Stain-glass Eyes

I don’t live in St. Ignace.  It’s my hometown.  But….it’s not my home.  I haven’t lived there since I graduated from high school, in 1975.  I’m more of a visitor.  St. Ignace-When There Was a Local Theater Many years of my adult life, I lived in Gaylord, Michigan.  But, I never felt I was “From” there.  I felt like it was where my children grew up.  It was their “Hometown”, not mine.   Sometimes I still consider myself a Yooper. (a person from the U.P.)  A term of almost mythical qualities.   I was raised in a small town in the Upper Peninsula, a subculture far, far from any sizeable city.  I identify with the colloquial language I learned to speak as a child.  My illusion of being a Yooper, explains a sample-piece of who I believe I am.  I really don’t need to reference being a Yooper for someone to understand who I am, do I?  What does it really say about me?  I’m much m...

I’ve just arrived. Pink, streaked with blood, I bellow at the top of my lungs.  My voice scares me.   Three nurses sweep me away like I’m the new catch of fish they just pulled up, in the net, from the side of their fishing boat. My shoulders are seemingly so broad one scapula broke during my exit from the hell-canal.  I can’t feel a thing from the break, I’m just famished.  But I DO feel the thing they just shoved up both my nostrils.  Man! That hurts!  And if they scrape the bottom of my feet another time I won’t be responsible for the level of scream I think I can produce. Dr. Koby-Olson (I guess she’s my doctor), puts an end to all the clamor, scoops me up and places me in my father’s arms, after explaining what took so long to get me to my parents.  The Apgar score was very low—my shoulder.  He feels strong, comfortable and sure of himself.  He’s nothing like all these rushing bodies hopping around in this birthi...

I just read “Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran”, by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt.   He puts across wisdom and makes it uniquely personal.  Schmitt slowly pulled me in and I felt I was standing beside the characters as they were hit by universal emotions; despair, anger, fear, intimacy, love and death. Schmitt’s character, Monsieur Ibrahim, tells a young boy about love, “It doesn’t matter,” Monsieur Ibrahim said.  “Your love for her belongs to you.  It’s yours.  Even if she refuses it, she cannot change it.  She isn’t benefiting from it, that’s all.  What you give, Momo, is yours forever.  What you keep is lost for all time!”  Ibrahim tells the young man, Momo, a dozen or more times, that his book, the Koran, tells him what he needs to know in order to live.   Surprisingly, he clarifies his faith later, when he says to Momo,  “When you want to learn something, you don’t take a book. You talk to s...