Zel-kun’s Words

When I crawl through traffic in the morning, it’s not uncommon to see garbage on the side of the road.  Most often, they are the remains of meals and boxes that some people are just too lazy and ignorant to throw away properly.  Once in awhile, it’s something a broke-down motorist or a tow truck forgot in their haste to be back on the road: gas can, a jack, or even one of those metal ramps.

But today, as I moved at a steady four miles an hour, I saw a bible sitting there on the road.  It was perched against the edge of the road, open to some verse or another.  I could see the chapter written in the corner, but it was much too far for me to make it out.  How did it come to be there?  Did it fall off the back of someone’s moving truck?  Did someone place it there in an effort to guide someone who would need it, a message from above?  Did someone, after a lifetime of hardship, after one divine-slap-in-the-face too many, throw his bible away in anger at his uncaring god?

A bible is a hard thing to throw away, I happen to own two from my more pious days.  One was given to me by my neighbor when she took me to church, the other was my grandfather’s, given to me by my grandmother when he passed away.  They sit on my bookshelf, oddly enough between a book on Zen and a statue of Buddha, this very day.  While one is a memory of my grandfather that if nothing else, I would keep for sentimental reasons, the other I should have no attatchment to.  It is a simple, leather-bound book that I once brought to and home from church.  I haven’t even read very much of it, mostly through the Tower of Babel, if memory serves.

And yet, given all that, I can’t bring myself to throw it away.  Can’t even really say why.

Maybe that’s what happened.  Someone else couldn’t bring themselves to throw it away, so he places it precariously upon the top of items in the back of his truck.  And if God wants the wind to catch it and remove it from his responsibility, then so be it.

Zel-kun out.