.17) Hymn To My Days As A Delivery Guy

I. The company’s magnetic logo plunked onto both sides of my Mazda, I sit parked beside a field of new snow that covers my memory with innocence in front of some faceless warehouse, waiting for Jay the dispatcher to call. Finally, he tells me where the packages wait. I cross a bridge to the depressed steel mill towns on the East Side and the oil refineries I never saw as a child though I grew up only twenty miles away. Soon after that, the weather turns. The wild spirit of the spring, a young lion, jumps in my car window one night, pawing me and carousing as I drive thirty miles, across the Missouri, for a lab pick-up at a rural hospital. Always, I hang with my companions NPR and endless books on tape, styrofoam cups, delicacies and coffee, a notebook and a pen. II. Every day the Mystery of driving a sacred world, God’s footprints everywhere as though He just left and His fragrance still lingers. Even as these moments come up in memory, the humor of the game goes on, for where I looked for Him in vain when each moment had its fling with the Present, now as each arises again, part of a slide show frozen on mental film, I see He was there all along. Beauty is back there calling me even while continuing to play hide-and-seek in the life I've exchanged that one for, different trappings on the surface but underneath the same 'job', pursuing the Loveliness that will not fade.