From the World’s Navel to Pittsburg, Kansas
By Bobby Neal Winters
As I write this, it is my last day in Paraguay. I arrived here one week ago, come 11pm tonight. My flight will leave at 1:10am tomorrow morning, so I will have been here just two hours more than one week.
It has been recognized there are places where God seems closer to us than other places. Jacob had a dream on a mountain top. There are fortuitous encounters that happen at water wells. These are places where the natural setting thins the wall that separates us from the divine.
Asuncion is like that for me.
Perhaps it is the large number of trees in the city. Perhaps the Jesuits who brought their missions here so long ago felt something special. Perhaps the daily close encounters with death on the streets by motorists and pedestrians has worn the wall thin.
Who can say?
Regardless, I’ve sometimes felt God speak to me in his own coded, metaphorical language.
On our first day, we went to the Supermercado Real and bought fruit and crackers to have a picnic in the park that is just a block from our hotel. We sat and ate among a few pigeons. When I was close to done, I broke off a piece of cracker and tossed it among our feathered lunchmates.
We no longer had a few lunchmates; suddenly we had entered a Hitchcock movie. We were surrounded. I thought briefly about the piranhas in Paraguay River and wondered if pigeons were anything like those. Would they find a pair of skeletons with US passports in a Paraguayan park? Would there be YouTube videos 20 years from now pondering the mystery of our disappearance?
But no. They ignored us. The cracker occupied their entire attention.
The cracker was a problem for them. So that you have the whole picture, you should know it wasn’t a saltine. It was a very thin, very hard cracker with seeds in it. The piece I had tossed out was too big for them to eat with a bite and too hard for them to break.
This did not deter them from trying to eat it, however. Indeed, while they couldn’t eat it, they could fight over it, and they did.
It was through this that God began to speak to me. There was one telling point in the fight, when one bird had the cracker, another bird began fighting with him for it, and while the two birds were fighting, a third bird came along and stole the cracker piece.
The cracker piece eventually disappeared from view without ever having been usefully subdivided.
This has been bothering me during quiet moments ever since. I’m bothered not because I have no interpretation, but because I have so many.
Are the pigeons the American people and the cracker corner tiny bits of largess the government tosses out for us to fight over? Are the pigeons university faculty and the cracker issues that only an academic could care about?
I need a Joseph or a Daniel to unravel this for me, to tell me what this all means.
What it means in this place where I feel so very close to God.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )
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