which worry would you remove
The town dump is a great place to find what others want to lose. Once I found a wad of Monopoly money. It stank of smoke and mom refused to let it into the house, but that’s what a fort is for. Ours was boards across the garage rafters. Comic books were another prize find. Even better: bicycle parts.
Rub it off, my brother said, holding out a tarred teapot. There’s a genie inside. That’s a lantern, I told him. But he was right. Rubbing it on his shirt, the lid unscrewed and out peered what looked like one of my troll dolls.
If you could remove one worry, it said, what would it be? We stared. It blinked. Don’t I get three wishes? No, said the troll genie. Then no more asthma, my brother said. Okay, said the troll genie, now seal the pot. That was it. No puff of magic. My brother opened it again, but the pot was empty. You try it, he told me, but we took it to mom.
This part is hard to tell.
Mom rubbed off tar with a thumb, then on dad’s overalls. Dad’s a car mechanic. She laughed and said he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. The troll gave them one wish together. I thought they’d dispense with debt. We had a station wagon that ‘will never make it that far’ no matter how far we had to travel. If not debt, then disease. Dad had scarlet fever as a kid and they both smoked. Everybody did back then, even the doctor who came into my room after I had my appendix out. The smoke made me vomit and it sat in a glass jar at the head of my bed.
They chose to remove death. I thought that was clever. Forever young; younger than us one day. They died that afternoon. The station wagon never made it over the tracks; never made it that far.
Our house was left cold and empty. So was my brother. My uncle, to whom I owed a dollar, collected my brother to stay with cousins. Grandma wanted help canning pears; she wanted help taking her mind off the loss. I wanted answers and walked to our house, to the teapot.
Your brother breathes easier; his asthma is gone. Your parents asked for something beyond their understanding. Now you ask that this ignorance be taken from you. So it will.
Death is not the end; it resets the cycle of suffering. Your parents are conscious to the extent of their form. Dying as a lion, rising as an eagle. Starting over the cycle of suffering. It would have happened one day with or without the train, as it happens for all but a few.
Those few ask to remove the cycle of suffering. They enter the eternal stream as part of that which is in front of us, yet beneath us. Like looking at existence without seeing what exists.
This came to me in a dream. It may all have been a dream. I lost the teapot in the garbage pit, in black smoke from a burning tire. That’s when I found the bicycle seat.
