The Sky Beneath The Ground

     Facebook can be the devil's playground to some. And a den of those who never mentally graduated from preschool to others. It can create new memories while preserving others as some sort of digitally autonomous museum curator, where our lives are an algorithmic display of random thoughts, emoticons, comments and likes, photo albums, and of course, selfies. Memories pop up, and some give us pungent flashbacks of where we were last year. Two years ago. Seven years ago. Then there are the memories created by what friends post.

     One of those memories came to me in a photo via a tagged notification from a friend of my mom's who is also a Facebook friend of mine. It was a 1987 photo of Mama, my oldest sister T.C., and myself, bathed in Chicago afternoon daylight from a North Side high rise window to our left. We were posing for a photo taken by a friend of Mama's at the time who was a professional photographer. Mama was trying to get me to smile, so she tickled my neck. Then snap, the photo was taken. It's one of her favorite photos of us. We grew up fast. Time sprinted by. Cell phone cameras weren't only a Jetsons thing anymore. Where did 30 years go??

     Aside from the ticklish grin forever frozen in the photo, I remember not wanting to smile. Not because I was an ornery 10-year-old boy. I was a downtrodden kid whose childhood was like rapidly running my hand over a metal cheese grater again and again and again. The North Side was like an oasis to the suffocating nightmare that our South Side street address was. My young imagination and the foot-stomping Gospel songs like Reverend Milton Brunson and the Thompson Community Singers' 1987 jam I Guess You're Wondering are what kept me going. But I didn't wanna smile.

     I thought to myself, at 41, what the hell would I say to that younger, short-circuited me if we could stand face to face? Would he be in awe of the adult me? Or disgusted that his future is no better than his childhood? 

     There's only so much I could tell him. So much he'd hafta tell himself and learn himself. I'd tell him that reality is either the wine press that crushes dreams, or the pruning knife which helps the vineyards to grow a harvest of fulfilled dreams. I'd tell him to stay himself, though he would face great suffering. I'd tell him to not be afraid if he becomes the peacock in a wooden garden. That sometimes, Jesus is your ONLY friend. I'd admonish him to learn piano playing and music composition sooner. That falling in love is a sticky, ephemeral glaze that becomes a hardened, regretful residue. That the transcendent imagination he has is proof that God dearly loves him. And that when he walks the broken Chicago city sidewalks that sparkle with shattered fragments of empty malt liquor bottles with his head hanging down...that there is a sky beneath the ground. That once you're so low, looking down is actually looking up.