One of the rooms in the church has a door with a small, square window so that adults can look inside.
Of course, it is much too high for me to see through. The door is heavy and metal, and the window glass looks to be pretty thick. The window is crisscrossed with pinstripe black lines that look like they have been etched on.
Mom explains to me and the other kids in the class that the window on that door is the head of Goliath.
The height of us children and the height of the window is a relative comparison to the height of David and the height of Goliath as described in the Bible, Mom says.
The goal of the class today is to kill Goliath the same way David did it- with a sling shot and some rocks.
There is a sling shot on the table in front of us, but it is not like one I have seen before. The sling shot that I am familiar with is wish bone shaped, with a leather pocked tied by elastic bands to each side. I would put the rock in the pocket, pull it back until the bands are taut, and then let it fly.
This sling shot, though, is simply a strap of leather with a pocket for the rock. It is similar to the one David would have used. We are supposed to whirl it around our heads and then launch the rock at the head of Goliath.
The “rocks” are actually balls of aluminum foil, which we make ourselves from sheets that Mom gives us. Just as David carefully selected the stones he would use, we make our own balls of foil.
No one comes close to hitting the window/ head of Goliath. I cannot even get the ball of aluminum foil to go in the general direction of the door. How the sling shot is supposed to work has befuddled me. Another frustration is that I only get one try before I have to pass the sling shot to the next kid in the class and wait at the end of the line for another turn.
I am fascinated by the window, though, the etching on it, and what might be seen on the other side. I keep bugging Mom to lift me up to the same height as Goliath, so that I can see what he sees.
After everyone is finished with the sling shot, I finally get Mom to hoist me so that I can look through the window. I want to touch the etching, but Mom does not want me to get fingerprints on the glass. All that is on the other side is the barren hallway wall.
Still, I enjoy the view from up there.
***
Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.
Life is pretty good right now. This morning, I am recovering from a night at the Dowling House, one of my favorite places to eat and hang out in town.
Yesterday, I ran a 5k race in Tallahassee and saw several of my classmates from law school. We had breakfast at Jim and Milt’s after the race, my first time ever going to that restaurant…
Last week, I wrote a bit of a dark entry about this feeling that I have that there is not much longer for me to live.
That feeling is still there, despite how much I am enjoying myself now.
But what I dread much, much more than my own death is the death of my parents.
I hope they live for many years to come, but it is an inevitable fact that most of our time together has passed, unless they live to be over 100 years old.
This is something that I am incapable of thinking about for long, and I only note it here to balance out my last blog entry.
I worry how my mind will react when one or both pass away. I expect it to snap in some fashion, just as my cousin admits that she has to fight back insanity when she thinks about how her dad/ my uncle died unexpectedly of a heart attack when I was in law school.
My mind has snapped before- in 1997, the darkest year of my life. I was a student at Western Carolina University. I recovered on my own after dropping out of school for a year, but I never looked at the world the same way again. It was a new world with new rules.
A friend with whom I went to Western Carolina University lost her mother a few years ago, and I gather that was an event that changed her.
My grandmother on my mom’s side died in 1995 right after I graduated from high school. Mom talked about that as the single most challenging moment in her life to keep her faith, to believe in a heaven and in a god that loves us as she looked at Grandma lying on the hospital bed after her heart and her breathing had stopped.
I am not sure if there is a useful point to writing this part of my blog entry. Maybe when the dreaded event actually comes to fruition, I can go back and read this and it will help me.
But I doubt it. I imagine my mind will snap again, though in a way probably less severe than in 1997. I will recover, I hope, but it will be a new world again, with new rules for me.
In the meantime, I am doing the best I can to enjoy my life and the time with my parents. I talk to them almost every day on the phone.
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