Saturday, June 20, 2009

All We Are Is Dust in the Wind ...


... or maybe we're plastic letters on the fridge?
Saturday morning ... and I woke up to the very pleasant sound of Sister Baby's morning show. She has these magnetic letters on the refrigerator and each one is a different character in an elaborate drama. Funny to me that with all the high-tech (and expensive) trinkets we have attempted to delight her with, this is still one of her preferred play activities ...
Sort of reminded me of my occasionally idle mornings and afternoons when I was a kid. When the sun was just right, shooting nearly solid beams of light into the room through the windows between the slits in the curtains, I would go and find a t-shirt or a dry towel. If you wave the thing in the shaft of light you release thousands and thousands of floating specks of dust and lint. I would pretend it was a dogfight ... Allies vs. Axis over the skies of World War II Europe. The smaller specks were the fighters ... the little spitfires soaring deftly among all the flack. The larger ones were the bombers, lumbering toward their intended targets, pilots white-knuckling the controls, gunners spinning in their turrets. After waving the t-shirt, I had no control ... the dust fighters fought furiously till there were only a few left and then the victors flew slowly, gratefully and pensively home. I couldn't control it, all I could do was watch ... some of my favored pilots made it, some didn't.

I wonder if that's how God is ... having waved the T-Shirt of the Cosmos, setting this whole thing in motion. Is He waiting for the dust to settle? And after we have flown through the fray, protecting some harassing others, who among us will make that peaceful flight home?

Or is the Universe more like the refrigerator and God, like Sister Baby pulling all the strings ... lots of action and high drama ... danger, fun, love, strife, hate, bliss, misery and (occasionally a little) peace ... but in the end, everything comes out okay.


4 comments:

VanO said...

If I were going to pick a mythology, I think I prefer the latter.

Tess D said...

I agree; the latter is best. Great imagination regarding... dust specks.

Shemetra Owens said...

You're brilliant!!

Vallypee said...

Great writing Van. What an imagination you had as a little 'un...no wonder sister baby can come up with such stories too ;-)