Continued from Part 1 and Part 2, below
I arrived at the Baylor Clinic at 7:00am. I had been asked to give a brief speech to the children and caregivers that day but, despite the best efforts of Google and tedious introspection, I still had nothing to say. (Morning prayer typically runs from 7:15 until 7:30am, when patient registration and triage begins.)
By the time I arrived, the chairs were full with adults and children carpeted the floor, as usual. I walked through the matrix of faces, faces belonging to people born faraway from my birth-place. Faces of people who have never heard of white-tail deer, the Alamo, or the two-step. Faces with Tex-mex naïve palates. Faces with eyes following me as I walk by, as if I were a slow-moving tennis ball. (Had these eyes ever seen tennis? Of course, I reassured myself. Surely at least some had.)
Even as I stepped over kids and brushed against the shoulders of those with aisle seats along the narrow passage towards the reception desk, I felt very far away. That aching, uncomfortable, alienating feeling that couples speechlessness reminded me of a few bad first dates and those times I unwittingly sat at the wrong table in the high school lunchroom.
The sing-along started that morning as it always does, the Setswana words indecipherable and the harmony seemingly effortless. At about 7:20, the group transitioned into “Kumbayah”, a song that my parents used to sing to me almost nightly when I was young. The song title, as I understand, is a Creole blurring of the words “come by here”. The verses (“someone is singing, praying, laughing, etc”) are otherwise in standard English, so I was able to join in the chorus.
As I sang, I thought of all those nights when my dad and I would lie down and informally serenade God, asking him to drop on by. I remembered the bedtime stories that my father would tell me. They usually starred a protagonist named Freddy. He was a fish and, though my dad is an avid fisherman, this fish was benevolent and clever, unlike the sinister, tasty striped bass that we pulled out of the nearby lake Texoma and, once breaded and fried, ate with hushpuppies.
“Freddy the Fishy” was also verbal and, now that I think of it, amphibious. At the time, I did not know or care about gills vs. lungs. I knew nothing about Africa except that it was far and that people were once stolen from there.
Still singing, I thought of the other songs that I used to know. There was a pre-dinner song that a littler version of me used to perform when it was my turn to say grace. It went like this: “The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the family.”
I am pretty sure that the real words were “…and the apple seed” but I always preferred “family” because I didn’t understand the original lyrics. You see, we never needed to grow our own food and I simply threw the bitter, seeded core of my apples in the trash. An apple, I now know, used to be a perfectly suitable gift between friends and family. (No, not an Apple iPhone, but the actual fruit.)
Sun, rain, and family. I must have sung those words three hundred times. Now, I live on a sub-continent where subsistance farming is the norm, and work in a country that sits on a desert. I look around and see a troubled family structure being further wrecked by a hellion of a virus. As for “the sun, the rain, and the family,” only one of the three thrives here. The scorched earth sustains little, and that which grows is scrubby and thorny, for all that is not dense and sharp is eaten by the few, hungry animals that roam about. Apple trees do not grow under this sun. Apples are imported, and most kids will choose one over a hand full of candy any day.
To be continued...
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