sangha

A Pair of Dishgloves

March 10, 2008 on 10:01 am | In Discussion | Comments Off

I’m working toward licensure to fost/adopt parent — I want to be a dad. The longer it takes, the more sure I seem to be; this is one of the very few things left in the world that I think I need to try. It’s the only thing I feel I truly lack.Not really relevant; it’s just background. A few months back, hanging out at the locally owned café, I made the acquaintance of the weekend dishwasher, a teen kid with whom I connected, entirely and totally, after about nine to eleven seconds of conversation. The interdigitation was strong and a little eerie in its depth. He’s how I hope my future son will be, very bright, very sweet and just a good kid all around.Where he works there isn’t a pair of dishgloves that fit him — the set there is too small. So when he takes them off at the end of his shift, they wrinkle and fold back on themselves, and end up in a disordered heap on the rack, in a way certain to irritate the store’s owner. He can’t help it, and being a teen is a bit scatterbrained, so he tends to forget the state of the gloves.A few weeks back I was in the café, and there were the gloves, disheveled and hopeless in a rubbery heap where he’d left them the night before. I smiled to see them, thinking of the bundle of energy and life that had touched them last, thinking of nothing else in particular, and then realized that what I was seeing was a deep lesson — that a rumpled pair of gloves would be meaningless, anonymous, just a bit of noise to most observers; but they meant something to me — they were a cipher whose code I could read — and that the world is actually full of this noise. Continue reading A Pair of Dishgloves…