THE KING--AN ORDINARY ODE

There's a picture of him that I have and keep out.  He doesn't know his photo's being taken.  He's coming home from work.  His arms are laden with papers, books, folders and for some reason a large cardboard tube askew to it all.  He's wearing a windbreaker/rain jacket.  It's green.  I know it's consignment.  I know it has chalk in the pockets.  Did I say he doesn't know the picture is being taken?  Someone - the photographer - is peaking out the living room window, an anti-paparazzi.  Anit- because no one would ever pay a nickel for this man's photo.  No one wants to see that face, with the weight of the world just barely poking through that look of determination, in any magazine on the doctor's office coffee table.  He climbs the front steps the way he has a thousand times before to join his wife and five children at the dinner table.  The house, the table, the food, the electricity, the beloved TV, the absolute sense of love and security all there because he climbs up and down those stairs and drives back and forth on the highway day after day.  So much so that the momentum of going and going and going sustains him even to this day into his seventies.  He hasn't stopped.  He hasn't been able to.

Always, on top of his duties, he maintained a belief in humanity and its basic goodness.  Assailed constantly for his moderate voice, and by jealousy of his instinctive ability to know what it was like in the other guys shoes.  Despite all of that he was optimistic.  Optimistic about the people around him, none of whom were fit to hold a candle to him (or whatever the dumb expression is), who criticized him, who called him a moderate--he believed always that they meant well and he knew that they struggled just as he did.  Maybe they weren't equipped to handle it as well as he was.  Maybe they didn't have his gifts.  He knew his ultimate duty, to himself, to his family, to his community and to the God he put his faith in despite having the mental capacity to know better, was to lift the tide where and when he could.  Add just a little water to the ocean and we would all float a little higher.  The King and his subjects.

I have my own gifts, my own passions.  One of them is the perspective to know that the footprints on this path I'm walking on are his.  My inclination is not to believe in my fellow man the way he did--the way he does, even now as death's indignities are raining down on his friends and life's ultimate betrayal is coming into sharp focus.  Having been loved the way I was I walk with a confidence that only can come from the sure knowledge of own worth - knowledge I only received because of close proximity to him.  And so I'm over-confident.  I'm cocky.  I sometimes think I'm better.  But I am his princely son and have also been inured with his instinct for taking the back seat.  For discovering the beauty in my community of mediocrity.  For celebrating the ordinary all around me.  And in that way becoming ordinary myself, but I belong, and by belonging I make the group better.  There's virtue in giving your life for your brother, even when he doesn't deserve it.  If only because that act in itself is uncommon.  It's radical even.  Most people are too scared to do it.

I know how he feels now, the King.  I know that look on his face when he thinks he's alone.  We don't want pity, we don't want glory.  We want the path.  We want the journey.  We want the struggle.  It ennobles us.  It makes us kings.