Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Missed Calling

"It pains me to imagine the very probable truth that over the next 20 or 40 years, children will become completely disobedient to their parents. When they are told to behave, they will, being children, ask why...And when they are told that they must behave in order to please God, they will wail and cry that none of the other children at school don't believe in God."
-From On the Morality of Youth, written by William Goodwin Grant in 1884

I have been receiving missed calls

like the feeling of standing at the airport
holding a sign bearing the name of someone you once loved
who also missed her flight,
I have been receiving missed calls.

I get at least seven a day.

Why am I never there to pick up?

The calls I always miss are always from the same number
which I'm convinced must mean something.

I've taken the digits to the top numerologists
but they have assured me that it is not
the longitude coordinates of a mysterious Parisian apartment
nor all the prime numbers divided by each other
nor the last ten digits of pi
But just an ordinary number from a real
and ordinary phone.

I guess that makes sense.

Then let's try to figure this out logically:
Who has the power to spy on me
so completely
that he knows to call when I am
asleep or in the shower or daydreaming
or all the reasons I am ever away from my phone?
And to remain unnoticed and anonymous?
Does such technology exist?

When I call the number back, you see,
I get a busy signal.
Perhaps he (or she) is placing a missed call
in someone else's phone
or trying to call me at the exact same moment.

My father's twin brother, who is a priest,
told me it is God.
Experts tend to claim all problems
fall within their area of expertise.

He said that the calls are a simple symbol,
that God is calling me but I am not there to listen.
And I told him what my father told me,
what my father learned in school,
that God has not abandoned us
but he is hiding like a squirrel
around a tree trunk
on the other side of the Sun.

My father's twin brother, my uncle,
warned me to be careful,
"Don't be like Pascal
and trade your personal relationship
with God for a professional one."

There is a simple way to solve this.

I know that societies are remembered by their myths
And thus
Ours will be remembered by the ridiculous notion that "a watched pot never boils"
And thus
I place my cell phone on my bed
kneel on the floor beside it
and wait.

But now I've been waiting for years, and
as I grow ever more hungry, ever more gaunt,
I begin to wonder whether my cell phone
or I will run out of battery first

before He calls again.