Didymice

The Twin

They won’t have a place like this for me in heaven, will they. A place looking out across St. Andrew Bay over Shell Island into the Gulf of Mexico and on to where the earth curves and disappears below the horizon. There ain't no way, it’s out of the question: when Rock looks at my dossier he’ll pull the lever and drop me straight into West Texas. 

For the last laugh on me he’ll clone my twin for eternal companionship. “Enjoy yourselfs, Didymice,” he’ll guffaw as he changes our name and slams shut he window into heaven.

Up very early, I did the mental exercise, the meditation. The website I’m using says the goal of meditation is no goal, it is simply to be present. My goal is more the next line, “liberation of the mind from attachment to things it cannot control, such as external circumstances or strong internal emotions. The liberated, or ‘enlightened,’ practitioner no longer needlessly follows desires or clings to experiences, but instead maintains a calmness of mind and sense of inner balance.” Never thought of myself as a practitioner, but here goes, underway, shift colors.

Again, instead of the breathing, for my introduction to meditation I’m focusing on the most present and central feature of my being, the ringing tinnitus. I grew up in The Cove with woods all around, and all my years I thought I was hearing frogs and crickets. It never occurred to me otherwise until the day of my Navy retirement physical, when the doctor told me to step into a little booth and sit down. He handed me a cable with a button on the end of it, and said, “when you hear the ringing sound, push the button.” “WTH,” I say, “how do you expect me to hear a ringing sound over these crickets?” That instant it dawned: there are no crickets in a soundproof booth. It’s tinnitus. Pretty loud too. After all these years, I finally found a use for it.

Yesterday I got up my thoughts for a funeral homily in Apalachicola tomorrow afternoon. Today is Friday: sermon prep for Sunday. What I’m contemplating, see, is that we’ll get the dozen or so people who show up in church to come over here to our condo, with the binoculars we’ll watch the rest of the congregation over on Shell Island, and when they eat fried chicken in the sweltering sun and no bathrooms around (you have to wade out in the water and pretend to be enjoying the surf), we’ll have fried chicken here on the shady balcony porch in a condo with three bathrooms. 

TGIF

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