It's funny how lives twist and turn and get tangled up into each other.
When I was four, my daddy built a church in Jackson
and I remember going to Sunday School there,
sitting in the tiny chairs,
putting together Jesus puzzles in the basement cinder block room
just for preschoolers.
I remember having a tantrum in the narthex,
the staggered stained glass windows built into wood paneling,
wrinkled, smiling faces,
the half-doors of the nursery.
Later we moved to Dearborn, and that's where I grew up.
I met Cyndi in the ninth grade.
My earliest memory is of
making homemade flip-books with her,
on the sly, behind our notebooks
in the back row of English-French.
Stick figures danced their way through conditional tenses
and Parisien architecture,
sometimes bordering on the burlesque,
but mostly dwelling on the silly,
entertaining two naughty girls
and passing the time.
Passing the time.
Many, many years later
I attend her funeral, back at that old Jackson church.
It's funny how things circle around.
Because my brother eventually married her sister,
and Cyndi graduated from college,
found out she had Huntington's Disease,
had a baby,
ran away sometimes,
came back home,
remembered church and friends,
lived in a series of adult foster care homes until
she ended up in Jackson.
And the last nine years of her life she attended
the church that my daddy built,
and that's where they said the final prayers over her today.
So after most had left I walked down into the old basement of that church again,
the old section,
the part that holds up all the new remodeled parts.
And I stood in my old preschool classroom and I looked at those tiny chairs,
and I smelled that good old smell of glue and waxy crayons and faint mildew.
And I had the thought that maybe everything
always, eventually comes back around.
Stick figures dancing,
we pass the time from childhood on.
Our paths criss-crossing,
in pain and in joy,
touching each other sometimes
only so very lightly.
But touching each other just the same.
*
