Fly Away Home (for Joe)

news4jax.com reported it very early this morning. The body of a black male was found discarded in a creek behind subsidized housing. The body had been there for at least a day. The creek was on the "upscale" Southside part of town which is about as far from the Northside and the hood and the Ribault Trojan nation as you can get. Grief counselors were called in to the school. The RIP was posted on Facebook. Homicide detectives are investigating.

This wasn't your typical Monday morning! This weekend I worked at a Jesus thing, a church renewal weekend called Faith Alive in West Palm Beach. It was wonderful and it was over Saturday night at 9:30. Of course, it was 5 hours NORTH to go home or it was 1 hour SOUTH to hear "Welcome home!" from Mr. Man. Did I even have a choice? While we baked in the sun all day Sunday, I couldn't help but be mesmerized and completely captured by the antics of a band of seagulls as they disrupted our view of the horizon. Actually, they WERE the view and they have probably been to the horizon and back a few times. Or as Buzz promised, "To Infinity and Beyond!" I snapped this picture with my phone to remind me to spend time being carefree and to embrace nature 24/7. I also remembered Bach's fable, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I thought about it a lot actually. Well, Jonathan's spirit, at least for today, is embodied in a scruffy bearded, BIG, beautiful eyed, Reuben Studdard voiced, thug, who always addressed you by name and always wore a smile...His name was Joe and he was in my 2nd period class. He had become more disciplined in his Senior year. He had been attending class regularly. I helped him Thursday search and apply for some landscaping jobs online. He loved to rap and had just given a report on a book entitled The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah. The irony is that according to amazon.com the story is a CAUTIONARY TALE protesting the use of drugs and violence by African-Americans in the inner city. I can't really dwell on Joe any more tonight and a life snuffed out too soon, but here's some excerpts from JLS that seem appropriate... (Keep reading until the end for the real eye-opener!)

So this is heaven, he thought, and he had to smile at himself. It was hardly respectful to analyze heaven in the very moment that one flies up to enter it. The memory of his life on Earth was falling away. Earth had been a place where he had learned much, of course, but the details were blurred - something about fighting for food, and being Outcast. "Why is it," Jonathan puzzled, "that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it forhimself if he'd just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be sohard?" "To begin with " he said heavily, "you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself."

Today was progress report day. Yesterday, I went through my folder of unread essays, and guess whose essay was on top. Yep.. Joe's! Here it is. The 3rd paragraph is prophetic, in a very sad way!

Name Something that Made a Change in Your Life Something that changed my life was when I witnessed my first homicide with my own two eyes. It numbed me up in a lot of ways. It enabled me to feel all kinds of feelings that I never had like constant paranoia, the lack of sleeping, and of being alone. I started sleeping during the day because I was scared to sleep at night as a result of being traumatized from what I had seen. When I say it numbed me out, it shut a lot of emotions down or into shock. It felt like my nervous system was literally witnessing technical difficulties. I felt like I was just taking up space like I was just there, with no expression on my face, just blank nothing, just pure displacement. It detached me from living a normal life. The constant paranoia did not stop. It was a constant symptom of seeing a heinous crime. It reoccurred hundreds of thousands of times. I seen it so much that I could see myself as becoming the next victim to be killed, gunned down in the streets like an outcast or some estranged bum. Over time, I guess wounds heal but I’m still mentally, physically, and emotionally scarred from the incident. It took away any innocence that I had. It was gone. I was now a victim of things I could not change, the changes being good or bad. I just keep moving on. I don’t beat myself up about it.