This is how I know you. Comfortable... talking on the phone, making plans in a language I still can't manage to understand.  Arms length from your whistle that still calls the cows home no matter what city we are in, no matter how far.

You are always mythic in my mind.  I forget you are real.  Then I see you again and you ask me to come sit beside you and listen while you play the music you learned as a boy herding the cows in the wide open plains of Uganda.  I go over the stories in my mind and try to imagine what it could possibly mean to be seven or eight or nine and possess nothing but this whistle and the confidence that comes from knowing undeniable love in the face of unimaginable suffering.

To be together is to erase a thousand sorrows, you tell me.  And I know from the whistle, it's true.

You pull out a neon orange mouthpiece you sawed off a recorder I brought to Rwanda so many months ago.  See? you gesture as you attach the plastic to the crude black plastic tube.  I listen, but it's not the same.

How can anything improve on what you already possess?  How could anything compare to the secret of everything, the power of together being all you've ever known?



Sometimes without your consent, your life cracks into a hundred little pieces, leaving you with nothing left to do but sweep up the shards and try not to think about anything else but the very second you're living and the task before you. 

You report your losses when asked without pity or emotion because you know that yours pale in comparison to others you have known.  Compassion is something you traded in for commitment long ago, and so you do your work and you offer your best without fanfare or ego.

This is what is said without saying, and I understand but not from experience.  My way is to pick up my pieces and belabor them, to rearrange them like a thousand piece puzzle without the box, forgetting over and over again how anything fits.  My way is to broker my work like currency in exchange for privilege--the luxury of company in this catastrophe, a first row seat to a disaster where love always wins.

This is the picture the kid took of you when no one was looking, when all she could see was how kind you are, even when you saw her sad, even when you do the only thing left you know how to do--to give your all.