A Story by Jim Brady
Prologue
Helloooo. Anyone over there?
Can anyone hear me?
I can hear and see you. But you can’t. Maybe ya’ll are going deaf or blind.
Well, I was once, too, in those final years, before I became dead.
But now I’m a would have been a one-hundred-years-old spirit today. Yessiree you young still-alive whippersnappers, I may be gone, but I’m still here.
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Introduction
In case someone’s hearing, I’ll pretend someone is. Or maybe I’ll just talk to myself, which is pretty much the same thing.
You see, I’ve got some out loud thinking to do, so just bear with me.
1
First of all, what a load of horse shit it is that as we grow older we grow wiser and have more answers to the big questions about life. Questions like, Why? How come? Says who? What gives? What if? What’s up? WTF?
Trust me on that: I’ve been there and come out here on the other side, and all that search for answers and meaning of Life, with a couple of wanderings in the wilderness seeking wisdom….well, life sent me back a lot of questions with postage due, ‘addressee no longer lives here’ type of responses. Return to sender.
2
So, where was I? Not having to deal with a decrepit body on the corporal plane of existence sure gives an old timer a boost of energy, but it doesn’t seem to help with memory.
Oh yeah. Questions.
My Main Question for pondering recently is…..
I wonder what happened to the two boys with one shoe?
3
That might not make sense without some context.
You see, there was a time when the former me returned to South Africa during the end of apartheid with some educators to meet and advise the new ministry of education people, and then I went by myself next door to Mozambique for a visit. The dust hadn’t quite settled yet from their twenty-five years of post-Colonial revolution and complicated series of civil wars. What a mess. Not to mention AIDs arriving and decimating the population.
Whoops, sorry about that mental memory meandering.
So, back in Mozambique, there’s land mines. Blown-up and upside-down tanks and Toyotas and airplanes here and there, and a lot of likewise blown-up amputees on crutches. (My most memorable quote from a local resident: “While we’re walking on this path, just be sure to step on someone else’s footprints; if they were ok, you probably will be, too.”)
4
So, I’m down along the shoreline of Lake Malawi dropping off a couple of large sacks of maize seeds and wheat flour for a community living around a mostly roofless church, a church lacking in pews and crucifixes, but with plenty of mortar holes and gunfire pockmarks in the walls.
Two young boys appear in ragged shorts and t-shirts to help carry the 50kg bags from truck to church. The boys are smiling, from an inner-distance, with eyes that look too far beyond their years. And they’re barefoot. Sort of, mostly barefoot. Three of their four feet are bare at any given moment. What they do have is one shoe, which they share back and forth, each to the other, right to left, One kid wears the shoe for a few minutes, then the other guy gets it.
5
Back to the Question:
The Question with no answer is: whatever happened to those two boys and their one shoe?
Bigger Question: why did what happened to them in their lives, happen to them?
I got no answer for that, and I’ve even asked around this post-life spirit world to see if those two boys are around anywhere, so I can ask them.
But nope, no boys, no answers.
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Epilogue
Shit. It seems we don’t even get answers to Life’s Big Questions on this side of the afterlife.
But I’ll keep asking.