Monday, October 10, 2011

Prayer for a Parking Lot

The world is full of non-places.

The parking lot outside the window of Room 212 at the Sleep Inn in Omaha, Nebraska is one of them. On an autumn night, wind makes the plexiglass window hum, and so I peel back the shade of the tomb of a room and look.

It’s a parking lot, entirely empty. The few guests here tonight have parked out front. Beyond the blacktop and curb is a bank of trees, a field, an office park, and, at last, a regional airport whose last flight already left.

The parking lot is a space created by man and left alone by man. Out there in the dark, windy, unknown and unnoticed spot, no two human bodies have ever met in passing, never touched, never spoken. Never admired, never even thought of. Maybe, once, a confused deer or a rabbit might have emerged from the little group of trees, suddenly tense at the exposure, wide-eyed at the flatness. But that would be all. This place has no retrievable past and no hope of anything happening here in the future. The last moment in history for this place was the day it was paved.

Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come, come to the place outside this window, and night shall be no more. For where can I flee from Thy presence? If I run into the windy, abandoned parking lot behind Room 212, Thou art there before me, and after I leave, Thou remainest behind, dwelling in a place Thou lovest and that Thou rememberest in the midst of all the changing universe.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The Bicyclist

Pudgy, you’d call him, or squat, a smallish boulder of a man, but in any case well-balanced. With two bearskin hands bearing down on the handlebars, he whizzes through dew-laden traffic in the early morning suburban outpost of a metropolis. Beneath his bulk, the bicycle looks like it could snap, like the just-too-thin tree branch giving way beneath Pooh on his way out to the honey hive. But up he stays, and then some, cutting off cars, torpedoing down the hash marks while they, the inflexible hulks whose mirrors reach out to clip his elbows, wait at intersection lights.

He’s older than you’d expect, and he wears no underwear, a fact abundantly revealed as he glides past the corner crosswalk, hunched over for speed, pulling the fringe of his pleather Redskins jacket up, and the beltless hem of his light blue Levis down, revealing a wide fleshy band of gargantuan pinkness. We on the corner pretend not to notice the magnificent jest of his enormous presence.