Falling into line like the fresh picked olives from the crooked vine.  Still don’t know if these are yours or mine.  Into the morning of apprehension I stick my weary head too encumbered by last night’s concerns to turn my thoughts to ward any other way. Pristine water mirrored in the gray windswept formations overhead. The tear in my eye yearning to be one with the water, misty mud laden gladness of the dew.  Am I to make sense, unraveling this mysterious conglomeration of worldly events or leave them be, buzzing, chiming, spinning, turning, wiggling like the worm on the warmer side of morn. They can’t help but catch my eye, Red and white, then augury blue, testing something deep inside, remembering for what we stood, Still.  Four-thirty and dawn happened. Standing as older men, pressing forward, a little closer than I’d care to be, smelling of too little attention and three day old shirt.  Soured to the things of pleasantry grumbling, stumbling, lacking the balance of a baby boy, fumbling for completed sentences we stare in patient expectation.  He don’t know Jesus, only the accumulation of things, the years washed away. people gone, memories too, nothing to hold on to but the thoughts of a tomorrow that may never come.  I want to say I love you, knowing that will be dismissed by the wave of a spotted, left hand intent on forgetting something he cannot remember.  Decay, rapid decay of thought, wishes and good manners, nothing left but pain but yet the pain helps it drives, it clears thought, it gives at least, well something to hold onto. Pestering aside I’d truly wish some reason, some reason to try to break through the decades of defenses built to keep out people who would have you feel something about something, don’t they know that I just want to forget it all and move on.  But there is something left worth saying.  Ed, do you know where you’re going when you leave this painful life.  Is Ethel there or is even that enough to get you talking, listening, accepting of prayers, smiles and kin? I ask about the war, no answer, about children, still the same.  Then I stop to ponder what he always discussed at the quiet suppers where nothing much was said or remembered.  For him it always was the lake, the Lake He said, “It’s wider than the river and deeper by a mile”. “On this side you can barely see Montana, and over there a sterling rainbow Christened the birth of our new yearling”, so I leaned a little closer and whispered of the winter touching its windy tongue on the dock of Farther’s Crossing. One stern fueled eye turned to me, reviewing me curiously as a giant views a talking fly.  The tight sewn corners of that beaded old mouth curled in what could pass in most parts as the beginnings of a smile.  He held it a while and then his eyes looked up to the light passing through the window and he pointed as if we would see what he had recalled. And on that winter’s lake was the moment I met Jesus, He was there and I think he shared my thoughts.  For in the boat that day we both saw him resting on a pillow in the bow, settled against the misty, icy breeze.  Then with a tear in the side of his eye, He turned his head right to me and said to me, “Sweet Jesus Bring Me Home”.             ,