The Pursuit of Truth

02/10/21 • 6 min

If my dharma were the pursuit of truth, I’d not be here tapping these keys right now. I’d have never left welding, where everything is black and white. Well, it’s really black and silver or sometimes black and copper; there are no gray areas. A weld is either a good one or a bad one. There is no in-between. You have to bring the metal up to the right temperature, use the right mix of oxygen and acetylene, the right flux. It can be fiddly, but there’s no getting around a good weld. It’s truer than the metal it unites. Period.
Other things, like the future or what a dog thinks, are not as straightforward.
On Saturday morning, a chickadee hit the sliding glass door and fell to the snow. I heard the clunk of its little head on the cold glass only in retrospect. At the time, I didn’t consciously notice it until my dog Dewey brought it to my attention. He whined and whimpered at the lower corner of the big glass door. Pinned to the spot, he looked out with concern. When I finally got his message, I went out onto the porch and scooped the unconscious bird into my hands.

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Previous Episode

Small Victories

When we lived at Terry’s house—a small log cabin in East Charlotte at the end of a very long and sometimes treacherous dirt driveway, I counted getting all the way home a small victory. Let me clarify, sometimes that victory was actually quite large. I tended to drive low-to-the-ground fuel-efficient Honda Civic Hatchbacks back then. Though I often outfitted those Hondas with studded snow tires, the depth of the snow in the driveway sometimes prevented entrée. Terry plowed the driveway himself and on his own schedule, which wasn’t always mine. He had built the cabin himself from timbers he’d taken from the land with a team of horses he’d borrowed from a neighbor. He was an excellent, though sometimes taciturn housemate. His cabin was the perfect landing place for us when we packed up and left Emmett’s dad.

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The Blush of Youth

One-hundred-fifty-six years ago today, Abraham Lincoln was struck down in the blush of youth. Honest Abe was not a babe, he was 56. His presidency was in the blush of its youth.

I am older now than he was when he went to the theatre. It is amazing for me to imagine that I have made it this far. It’s not that I have lived a dangerous life of drugs and debauchery, but that my imagination as a child—when I worshipped Lincoln because of Black friends and a children’s book depicting Honest Abe holding a friend upside down over his head so that he could walk with muddy feet upon the ceiling of Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s immaculately clean log cabin in Kentucky—could not conjure the notion of a me so old as I am today. Older than the great man himself, who was indeed very old and with wrinkles and a tall hat.

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