Rough Cut
By Felix F. Bethel
The Bahama Journal



Kahlil Gibran speaks truth when he avers that, “…Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you…For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams…”

Now I can tell you that, when I was but a strip of a lad in the long ago years, I early on formed the idea that, when Moses was given the command to the effect that he should tell Pharaoh to let my people go; that reference was also to the ME that I just so happened to love ever so much in those long ago years when men were men; when women knew their places and where children new their places.

Sadly and gladly, I am now getting old.

Here I can tell you that, of the good things about getting old is that you can blame practically anything on the fact that –at long last – you are getting old.

Like man, if you want to drool anytime night or day all you have to do is to like, drool. And here, let’s not for a moment forget that matter that relates to memory and what they say time and illness can do with your memories about this or that.

What I am trying to tell you is that, you wake up one day and you need to share some words with a loved one about some of the matters that matter; and then, like out of the blue, you forget what you were trying to remember.

And two days later, while thinking out loud to yourself, you retrieve the memory for which you had been searching just a little while ago.

Well, what the hell! Sometimes you remember; sometimes you forget; and often enough, you also can find yourself in that position where you told yourself that you should let the past bury the past; but yet where – as if out of nowhere specifically- a memory of a hurt thought long past has been festering right there; right-bloody there; in that part of the mind where hurt hurts most.

For me, those hurts invariably come directly from my nigger-yard experiences of yesterday and ten thousands more of such mean yesterdays.

But even as some of these yesterdays were mean enough and even though some of my peers did not make it through the passage of those terrifying days; some of us have managed to make it.

And for sure, while some of us have made it through; some of us remain hurt and troubled for the likes of one of our school-mates who was raped and who – as a consequence – was obliged to abort her schooling.

But even as she opted to abort her schooling; this school-mate of ours decided that she would carry the fruit of that rape to term.

God is good. God is great.

Here all I can tell you is that you should be careful whenever you go about any business that calls on you to dig deep if you want to discover this or uncover that.

What I’m really trying to say is that you should watch yourself like a hawk in flight if you ever woke up and told yourself that you want and must have access to this or that secret information before this or that precious person kicks the bucket.

Beware dust and also, please beware ashes; in both you find death and memories congealed.

And so please believe me when I tell you that, Time has a way of doing its thing with the likes of all manner of persons, places and things. What I’m trying to get at has to do with how things, places and things can and do grow old; how they wither; and how they eventually die.

What I am trying to really get at is that thing – that peculiarly certain thing - that happens once time gets you in its grips; and how in the case of people who have children and grand-children can come to have a strange enough impression of the self they inhabit once they enter a certain period where decrepitude beckons.

What I would like to really get at has to do with some of what people around you do as you settle with the fact that – at long last- you are getting there; that is to say, you are finally getting old.

But getting old or not, I can tell you that, as I awoke to the sound, smell , taste and feel of this new day, I thanked Him from whom all life and blessings flow.

I thank Him in all things and give Him thanks for all things good, beautiful and true.

And above it all and beyond it all, I thank Him for not only waking me up this morning, but for the tender care that was His as I struggled with some of my demons as they sought to beset me during some of the hours in the night and early morning.

As I wake to this day and as I pore through some of the ashes that now remain of the life I have lived; some of what I have experienced now return to me in the guise of memories of some of what happened just the other day.

Just the other day, I was young , green and insatiably hungry to live this life that was given this man-child, born a black bastard so very long ago in a Bahamas that was infinitely more cruel than today’s hard-edged, stink-hole of a place.

In those other days, the children and the women and the men –most of whom just so happened to be poor and who resided in yesterday’s fetid nigger yards – turned their bile and their wrath and their hate and their spite and all their troubles on each other; thus the fact that, even as they copulated and reproduced after their own kind; some of their terrifying offspring now maim and kill each other.

Today I am old enough and alive enough to reality to tell you – and here for purposes of clarification – is that, what I am trying to say is that, when the matter that is your life comes to that point where things can be summed up –so to speak – you sometimes wonder if there is any real point remaining in that life you have lived; or for that matter, in the one life that you would have liked to live if you had you not been stupid enough to have chosen the parents you did; or chosen the loves of your life you happened to have loved when you had love enough in your heart.

What I’m really getting at is this: did you or did you not have choices in these kinds of vitally important matters?
Perhaps, we have less really-real choice in these genesis-matters than even we would like to believe.

Evidently, since we can only really-really only love the ones we know; we will never really-really know if the ones we love or have loved were really-really the ones we should have loved had we choice in the matter at hand.

Indeed, this dilemma might have an explanation that is –for the moment at least – locked up securely in the mind of the Almighty – the One and Only One; the Great I am- who knew me even before the foundations of the world; and therefore eons before this or that mid-wife’s scream and bloody shout to the effect that to some woman or the other a special child – whether boy or girl - had been gifted by the Almighty.

November 18th, 2010

The Bahama Journal