Sifting
When I was young I used to watch a lot of television...
A TV-o-holic, I sat wide-eyed, frozen in my paisley Lazy-Boy,
mixing my drug of choice with other evils:
cokes, potato chips, Twinkies--
(Ah! Twinkies! Food of the gods. Golden, cream-filled ambrosia!)--
Silent and solitary, I stared into the screen.
Eyes transfixed on blurred black and white images,
Ears focused on a pastiche of jingles, jokes and conversation,
Fingers ever-clutching and lips ever-munching the glorious goodies from a basket beside me--
an old, cracking, woven basket made by a great-grandmother never met, never remembered, whose legacy to me, besides my green eyes, was the object of intently probing fingers, occasionally getting caught in its uneven edges as they searched for the last residual sweet and salty bites --
I waited as the drug took effect, calling me out of my life,
inviting me to explore strange new worlds,
to boldly go where none had gone before.
And I went gladly, content even when the last morsel had been consumed from great-grandmother's basket...
"Chewing gum for the mind"... "The idiot box," someone called it.
But what did they know of its pleasures?
What did they know of the misty corridors of the outer limits of the mind?
What did they know of the crooked images in the muted mirrors of the television twilight zone?
They knew nothing.
But they stood in their pulpits, whiskey-and-sodas tinkling in one hand to balance Cuban cigars in the other: the new Pharisees, blaspheming my god.
I read once of a field in Arkansas or Louisiana--a barren, weather-worn grass field, blanched by the sun, mottled with hills from excavations made by small animals--a normal-looking field, empty and worthless, nothing to waste time on.
But in that field have been found, by those with the patience to search, the largest concentration of diamonds in North America.
How many thousands of jagged, ill-formed, gray-brown rocks must each of those fortunate souls have handled before finding the one brilliant gem?
How many hours treading water, immersed in the morass, before erupting to the surface?
The Pharisees preach of the evils of the wasteland.
But in the green glow of days and nights in my youth,
as I dipped my fingers gingerly into my great-grandmother's basket,
I knew something that they did not:
many of the most beautiful flowers are small
and hidden among the weeds;
many of the most precious stones are tiny
and tucked away among the silt.
The joys of life should not be missed simply because they must be sifted
for.
These pages copyright Karen Kopriva 2002;
all rights are reserved