A little one on one at a time
Family, Friendship, Murder, Relationships With Others
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I watched the young lad struggle with the grass clippers. They were too big for his hands, dull and it was too hot to be working in the sun. I stopped the mower, called him over to me and asked him if he was ready to take a break. Like any other seven year old, he was ready. So was I. That sun was tormenting us.
So we got into my pickup truck, rolled down the windows, buckled in and off we went to the corner gas station. We could see it from where we were, but it was just too hot to walk across the sea of concrete to get there.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the life of that seven year olds’ mother was taken in a drive-by shooting that may have been no more than a gang initiation. A senseless rite of passage for a senseless generation.
It takes more than a bullet to prove your manhood, punk. It takes a lifetime. My young friend is closer to being a man than you are.
I’ve seen photos of the young mother and her baby boy. They were in love in exactly the way you would want a young mother and her son to love each other. That joy for each other simply leaps out of the picture at you. That’s what that young scum bag brought to an end.
I can’t help but be angry — “deeply enraged” seems more precise, but even that is lacking. What I feel toward the offal that ended that goes beyond the power of words to express. The kid already didn’t have a dad. You took away his mother, too. Someday, you festering boil of a punk …
(Exodus 22:22-24) 22 “YOU people must not afflict any widow or fatherless boy. 23 If you should afflict him at all, then if he cries out to me at all, I shall unfailingly hear his outcry; 24 and my anger will indeed blaze, and I shall certainly kill YOU with the sword, and YOUR wives must become widows and YOUR sons fatherless boys.
Take a deep breath, old man. Start over. Take another breath. Release it slowly. Relax. It is life you must nurture; death can take care of itself. The kid who pulled the trigger will pay the price. The wages sin pays is death. In the end, there is no bargaining and no other outcome. Get back to your story.
So we, my young friend and I, wandered back toward the rear of the gas station and found a flavor of Gatorade we each liked from the cooler and a bag of some sort of salty snack to share. Pork rinds, I think. Maybe Pringles. It didn’t matter what, it just needed to be salty. We were sweating like leaky sponges. I’ve had whole body heat cramps. They can be pretty gruesome. So I pumped my young friend with electrolytes, liquid and salt. He didn’t know about that part. It all looked like free Gatorade and pork rinds to him.
It’s not often that you can find a real friend. Most folks can count the real friends they’ve had over the course of a lifetime on the fingers of one hand. Seldom do we have as many as two at the same time. A real friend is just that hard to find. One who will buy you Gatorade on a hot day is a real find. So is finding someone to share your Gatorade with.
The store was crowded but eventually the older man and the younger man took their place in the checkout line. The older man kept a wary eye for … for what? In this sea of dark faces, the older man was well aware that having a young brown-skinned boy with him was, to say the least, unusual. Glancing around, some faces were kindly. Some hard. Eye contact with the hard faces was brief and quick. Can’t show any fear. Mustn’t challenge. The kids parents wouldn’t mind him being there because they trusted their youngest with the old man. But the other customers were an unknown. The gas station is in a crusty section of town and has seen violence more than once before.
“Please, Father, let us pay for these rinds and live long enough to eat them.”
The line moved far too slowly for comfort.
In the end, the cashier counted out the change and the old man and the young boy walked back to the battered old pickup truck with the peeling paint and they drove uneventfully back to the lawn they were working on and found a shady place to eat the rinds, drink the Gatorade and talk man talk.
In most big cities the difference between ‘good neighborhood’ and ‘bad neighborhood’ can be little more than one side of a street or the other. Sometimes you’ll drive along and notice that the boarded up houses stop suddenly at an intersection. So we sat and ate our rinds in the shade of the good neighborhood, within site of the gas station where a young man was gunned down in broad daylight just a month previously, grateful that his assailant had not shown up on this hot day. That young man was the second to die there in only a year. That gas station is always busy. Most people just come for gas, smokes, a lottery ticket or a fudgesicle . Some come to die.
Until the last of the rinds disappeared from the bag, the old man kept that wary eye open for rear windows being rolled down.
It’s good to sit in the shade and talk man talk with your friend.
(James 1:27) 27 The form of worship that is clean and undefiled from the standpoint of our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their tribulation, and to keep oneself without spot from the world.
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Br. Bill @ May 5, 2008