Back Under My Fig Tree

May 24th, 2019  |   

Pig In A Poke On My Porch

On my daily walk downtown, I pass the church I once served years ago. The columbarium in the church garden is a stone wall with a niche, space that has held Judy for over five years. Next to her, a recently opened niche now holds our son, Stephen.

You see, back in August, I was about to climb into bed when the phone rang. On the other end of the call was my daughter-in-law’s hysterical voice: “Stephen is dead.” He was snatched away, as if he were a small animal, prey for a red-tailed hawk. Judy’s and my 58-year-old firstborn child was gone. No warning. Suddenly his heart just stopped beating. He could no longer draw a breath, no longer share a word. 

After a toss-and-turn night, trying to follow some semblance of my regular morning routine, I went to the front door to fetch the newspaper. There, on the doorstep, was a plastic bag filled with sliced ham, left there by a friend, who had already heard about Stephen. Tucked inside the bag was a card with a simple handwritten message.

It read, I can’t find the words…

Words—Lost Not Found

Needless to say, the pig in the poke on my front porch, the sliced ham, is long gone. The note, also, has disappeared, carried off to the trash dump. But the words scribbled on that piece of paper don’t want to go away. They cling to my brain, like a message held by a magnet on the refrigerator door.

No matter how busy and engaged I’ve been, that lonely, incomplete message won’t go away. It’s indelible. Time after time, over and over again, since the night the note arrived on my doorstep, the words continue to haunt me.

I can’t find the words…

Time–Tick-Tocking Along

Recently a friend made an observation about time. “Jim, the older I get, the faster time flies.” I know, firsthand, what she was talking about. The truth of the matter, however, is that time doesn’t have an irregular beat. It’s not like an arrhythmic heart. It just keeps tick-tocking along. Time only stops on a scoreboard for a timeout, or when the battery in my bedside clock dies. Real time, a term news commentators like to toss about, just goes tick-tocking along.  

Actually, my friend and I really do know an even more penetrating truth about time, flying by at NASCAR race speed. The whole truth and nothing but the truth? Time seems to be moving faster as we age, because we know we have less of in front of us.

From another vantage point, as Dr, Seuss put it, “How did it get so late so soon?”

Finding Words

After over 33 years of writing Notes From Under the Fig Tree, I just plain ran out of words. Better said, they ran out on me, and I couldn’t find them. Christmas, 2017, was my last edition of Notes. Trying to find the words to write, Little Bo Peep, who lost her sheep and didn’t know where to find them, came to mind. I hadn’t lost any sheep. I had lost words and couldn’t find them.

Had I finally been stunned into silence by the mother lode of Donald Trump lies? It certainly felt that way, with his perverse attack on words, flagrantly fake and uniformly untrustworthy. Brought up to respect the veracity of someone who would give me his or her word on some matter, truth was clouded over by the multitude of lies that have poured forth from his mouth. Trump’s reckless use of words makes it seem like words don’t count anymore. 

Since Donald Trump has occupied the White House, I’ve seen folks stumbling around like characters from the television series, The Walking Dead. They’re post-traumatic ballot survivors struggling to stay alive amidst a zombie apocalypse.

Personally, I feel like I have been drowning in a sea of words, too many words, sinking in a tidal wave of tweets, the character limit having doubled since Donald Trump’s election. Perhaps the overblown high-pitched intensity of cable news, with its broken breaking news, hysterically shrill commentators, with apoplectic faces yelling and interrupting one another, has also done damage, souring my longtime love of words.

Was I just plain out of kilter, written-out, sick of words, dog-tired of searching for them? I don’t think so because, unable to find my own words, I have been turning book pages voraciously, burying myself in book after book, hoping that the printed words might jump-start my own writing.

Grief Seeps

Because grief has a way of seeping into every aspect of our lives, always associated with loss, perhaps losing my words had something to do with grief.

Had the burden of grief over the loss of Judy, my brother, and Stephen, in such a short passage of time, finally caught up with me? Perhaps this seemingly futile search for words was connected to time, the awareness that my life was running out of time, time to find more words to write? 

Trying for months to find words to break the silence, merely to write this message, a very threatening question confronted me. Would I ever write anything again? And, if I could find the words, would I have enough time to record them, share them? Had my life, like a football game, arrived at the final two-minute warning, with more points still to be put on the scoreboard, before time runs out?

Back To Little Bo Peep

What a dreadful thought, Little Bo Peep losing her sheep, and not knowing where to find them. Lost, nowhere in sight, she searched but could not find them. Then it came to her, a moment of enlightenment.

Stop searching for them, Bo Peep; sit down and they will find you.

That’s me, you see. I’ve been searching for words, but unable to find them. So I have come back home to sit under my fig tree, waiting for them to find me.

And didn’t I really know it all along? When you can’t find the words, they will find you. That’s the way it works. Like they did when I was too young to speak, a newborn. I didn’t teach myself how to read, didn’t know what a word was. Words found me, thanks to the people in my life who talked me into speaking, spoke me into words. The words entered my ears, found a path to my brain, and then moved on to my lips. I hope, also, having moved through my heart. Then, in a marvelously circuitous way, the words became flesh, spoken and written.

So, I am back under my fig tree fully expectant that the words will find me. As you can see, I have already captured a few. I intend to be disciplined about passing words on to my readers. I will be sharing bits and pieces of a book I hope to complete, a collection of pieces honed and cultivated from past writings, along with fresh observations and insights. A number of people have encouraged me to use my time, whatever I am graced with, to continue my writings, as the words find me.

The Book of Job, in the Hebrew Scriptures, offers a reminder that our days are numbered. And, like a number on a lottery ball, our lifespan will only be known when the ball drops from the spinning cage, and the number can be read. 

Until the ball drops, I hope that you, as one of my Notes From Under the Fig Tree readers, will stay in touch by sharing words that find you, under whatever tree you sit.  (ejlchas@aol.com)

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives