it's december 1995

like a soil covered with teflon, the snow doesn't stick. like a summer doorscreen the cold passes through my body. after all these years, i still don't dress warm. gone are the days of sled rides and snowball fights. but my childhood dressing habits remain. i still need my mother to bundle me up tight, and not allow me to hear the end of the matter about avoiding catching cold.

but approaching fifty i kowtow only to a foster parent of the spirit: the arrogant sense of immortality.

walking late night up geneva avenue and onto dakota street, there are few christmas lights in this third week since thanksgiving in the mid- 1990s. and then only in the houses of the well-to-do. only on boyd street on the house next to the neighborhood chop-shop, hang a row of bright multi-colored bulbs offsetting the pitch of this cold night.

i who am grateful for the small victories pause, genuflect, stare for long moments at these lightsand continue my walk home. and i remember another december three decades past.

it's nineteen sixty three. i am walking on a cold december night along shawmut avenue. i am approached by two ragged- clothed urchins, neither of them a day over seven, and out way past their bedtimes. i can almost hear their growling stomachs singing hallelujah to their backbones. their hunger is their morality and hands outstretched they each ask me for a quarter to buy cupcakes.

i reach into my pockets and split between them all the change that i have.

cupcakes!and soda pop maybe? and as i continue walking, i am inarticulate quietly raging out at something i can't define. something that in this rich country makes it possible on a cold winter's night for two young white boys to be begging a young black man for food- money. i have a feeling arising from my gut of willful destruction of that which i cannot name but which sent these young to me on a christmas season night so deep so deep.

i am seeing brightly burning bridges to my past. i have been out of reform school for three months. i have been in school and job training. i have been in freedom school. i have lived through unforgettable days in this past month of november. i am watching those tornado funnels of my country's political life. they will soon suck me into their vortex like dorothy out of kansas.

i have veered off the highway to crime and now i am on a back road traveling in another direction that feels strange but comfortable. i hear voices in the winter night calling: forward. march. gentle voices of the spirit, non-sergeant voices calling: forward. march.
i am seventeen and on the road to see what the end will bring.

from Ten Thousand Miles in the Mouth of a Graveyard,

Boston 1996