Good Friday

A guest post by my dear friend Nick.

Nick is one of my truest friends. He’s been both my mentor and my assistant. We’ve been writing and walking partners over the years. He sent me this piece this morning, and I asked him if I could share it here. Nick can say in two lines what takes me two pages.

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3.29.24, Good Friday

1.

The so-true song in my head upon waking:

“Children Will Listen” from 

Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods

2.

I have not read everything, of course (none of us can), but I have tried to read in everything I can, and I remember this morning how clearly my mother had me figured out long before I had finished grade school, mostly expressed in odd sayings and little truisms of her own. Though she had very little education, she grasped some things hard and well. 

     She would tell me, “Niko, your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” and “You don’t know what you want,” and the prize insight of them all, “Afraid you’ll miss something, Niko?” That third one was almost always posed as a leading question, indicating that she was fully alert to my motives.

     I have often pondered how famous people with little or no education could avail themselves of the one book available to them and dig deep in that single source far better than most of us know how. Frederick Douglass found one little book of speeches, but he also found Emerson in it. Vast numbers of people have had just a Bible and made it into life-long nourishment. People who couldn’t read could nevertheless tell you what Jesus said, or what Confucius said, or what ‘the song’ said. 

     And that works. That can be enough. 

     After a lifetime of reading, still unfinished, one of the most haunting of truths came to me from a random song I had to look up on the internet as an old man. I don’t know if I first read the line somewhere, or if I actually heard it in the background of a movie. I certainly didn’t know the song or the group (Sister Hazel) who sang it, and to this day I can only hear the last three words of it as actual music in a long-lasting echo — but I have taken the statement to heart and have it in mind as a deep guideline:

     “If you want to be somebody else,

       change your mind.”

My mother knew me in a similarly simple-but-deep way. Still and often, I marvel at her courage and surprising power to carry on, mostly through alternating storms of laughter and anger, and with an ocean of stubbornness. My formal education surpassed hers by the time I was in Sixth Grade and only 11 years old, but I’m still learning and trying to learn from her, over a half-century later.

God bless you, Mom, and rest in peace. You and all the other Wise Ones before us have died for our sins. Today is your great-granddaughter’s birthday, and the day after tomorrow is Easter. Christos anesti! “Χριστός ἀνέστη!” Christ is risen.

3.

Everything is personal if you care to know. Anything is universal if you know to care.