Ramadan 1433

Ramadan is here, a bit quicker than I had expected though :)  I am well into the first day and doing well. I have settled into my new job and location, and I have so much to be thankful for. Last Ramadan, I read through my Koran and wrote a post about each sura. It was a wonderful experience, and the discipline was very comforting. This year, I will read my Koran again, but I want to do something different here. I have decided to write a post about the people in my life who have influenced me, some in very small ways, some in very profound ways. I am not sure how many posts I will produce, but as I write them, I will revisit the lessons I have learned the inspiration I  have borrowed from these individuals. Some of these folks are already mentioned in previous blogs, but I want to single them out again to honor the goodness that they have shared with me.



There is a young man who haunts me these past thirty-eight years. I have an image of him, but I am not sure it is correct. I never talked to him, and probably only saw him a handful of times, yet I think of him often, and he was the first one I thought of today as I thought of people to write about. When I was fourteen, my family moved to Pontiac, Michigan to a very rough side of that rough town. We only stayed there for six months, and I am convinced I would not have survived if we had stayed too much longer. I won't go into the details of the place (I did that in Train Kept A Rollin), but it was a place like none I had seen before or since. Between its iniquities and my weaknesses, I barely escaped with my life, literally. I spent five months in an inner-city school there, and that is where I encountered this young man - I started to say this remarkable young man, but I am not really sure if he was. His memory is though, and I will stick to that.

I moved through the school warily; the violence, drugs, alcohol would rival a rock concert on most days. I found a few friends for security, and we did our best to avoid too much attention. One day, while listening to a few girls talk about their drug-fueled dates the evening before, I noticed him sitting a few tables away. It was a dramatic moment, as he was so comically out of place. Looking back now, I suppose he was as Muslim, a member of the Nation of Islam by his dress and demeanor. He was very serious, immaculately dressed with a bow tie, and carried around a brief case that I am sure got him beat up from time to time.

He was always alone when I saw him, and I never noticed him communicating with anyone. He did not become a major point of interest for me, but I do remember puzzling over his presence there. I thought him single-minded and stoic, and I supposed that was in his mind the only way out of that sewer to a better life. Still, I could not imagine forgoing the immediate environment (no matter how bad it was), its pains and pleasures in pursuit of some future contingency unsure, unsettled, and surely not guaranteed. Whatever lay in the day, had its own security - to walk right past that deliberately and almost contemptuously was an act of personal anarchy that I would not appreciate for several decades.

I love this recontexutalized reality that occasionally constructs itself for me as I revisit old memories with new schema and motive. Looking back and seeing something for the first time (no, not differently as it was a incomplete or incorrect image in the first place) is the closest I get to epiphany. On most occasions, I engineer this new vision while revising incidents in relationships (usually failed) in my desperate attempt to understand something when the only source of enlightenment is long gone. When it happens naturally in other contexts, I make a significant shift towards a semblance of wisdom that then erodes but not completely, leaving me with a small residual gain.

I think about him often, wondering if he made it to where ever he was going. I think about him when I pretend that I don't worry what others think about, when I think I am brave and solely courageous. But most of all I think about him when I am lonely, and I wish I would have had the decency to talk to him all those years ago.