These thoughts were rambling through my brain today.
Maybe they come from teaching in a time of pandemic.
Do you need a security blanket like I do?
When I was a little boy, I’d carry my blanket with me wherever I went.
It was as if Linus had made his way out of the Peanuts comic strip in the Greenville News and come to live at 2701 East Lee Road in Taylors, S.C.
I named my blanket Boo Boo because it was there to soothe me when I fell down onto the asphalt of the road or the concrete of my driveway and scraped my knee.
It was there to strengthen me if someone said something unkind and I needed the courage to say, “Apologize and take it back.”
It was there to save me when I woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream.
It was there.
It just was.
In every way it was my security blanket, and I knew I could turn bad into good by just having my Boo Boo beside me.
Now that I’m a grownup, I don’t carry my blanket with me anymore.
I still have it, though.
It is tattered and torn, weathered and worn.
I can still hold it in my hands.
As I look at my blanket, I see a tear from the time I couldn’t find my mom inside of the house.
I ran outside the front door toward my elderly neighbor’s house crying at the top of my little lungs.
“I can’t find my momma!” I hollered, “I can’t find my momma!”
I felt the gentle, wrinkled, bony touch of Mrs. Tooke’s hand on my shoulder as she guided me around her plum tree to the fence and whispered, “There she is right there. She’s hanging out the laundry on the clothesline.”
I threw my blanket over the fence as if to use it as a rope to climb to my mom and caught it on the barbs along the rim of the steel poles and ripped it right through the middle of it’s soft, cotton face.
Mom stitched it up as if she were a doctor stitching a wayward wound on a broken child.
I run my fingers along those stitches, and feel the scar on my blanket that reminds me of the time it helped me find my lost mom.
After all the years, I faintly smell the clean, comforting smell of the detergent and fabric softener mom used day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year to clean my clothes and my blanket and to say, “I love you.”
Nope, I don’t carry my blanket with me anymore.
But I do.
You might be wondering, “Do you still need something like your blanket to help you?”
Yes.
I was thinking about this question the other night as I lay down in my bed and held a book in my hands to read myself into the tender twilight that settles upon us just before we fall asleep.
The book, I Explain A Few Things, was written by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and has one of my favorite parts of a poem inside of it, “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVI” -
Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres,
porque de las praderas planetarias
otro estrella no tengo tú repites
la multíplicación del universo.
I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of it's meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.
As I finished reading the poem, I understood that it is books, the stories inside of books, the poems inside of books, the words inside of books, the books and stories and poems and words of other writers, my own books and stories and poems and words as a writer, that help me turn bad into good.
Before I turned off my light and closed my eyes, I didn’t put Neruda’s book on the floor beside my bed.
No, I put it under the covers beside me in the place where my blanket used to be, to soothe, strengthen and save me while I slept,
If you watch me closely, you will see that I carry a book with me wherever I go.
Books have become my blanket.
Books are my Boo Boo.
No comments:
Post a Comment