"Sack of gold!"
I feel his arms wrap around my neck and by the time I hear the "duh" in gold, I am sagging beneath the full weight of my brother. I contort my 9 year-old body and try to twist away, but he is too quick and too determined. His arms extend like steel bands around my neck to my Adam's apple where his hands grasp each other in a death grip. His body sags down the length of my back, his feet drag in the lime behind mine. Up and down the barn aisle I will haul him until he is good and ready to let go.
Oh, I can plead, complain, and bemoan my fate all I want, but the unwritten rule in this unwritten game is that you pay for a lack of vigilance. The price is 80 pounds strapped to your back. You have to bear the "sack of gold." Indefinitely.
I was gifted a sack of heavy metal last week. It didn't even have the courtesy to holler "sack of gold" first. With a suddenness that knocked my breath away, it latched its ugly metallic tentacles around my neck. It lodged lead in my feet. My legs are comprised of cadmium with its sickly-blue hue, my heart cleaved into shards of Baraboo quartzite. My brain is a silvery blob of poisonous mercury, one idea rolling into another only to suddenly split off and meander into another dimension.
I am so heavy that I fear going swimming because I am sure to sink below the surface, to come to reside on the bottom of the pool where my cadmium cancer would be sure to swallow me whole - if the mercury didn't kill me first.
So instead, I've been unpacking the sack - my baggage. Looking at every nugget anew and calling into question what I once "knew" as TRUTH about myself and others. It has been painful - and shifty as mercury. Yet there are some things about which I am rock solid. Sack of gold reminded me of one of them.
Last night I phoned all eight of my siblings. We reminisced about playing Sack of Gold, and I glimpsed inside their lives to see what was in their bags.
Today, I still hurt. I still want to plead and complain and bemoan and begrudge and loathe and second-guess. I am still bearing this load. And it's heavy.
But man, it is a sack of GOLD. As in precious metal.
There are some nasty-bad nuggets in my bag, but mixed in with all of them, there are a few pieces - like my sibling relationships - that are definitively, purely... gold.
7 comments:
Sounds, well, heavy. Glad you've got some gold in there, I think the holidays often induce some reflection time, both good and bad. All the best to you for the new year.
I'm carrying around a lot of "extra weight" too. If there's a hidden gem, I've yet to find it. Best we both not swim in the same pool, given there may not be any water left for the others to move in. Swoooosh.
i think there was a time when i bemoaned my "baggage" whether physical emotional or otherwise...
for some reason now i embrace it. i like who i am - crooked nose and indebted and having failed at marriage and carrying some major child-age scarring. and given the chance to trade my lead-like sack for a carbon-fiber filled one, not a chance i would take it. my sack is who i am.
i read the same feelings in your post - it was nice to read... thank you tt,
d
Sounds like a heavy load you have been carrying there.. Sometimes we have to look in our bag a discard all the "fools" gold and figure out what's real.
Hopefully lighten the load up a little bit.
Best wishes to you.
Keep the good. Throw away the bad. Not so easy, but can be done. Enjoy your sibs this Christmas.
That's what family is all about...we all drag the bags around. Sometimes it's not all good when you merely cut the cord loose though...then you become weightless and free falling with nothing to grab onto.
It's a hard thing, looking in our baggage, but a worthy undertaking, too. It'll get easier, and lighter...it always does, no? In the meantime, enjoy your gold and can't wait to see you at the next JLT!
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