January 8, 2004

• by standing

   

  He is just a boy.

   

  Everyone where I go, I see knees; they’re as natural as trees for a mountain man.  Here, in a glowing room, surrounded by the delicate sounds of conversation, laughter, casual greeting and the airy smooch of European kisses, I make my way through a field of knees.  I’m hardly noticed.  Tube socks hiked high, bowtie askew, a tiny blazer gracing the bony seams of my shoulders, my plastered hair gleams, catching the flicker of intimate lighting. I eat sweet bread and stare.  Looking forward, I see knees; looking upward, I see faces distorted by the prominence of chins.  From their saucers, they sip stimulants and barbiturates, peppering me with inadvertent crumbs and the cold, building drip of condescension.  I’m too young to taste these things and I’m adorable, running under busy hands, shielding my head with a napkin.

   

  Now, knees are what I know of people.  Still, I’m becoming more aware of voices captured in a muted range of lofty tones – from the bass growl of a fat man to the nasal pinch of my nanny.  I’ve also heard how eyes offer a glimpse of a person’s eternal nature and their daily state of being. From my limits, I would not know.  But I notice the nervous twitch of a man before giving a speech or approaching an attractive woman.  And I’ve heard that people who shake their knees and fidget at the dining table are shaking out all the good luck stored up for their lives, like rattling change in a pocket - full of deep insidious, repressed or un-kosher meaning. 

   

  They say people change.  In a few years, I’ll face pubescence and hemlines – or their historic rise to shortness.  It’s a universal rite of passage.  But still, knees will remain that which I know best.  Both because I am small and because I am caught up in what’s familiar.

   

  I push my glasses up the pudgy bridge of my nose, adjusting my eyes for obstacles moving around me.  I am hardly noticed but they smile and continue as special guests of the Host.  Look at their clothes – the friar’s robe, the general’s slacks, the king’s culottes, and the painter’s spotted trousers. 

   

  But I want to see more than just knees and hemlines, I want to be that rare man in full, looking out the window, eyes peering over the skyline of downtown at night, even over the Cascades, the Catskills, the Andes.  Then, like the rare few who stand on the highest peaks, I may see God in a new, life-giving way.  I’ll say things that haven’t been said, think things that repackage life.  Hegel commands this salon but I am overwhelmed by the dialectic.  Still, when heard before in different classes, it’s all the same thing - missing the forest for the knees.  They tickle my tummy and I run to the next room.

  I am a boy and at best I giggle, watch, mimic and pretend, confused by, in awe of, bothered by these giants.

  —-

  

  —

  It’s cooold outside.  Well, it’s in the high 20′s.  And that’s frigid for a native Californian.  It’s raining too.

  Matt11:28

  • 7:47 pm
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