Flashback: Jessie ...

   I remember the awe I felt when Dad took me to visit the Salado Cliff Dwellings in Arizona as a little girl and I discovered a multi-storied, ancient adobe structure that looked similar to our own HOME.  I felt drawn to it by an ache in my chest that I would later learn was nostalgia - yearning for a time when a family lived there so long ago.  I learned that generations of people lived there over countless centuries, and in that moment realized - as Dad put it - the world wasn’t created on the day I was born; that I was only one small link in a chain of humanity that stretched back hundreds of thousands of years and may continue for hundreds of thousands more.  I know now that the only thing that binds all those billions of links together through time is love, and it is the broken people of this world who have lived without love who truly know how precious it is.

My own small segment of that chain began half a century ago with a broken little boy and his bootlegger grandma, with a mother too busy surviving and a father too immersed in alcoholism to love him; then as a man who once treasured a brief and tragic love, the longing for which would never fade, he had found a broken, angry little girl and passed that love on to her and doing so, gentled her soul; and in turn she would pass it on to a lonely, discarded boy, and so on; links clicking into place, welded together through time.

We are mongrels.  We are outcasts.  We have all committed horrible crimes to protect what is ours.  We are a collection of broken people who carry junkyard dogs within our breasts fixed tight with chains of restraint.  Yet we have also performed wonderful things for people who need us; we have fed the hungry; delivered justice for the powerless; soothed those in pain; and brought joy where only sorrow lived before.  Those who do not understand the hollow hungry place in our souls we all bore as children, fear us.  Those who do understand, know that by coming together, by suffering together, by surviving together, we have filled that hollow place with the one thing that all of us so desperately seek ...

Love.

"Gangster's Girl"