Free At Last

Free At Last by Joseph Nathaniel Baron/850 942
5255/email=jbaronjd@yahoo.com

Call him 'Terrified'----as, he was. Barely 21, he could not recall a
period of that ultimate experience, and it was no consolation that 'it'
had eluded gigantic minds like Jefferson &; all great poets, of all
tongues. Instead, &; at best, 'happiness' was some milestone, which,
once attained was somehow more or less that tangible, that seemingly
sturdy possession that possessed its seeker. Yet, to the great and me
alike it was elusive, fixed only in a one dimensional flatland of
ethereal scratchings on sheepskin or paper, ensconced under hermetic
glass, 'safe' from the corrosive atmospherics of a space quadruple in
its dimensions, where one of those four was utterly invisible.

Yet, strangely, in as odd a way as 'time' itself was elusively exotic
to the brain, it was said that that dimension, pervading everything,
inside &; out, healed all wounds.

And so it was with 'him', me. Like 'time' &; 'happiness', which
seemed then---I &; my 'family', that dark night and numb morning
when I arose and drove away with the clothes on my back---so mutually
foreign, my subsequent journey into their connective sinewy
tissue----growth----had begun.

"This looks like something out of Tennessee Williams!" my 'good
provider' (for, he knew little of fatherhood) derided me, feigning
poorly a cardiac spasm, as I knelt before a panel of judges I called my
family. I had defied him, them, and continued a relationship with an
"emotional cripple", as he called her----a girl I would marry. My vain
reference to Alexander Pope's equation of forgiveness with divinity
went unheard, unheeded------by both me &; that collective dis-eased
body so often broadly misidentified as 'family'.

Years, tens of them have passed, error compounded by pride; on to law
school (not where 'he' had prescribed, one nearby, a convenient salve
for a mother's 'empty nest' angst (and his neglect and abuse of her,
his intellectual unequal by design), a careless lie----a younger
brother would remain at 'home' another 3 years), children, more
anguish, divorce the reverberations so Richter-like that that 'girl'
and I have rarely spoken since. Even the law, a mere euphemism for
aversion of the draft, is shed, as a mere costume that hides the
actor.

My pursuit of 'happiness', then, over bumpy, non-linear 'time', one
step seemingly forward, two back, has led me to a place which was,
always, but one millimeter and 180 degrees from that perceived
milestone so long ago.

Now a writer with surprising 'success'----mostly the sort that has to
do with self-liberation, of a self heretofore unknown, a self whose
discovery is a more than a balm for all the mutual hurt to and from me,
that only now, 34 years hence, do I fully grasp Pope's wisdom.

Another's wise heart now informs mine, thusly fully healed and loving:
"Free at last, free at last, thank G-d almighty, I'm free at last!"