“Enough already!” I shouted. “You’ve done nothing but complain since you sat down.”

“But, but . . . !” she stammered, “but I thought . . .”

I generally try to show tolerance for another person’s distress, but it’s not always easy.

“Doesn’t matter what you thought,” I replied. “You think life is supposed to be easy? Whoever told you that? My life is anything but easy; still you don’t hear me whining all over the place. And, trust me, I could teach you a thing or two about suffering.

“Just for example . . . you wouldn’t know it, of course, but my wife ran off and left me two weeks ago. That’s right, emptied the bank account, took the car, leaving me with two kids and a box of unpaid bills. All she left behind was her dirty laundry and a note that read, ‘Don’t forget Elliott’s dental appointment on Tuesday. I’m leaving.’ How’s that for rough luck? And you think you’ve got it bad!”

“Wow,” she said, “that must have been hard to take.”

“Hard to take? Hell, the guy she ran off with was my lover!”

“Oh, that’s horrible,” she cried, her eyes widening to the size of serving platters.

“Wait, I’m not done yet. This so-called lover of mine was renting an apartment from my sister, and I just this morning discovered he skipped out owing her six month’s back rent. Which is why we don’t have the money we need to repair our Mother’s broken dental bridge. Poor lady, she broke it in a car accident. Now, when she smiles you think you’re looking at a checker board, which is less than ideal for someone who works as a greeter at Wal-mart’s.”

“Car accident . . . ?” she asked, clearly afraid to open up another chapter of my family’s sad history for discussion.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad; put my dad in the hospital. We won’t know how badly he’s hurt until he wakes from the coma.”

I could see something was bothering her, so I asked outright, “What’s on your mind?”

“I was wondering how your sister could let your lover fall six months behind in his rent?”

“Same old story,” I sighed, “she was sleeping with him, of course. She thought he was going to marry her; now she does little else but spend her days and nights crying . . . “

“Because he left her?”

“Ehh, not really . . . “

“Because of the money?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Your mom’s dental bridge; your dad’s coma . . . ?”

“Well, more than anything I think it was the test results.”

“Test results . . . ?”

“Yeah, she found it in his room after he skipped out. Seems my sister’s boyfriend, who was also my lover and my wife’s current traveling companion, has what is politely referred to as a ‘social disease.’ Boy, that got my attention, if you know what I mean.”

She started to rise from her chair.

“Where are you going?” I asked in surprise.

“I’m leaving,” she tersely replied.

“You can’t do that,” I pointed out. “We’ve only barely started your therapy. You have at least another forty minutes to go.”

THE RESURRECTION OF 11-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Somewhere long ago he was once a child.

His world was a child’s world where adults towered over the landscape in a wondrous sort of mute majesty and rarely slowed down to listen to children.

Somewhere long ago he was a blueprint of the man he might one day become. A youthful creature brimming with untested strengths and unexplored depths. But he was also small, needful and, most of all, vulnerable. He had to trust that the giants in his world would provide for his needs. That they would nourish and care for him, and keep him safe from harm.

Somewhere long ago he was once a child. And as a child he saw the world through an innocent’s eyes. So, when an adult in that world, a parish priest, rose up like a menacing shadow to darken his life, he could only fall back on his limited experience to understand what was happening.

And there was no understanding.

There was only a child lost in confusion and fear. A child deeply hurt and frightened. A child surrounded by people but engulfed by a sense of isolation. A child who felt guilty rather than victimized, as if by questioning the actions of a priest—a man as close to God as any mortal could come—he himself had done something wrong.

Somewhere long ago he was once a child and used a child’s logic to order his world. Thus, when he learned he could no longer trust adults to keep him safe, he did what he must to survive. He created boxes in his mind. Boxes to hold those things that frightened or angered or confused him. Boxes he could keep hidden. Hidden from the world, hidden from the priests, even hidden from himself.

In one box he placed his anger at his parents for not protecting him. In another he placed the memory of the innocence that had been taken from him. In another he placed his fear of intimacy, having seen what happens when you allow someone to come too close.

And in the largest box of all he placed himself, an eleven year old boy frozen in time. It was the only safe harbor that child would know.

Many years later the boy had grown into a man, and the boxes which had been buried in the darkness of his memory began to fall apart like broken dresser drawers. They would spill out their hazardous contents at the oddest moments. When he found himself standing outside a church. When he noticed how vulnerable his children seemed while asleep. When people who thought they knew him, told him how lucky he was to have the gifts he’d been given. Or whenever he felt threatened or frightened, like a little child hiding in a grownup’s body.

For many years those leaking boxes and their toxic seepage dominated the man’s life. They undermined his most intimate relationships, they kept him running from job to job, they sent him searching for relief in alcohol, drugs and an endless succession of mindless distractions. Worst of all, they unleashed on those he loved the pent-up fury of a rage that had been burning for most of his life.

Sitting there on the TV screen, somewhere on the other side of the continent, he talks to a reporter about his painful past and why, after all these years, he is finally confronting his demons and opening up his boxes. He is one of a number of men who are forcing the Catholic Church to face up to a pattern of almost bestial behavior by some of its priests. Forcing the church to acknowledge it had condoned crimes any civilized society would condemn as savage and depraved.

He is one of many such men who, like the lost boys of Neverland, never lived out their boyhoods but instead placed themselves, frozen in time, in their own inner boxes. And now the boxes are being open. The victims are telling their stories.

The healing has begun.

And the church, perhaps, is being dragged from its own peculiar set of closed and darkly hidden boxes.

But as he sits there at his kitchen table holding his five year old daughter in an unconscious protective embrace, I see more on the TV screen than the angry victim, the outraged reformer and the loving father.

I see the man whose blueprint—once tragically unrealized—was now coming to life. Resurrected after all those lost years. Hopefully to blossom, even with all the discovery and pain that still lay ahead.

For that blueprint, too, had been hidden inside a box.

Waiting for years in darkness.

Waiting to be uncovered and brought back to life.

Waiting for an eleven year old boy to whisper it was now safe to come out and play.

From “How To Train A Rock” by Paul Steven Stone, ©2009 Paul Steven Stone. It’s somewhat sad and amazing to realize I had first written this essay in 2002 and yet today so much still remains to be uncovered, so many wait to be healed, and, most sadly of all, those responsible for enabling, condoning and ignoring these bestial acts remain protected and unpunished. Later in the week I hope to speak further about the culture of complicity and elitism that allowed hundreds of priests to prey like vampires upon thousands of helpless children across the vast expanse of decades and continents.

(Written For Amy Before She Came Into My Life)

I imagine her as a bird. All silver in her feathered finery as she flies over landscapes reduced in size like a topographical map.

Where she is coming from I cannot say. But where she is bound, the far distant perch that calls to her like a guiding star . . . ah, there’s a thought that brings up a smile!

For hers is a journey that could take her across continents, lifetimes, even the universe for all I know. While here I wait in the crow’s nest of my solitary life, watching for a woman whose features I won’t recognize but whose heart I will know intimately with the certainty of a lover.

And in truth I am not waiting, but also flying in my soul to meet her, a journey that has taken me across the span of my own lifetime and the gulf of that same mysteriously mapped universe.

I cannot say when she and I last met–in what former life, in what manner of relationship. We could have been brother and sister, parent and child, even lovers in a doomed marriage. But in this lifetime we have passed through each other’s night skies without taking notice, living our lives apart while slowly and inevitably being drawn together like planets falling into each other’s orbits.

Now, it is time for us to meet and I know it. Just as she must know the same truth within her own heart. What a beautiful illusion this is. What pride the Master Magician must feel to see us flying towards each other while the watching world believes us stuck in our lives, trudging across the same mundane existences we trudged across yesterday, and all the yesterdays before.

But no measure of time or distance truly separates two kindred spirits. What matters most is the rightness of the moment not the limitations of physics. What matters most is the urgency of two hearts to once again be joined.

And so I feel her presence. I sense the shadow of her wings as it glides across my soul’s landscape as certainly as I sense fragrance from flowers and moisture in a mist. We are flying towards each other through a sky free of cloud or obstruction, both of us unable to resist the accelerating pull of love’s gravity.

In a world where the laws of physics have been superceded by the inevitability of attraction, time no longer holds sway over possibilities; yet ironically it has somehow become the right time for this cosmic connection to be made. The right moment for her to find me and for me to find her.

I imagine her as a bird. Flying with a certainty known only by an arrow truly shot or a soul mate heading for the open perch in her lover’s heart.

She is flying to me. And I am flying to her.

Two souls who, in the perfection of some unwritten Grand Plan, will once again become one.

Love, I am waiting.

Cameron Mount Reviews “The Zen Of Whimsy”

“The Zen Of Whimsy” is the Seventh Rock Trick in “How to Train A Rock” by Paul Steven Stone, available on Amazon.com. To learn more about Cameron Mount, Boston area poet and author of the recently released “Evening Watch”, available from Lulu.com, visit his blog at evening-watch.blogspot.com. (Watch for future video reviews from John Bach, free spirit and unbiased friend, and Doug Holder, renowned local poet, cable TV host and another unbiased buddy.)

I lied.

You won’t save a penny buying my new book “How To Train A Rock”. Truth is it will actually cost you money when it goes on sale. But only about $5 if you take advantage of our first-time buyer’s discount.

There I go again. That’s not true. You’ll pay the same $15 that everyone else—except my mother—has to pay. And Mom’s only saving a couple of bucks at that.

I didn’t mean to lie, something just came over me.

The problem is, most of my professional life has been spent writing advertisements. So when I began to worry that intelligent readers like you might not purchase this incredible collection of my best “A Stone’s Throw” columns—some of them hilarious, all of them shockingly inventive—I knew exactly what to do.

I lied.

But don’t let that stop you from buying “How To Train A Rock” when it’s finally available. Because somewhere inside the book you’ll find our “mystery word” which could win you an incredible two-week stay at a fabulous oceanside condominium in Cancun, Mexico or . . .

Sorry.

I did it again, didn’t I?

There’s no mystery word hidden inside, no luxury vacation to win. It’s just another cheap trick on my part and I’m not proud of myself for pulling it.

Let’s be honest. You won’t save any money when you purchase “How To Train A Rock”. Nor will you win a prize, improve your social standing, lengthen your sexual organs or enjoy the benefits of space-age technology.

Truth is there’s only one good reason why you or anyone else should purchase this book.

I just wish I could remember what it was.

* * * *
Just weeks away from introducing “How To Train A Rock” to the world, author Paul Steven Stone couldn’t resist giving his new book of “Short Insights And Fiction Flights” one final—and hopefully humorous—plug. You may not win any prizes reading “How To Train A Rock” but I guarantee you’ll enjoy and relish the experience. And that’s no lie.