Farmboy, soldier, freak, teacher.

© www.razlan.net

The eternity of a child's summer is not ambered, but rhythmed with daily adventure.

The rural Northeast, verdant and sultry. A country road eases through the trees, past the old house, over the bridge spanning a chuckling brook. An immense silence, scoped by distant lowing, shelters my reveries.

An approaching tock, tock startles me to presence. A walking stick, a queasy presage. He's coming.

But how? He's blind. His terrible aspect now a terrifying visage. Yet he courses that gentle road, steady and true, daily, unfailing, undeterred by maimed limbs, his gait like clockwork, tock, tock. Now I would add, a jaunty stride, but there long ago, in my horror of his deformity, his swagger was lost on me.

But not his perseverance, nor his clockwork appearance, marking the passage of time, surer than meals, surer than sleep. The end will come, and autumn chase us away. Who is that? my blunt, offended question. An aunt, kind eyes veiled, answers: a local. I name him Hardacre. Not a mayfly like us summer folk. Thus, a farmboy, gone off to war years past, and returned to his home broken, hideous, and to my eyes, worse than useless. A monster. A freak. Come to spoil the cloudless blue perfection, the new mown idyll of my timeless paradise.

Almost fifty years have passed. I was, in my way, wounded, too. Then, and now. Whole of limb and blessed, each sense keen, my wounds, though hidden, were plain to many. Now, as I heal myself, my cruel disdain returns and demands atonement. And Hardacre is there, tock, tock, steady, oblivious, and yet not unforgiving, his first gift to me. Though not his first lesson: my first hint of death's iron surety, my first glimpse of pain and mutilation born of war. Of life's unfairness, and the long road we may yet have to limp, though we soldier on, and frighten the children.

His wounds, plain to all, hid his essential wholeness from my child's eyes, his second gift to me, received only yesterday, as I, blinded by sight, now see with my heart, a world new, bright, and timeless.