Haiti - Lake Katrine

Today is Saturday, Saturn's the Male epiphany associated with Harvest. The farmers used to have a bash on Saturn's day and bring out the sour mash. I am more sour than usual, in large part because of the realization and full understanding the implications of so many heads being hit by so much violence in Haiti right now. If any father can relate to the face of the man holding his surely wounded, possibly dead child, it is I. Yet some might say the child died in the arms of someone who cared, and that is true and that matters. It instinctively punches into the gut, deeply next to the still-beating heart. Thank the One they died so loved.

The camera pans. GoogleEarth zooms down to Lake Katrine, to a bed near a window where a 35 year old man stares or sleeps. He's my boy, my child and for so many seemingly lame reasons, it is rare I can hold his hand. He's 100 miles away, being otherwise “cared” for, but in the end they don't care. IN point of fact a tiny piece of a percentage of the money being sent to help that other father and his poor, wandering neighbors, is all that prevents my boy from being closer to me when he dies. See, it is a fact that the general pool of brain injured people die after about 15-20 years. The ones who got deeply hurt, who almost never wake up, they tend to die easier and last fewer years. So it is not with a conspiracy I fear for my boy, it is time, and time is hard to avoid.

Jon could have been a father, should have been, would have been a good one, maybe if we didn't fight about how he was raised. I tend to interfere and that isn't something I'd want to hang on to. I might get a TV star to raise awareness of Jon and have his sperm extracted to give us a child to carry on his name. Oh, that would have ratings and hate mail. But I would much rather Jon hand over his own child, made by him, than some quasi-verse where we can skip past Jon to his child's life. There are so many reasons I could give for Jon being nearby, healthy or not, conscious or not. Jon may be the only man never to tell me to shut up, to let me prattle on about politics or faith. But I know I do not know he hears me, it is a matter of faith.

I do know that my body finds it hard to bear the pain and the liminal points, the edges and joints, are thinning a bit. In fact several are starting to go away, making it harder to take a 2 hour drive to be with my son so I can chat with him, possibly, almost certainly stimulating a few new cells to procreate, my boy trying to get control of his lungs and mouth so he can at long last ask me to change the channel or just shut up for a change. Failing that everyday stimulation from someone who loves him, my boy will most certainly die before I do. It is not hard to imagine him doing it alone, in a white bed, by a window, but not being able to look out at the sky. I can't even hang a poster from the ceiling for him to stare at, because, of course, the nurses and staff could not do what they have to do to keep his body clean and free from infection. An infection run wild, anti-biotic resistant, will eventually give him a pneumonia from which he will not recover. They will probably give me his ashes, or I may have to chase them down.

So it is I observe a Haitian man frantically staring all around at the bodies, trying to find his child, and fearing that he will find his child.