Year 2!
Daisypath Ticker

Thursday, July 14, 2005
Midnight Blue
Met up with Tito Freddie last night. Weeks after that unfortunate mugging and mauling incident at a park in Melbourne, he is still reeling from the shock. He seems fine on the outside, wryly making light of everything. Even the cuts and the swelling on the right side of his face have almost completely subsided. But the wounds apparently run deeper. Much deeper.

For someone who’s perfected the art of solitude, and has been very vocal about preferring life that way, I don’t think he ever felt as painfully alone in his entire life as those long, sleepless hours in his hotel room after being released from St. Vincent’s Health Hospital. A pair of warm, comforting arms would have been appreciated then, but even that wouldn’t have been enough. In the steel-cold silence of the night, in a strange city, after such a violent experience at the hands of strangers, he sought nothing and no one less than God. God’s arms around him, telling him everything will be alright. But God was nowhere to be found.

At least, that was what it felt like at the time. And who can blame him? After being so acutely aware of God’s intervening Hand during and after the traumatic event--waking up in the hospital without remembering how he got there, mercifully unaware of anything that happened after losing consciousness at the park, remembering the brandished knife at his neck but realizing he had somehow escaped unstabbed—he had still fully expected, nay, demanded that Jesus himself visit him in his room and take all the fear and pain away. This strange, but not so irrational cry from the soul will probably be appeased in time, he says, but right now he is too angry not to wallow in it.

It’s proving to be a pretty expensive bout of wallowing. In anger, he immediately bought himself the latest Nokia model, setting him back a cool thousand dollars. The purchase required two credit cards, but what the **ck, he says, who gives a hoot anymore, anyway. As bizarre as all this sounds coming from Tito Freddie, the man on whose edgy, but always uplifting spiritual perceptions I have based most of mine, I completely understand. Even the cussing. The man didn’t just lose his video camera, cellphone, and expensive backpack after all. Bloodied, sore and fearful, he lost a lot more that evening.

His thoughts flying, he ruminated on how he now understands why it took Joseph (the dreamer) 22 years to reach a point of forgiveness after being betrayed, beaten up and left for dead. Who’s to know that those 22 years of healing were probably not even between him and his guilty brothers, but between him and God? Who’s to know indeed.

It’s difficult to sit two feet across from one of the most commanding and assured figures I’ve ever known, and listen to his quietly tormented outpourings over pumpkin soup, banana caramel waffles and oversized dalandan juice. Perhaps the comfort food was necessary. But none of us at that table was really very hungry. At least I wasn’t. I felt the world I had known with this man changing drastically as he dug deeper and shared his previously unarticulated thoughts. These were not easy words for him to say, and he couldn’t have said them just to anyone. He was angry, but no longer at his mugger, nor at the female accomplice whom he remembers vividly as “the only woman in Australia I ever saw with bad skin.” I was glad to see his humour still intact. He will need it to get him through this.
 
posted by The White Rabbit at 1:57 PM | Permalink |


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