THE DASH BETWEEN IT ALL... As a kid, out in the Ocala Town Cemetery (we use to go out on a stroll some Sunday afternoons) hidden in the generous shade of ancient Cyprus trees (heavy with still moist moss hanging grandly towards the ground)…I always like to run ahead, pretending to be lost in a maze of a crumbling Mayan, Jungle Ruins…racing in between graves that dated way back to before the War Between the States (you Yankees call the Civil War)…We would sit, my grandmother used this time to tutor me…to teach me in the meaning of life and what was our duties to living and more importantly, to each other…mingled in these conversations arose everything that I have always meant to be but, as I am apparently still a work in progress of being able to living up to the high bar that she always set…morals and the need to do good – all of the demons of good that descend down upon me, swirling, hissing and blocking my path as I continually pushed the envelope, blur the lines that she had so carefully drawn on our Sunday outings and wrench, to break myself free from its constraining hold…even to this day…this ritual continues on…although as a Monday Morning quarterback and being long in tooth (that I am), much of the envelop is torn and tattered and strained from what has already gone pass… Closing my eyes, I can still go back…sit and stare in what use to amaze me as I would spy out from our perch in the cemetery, out through a thousand graves that I filtered my thoughts up through…there, etched into each testament or narrative summary that always caught my eye. There, mingled in-between the announcement brags of the person’s birth and death...there was a dash located in-between... I traced the dash with my finger while pondering how could something so small represent…an entire life in one single dash...the importance is not when you were born or even when you die…its was that single line there that was our entire life…there in that small chiseled gash into the cold stone was everything that we are, all that we were…all of our achievement…loves, life, adventures and dreams reduced, taken away…reduced down into a meaningless dash in between the day we were born and controlling us up until the very moment of our death…all is hidden, concealed and compacted into that simple dash…and it became so clear to that young boy that the lives as we are living them has no meaning when cast upon the cold stone of the greater good, the grander schemes and smaller eddies of our time and made this young kid deeply question or heed the wisdom from his grandmother towards the need to do the right thing…to do good….especially as he surveyed out over a sea of a thousand lines…dashes all written in the same cookie-cutter refrain…all that failed to explain the difference that any of thousand made or even to what they had to say… Then how could I…why should I try? - Emil West
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:39:48 +0000
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