For Sale_ This Old House

[Van Canna]

I kept rummaging _almost in anger…even as I badly needed to sleep…I was thinking I'd just brush off the dust off the couch and sleep there in a few moments.

I must have dozed off…I was suddenly aware of a strange sound from the bottom of the desk. I looked under it and realized I must have actioned some control lever that had opened a secret compartment.

There, inside this 'hideaway' I see a red envelope, unsealed.

Don't know why at that moment the thought came to me that when, as a soccer player, I had made friends in a certain part of town where I would go hangout every Saturday before a game the following day.

I had befriended a good fellow, whom I knew had had some business dealings with my father before he up and left without a word, abandoning my poor mother and his children. We never saw him again. It was just by chance that one day, many years later, I found out that he had passed in his eighties.

I had long lost contact with this person, until one day while walking in that part of town, I saw him approach with a sad smile. It was then he told me he had traveled to South America and he had met with my father, who had married a local woman and was the father of a boy.

[Van Canna]

And with this thought in mind I decided to open the red envelope I had found in the secret compartment.

Maybe it contained some useful information or directives from my father for reasons I could only imagine.

Just as I thumbed the flap, I glanced to the picture of my parents on the wall…a chill that I felt down to my toes…my father was no longer in the photo…only my mother remained, looking towards me in desolate desperation and sadness.

In a moment of extreme anger, I ripped the envelope and its contents to shreds.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfkGocmCiE

[Van Canna]

I was up and around again, wandering about the direction my steps would lead me to without my thinking of where to go next.

The silence and the darkness now seemed to weigh as boulders and by now I had lost all perception of time_ I could no longer distinguish moments of consciousness from those of sleeplessness and whether any dreams were as real as memories.

Time had come to a standstill like a train in the night.

[Van Canna]

Tonight_ locked in the church of time_ the feelings are somewhat hidden, but I know they are there, I feel their presence as an embodiment of a cougar lying in ambush calmly awaiting a prey's false move, that just as it is made, finds the quarry in the jaws of the predator.

In a daze I continue to hear the whipping rain outside…a thunder falling nearby, the lightings illuminating intermittently the ghostly surroundings and the wind screaming the passage of seconds…

My steps had led me to my parents' bedroom once again. Such a beautiful room, I always thought, fit for my loving mother and father.

An irascible gust of wind blew one window open and in all its fury messed up the items on a night table just under the window. I then remembered…that table had been placed there by my mother for my convenience when I would sit by that window to study and to dream and to write of fables…that room, a particular symbolic refuge…my mother keeping vigil, distraught and praying that I would make it through that sickness that almost killed me.

A book of fables got opened at its half by the gust…freeing some handwritten pages making them dance all over the room.

I then saw my mother running to close the window, making sure it was shut tight before picking up the sheets of paper from the floor, her face bathed in tears…

By now the wind fury had diminished somewhat, though in looking out the window you could see its handiworks. Objects rolling along the street, swaying trees, flying papers everywhere. The night was as black as the overhead clouds, street lights having difficulty shedding light on the pavement.

"Are you still afraid?" asked my mother…
No, I heard myself saying, not now that I have a guardian angel.

I saw my mother wiping away tears as she turned with her back to me looking outside the window… I was not able to see her carefully folding the loose pages she had picked up and squeezing them in her hands.

But then she turned and lovingly _ replaced them in the book of fables and closed it with a sad moan.

"Good night my little boy, I love you so much, my beloved son" with a hug and kiss on my forehead.

"Good night Mamma" And I embraced her.

She was now at the bedroom door...door, turning around to make sure I was safely tucked in…

and now singing a lullaby in a melancholic smile parting her lips as her tears sparkled as diamonds in the night.

[Van Canna]

[Van Canna]

Unable to sleep I would realize that memories are all powerful and imperious _I could not believe of being able to relive those past moments and to 'catalog' them time and again.

My eyes browsed one by one all the rooms where the remnant of time looked upon one another in stillness. An old table hiding under a cold blanket of dust, the chairs offended by time _would creak for who knows what reasons in the silence of the night.

A remembrance of youthful years now invaded by memories finding their place amongst the running after a soccer ball in the asphalted streets alone or with friends, the real ones and those imaginary ones, a portent of life to come. We had lived with the glowing of the magic years of happiness and fantastic adventures just out the door of my house showered in confetti and in the midst of colored balloons.

But there was the musty smell of time that threaded the air and meshed with every step in dreams.

A realization that each room of my house…would reveal secrets to those who know how to listen.

It can reveal the past; it can speak of you, and even of your future. A room you occupied in some ways …knows your secrets and can recount them to whomever is next to you even in a dream state, it can accentuate your breathing or stop your heart…and it can also leave you lonesome and captive in mystifying limbo.

With all those inner voices advancing in my mind...an absolute certainty emerged: Your wants and needs are not what denote the segments of your life. But mysteries extraneous to them place limits and accelerations to the earthly time of every human being.

[Van Canna]

The inner voices kept buzzing the mind.

The subconscious whispered: the moment we open our clouded eyes from the motherly womb upon the world, we fall into the hands of destiny. The world, for each of us, has reserved splendid surprises and bitter delusions and deep sorrows along the way.

It is like as we_inept pilots_ venture upon unknown routes, going the wrong way many times, while trying to decide and or compelled to decide directional changes when fearing unintended consequences.

It is there when _ for fear of the unknown and in the hurry of the moment, we choose random ways, or those that seem the most comfortable and well traveled.

But in this meandering tangle of routes, that which unites, associates us, is a predetermined direction, one that each one of us traverses according to our individual times of our lives.

We all arrive at a point where the entire journey appears clear and undeniable; it is the moment where we each encounter the self. We can run into him at anytime, anywhere.

That which can be called conscience, regret, remorse, grief, nostalgia_ sooner or later will knock at our door and can overcome us in demanding 'hospitality'…and not one of us will be able to ignore it and leave it 'knocking' continuously.

And as you open the door all appears cruelly clear _ and in that moment where all personal defenses vanish, we will have no more excuses to encamp within, we have finally met the self.

[Van Canna]

As a child I was afraid of the dark_ terrorized by the feeling that there might be some presence in dark places, especially in the long darkened corridor of my father's house, that would look at me and controlled while hidden in the nooks and crannies of that big house.

One night in the shadowy blackness of that corridor, I was sure I had heard a beastly sound that sent me scampering back to the dining room where my parents were.

This phobia ended at about eleven years old while carrying an air rifle in the corridor at night. Somehow that rifle conquered that irrational fear.

Why can Mondays and rainy days be at times so lugubrious, as much as funerals.

[Van Canna]

Dreams are very strange. I think they are a phenomenon manifested by the brain during sleep. We store emotions during the day and the brain elaborates them during the night. Yet they intrigue because many are so seemingly devoid of significance yet at once very mysterious.

They are stories that occur in a tridimensional state in black and white, with mysterious individuals and plots that often have no head or tail.

One particular one was indeed 'off the wall'_

I had returned to my old town by the sea and it was the middle of the night.

I was walking through the winding and solitary streets of the town, waiting assiduously the arrival of the metro and I was taken by a sense of deep emptiness of the soul, something that someone may experience when feeling abandoned in the web of time, when on a trip to a faraway place, alone and in sadness because of personal loss.

Then the metro arrived but had left me at an unknown solitary station, and at that point I had decided to get on a train to a distant destination way out of the confines of my old town. But I could not name the destination.

Strangely the train was already there, silently waiting for me, and welcoming as an old friend.

The steam locomotive train had set in motion and I was at a window seat dozing together with the friendly smell of the combustive coal, on a train with no passengers, not even a dog on board.

I was suddenly awakened by the terrible sounds of the train derailing off the tracks and an explosion. And through all this I was laughing.

What would one make of such a dream?

[Van Canna]

It is beginning to rain. A light rain of an afternoon mid April. I know what's coming…I cringe in the dampness and begin a slow walk home, traversing the narrow roads deserted and cold with the gelid winds of the dark memories…lost in the void of my thoughts…meanwhile the thunderstorm begins to get closer.

The hard reality of the end of April is advancing…placing in evidence the particulars of that infamous day. The solitude of my soul is depressing. The pitch darkness, blinding, was congealing the blood in my veins.

The slow, but inexorable passage of time was marked by an imaginary clock that struck my eardrums with the petulant insistence of rusted gearing.

Nothing was certain, not even that I was alone in my depths of sorrow. All seemed to have been conceived and lived in a recurrent nightmare from which I would awaken promptly with my forehead drenched in sweat.

The dampening noise from the street - muffled my far away mind, ready to amplify the moaning of the soul consumed in the vain wait of my boy who would never return.

My state of oblivion, under the guise of incumbent sleep, was present to dispense torpor, trying to sweeten my salted tears that marked my cheeks. A cry of catharsis but still useless to wipe out the bleakness that 'sister shadow' loved to gift me daily.

[Van Canna]

And so it goes my beloved son. Here we are in this silent final resting place, a beautiful lake facing you and a a very tall tree standing at your shoulders. I am but a few feet away sitting in my car with my thoughts drifting to life and time.

Time moves on inexorably for all of us. We try to somehow control it through pictures and memories, flashes that traverse our minds as film on a screen depicting the past.

Father time ambles on, solitary, with the brim of his hat lowered on the forehead, the sad smile, the white beard, and as painted, a small tear, frozen, limpid and pure on his forehead.

Time moves on with all that 'beautiful' that every season of life brought him. And when a person has finished to write his book, when all that had to be said and done, was said and done …then it is only right that time would continue in his walk.

My dearest son, the tree towering at your shoulders, appears almost dead in the cold and solitude of winter reflecting on the frozen lake.

But for every leaf that it sheds in the fall, there is a hidden bud ready to harvest in the spring. It will overcome the winter, and the coldness of solitude …in reality, within itself, an explosion is about to be born.

An explosion of color and balm that in a warm day of spring will come to light.

Your heart, my beloved little boy, your heart is that tree housing
that bud, ready to face the cold of winter and to be reborn to life in the spring.

Losing that leaf … has been for us ...an immense sorrow that will never abate. But the happiness of seeing a new bud in the spring, ready to spread vigor and beauty, has succeeded to render much deeper and sublime the sound of that leaf falling to the ground.

[Van Canna]

"A Million Times"

A million times we've needed you,
A million times we've cried.

If love alone could have saved you,
You never would have died.


If all the world was ours to give,
We would give it yes, and more,
To see you coming up the steps,
And walking through the door.

To hear your voice and see your smile,
To sit and talk a while,
To be with you that same old way,
Would be our fondest day.

A heart of gold stopped beating,
Two smiling eyes closed to rest,
God broke our hearts to prove to us,
He only takes the best.

[Van Canna]

The rooms of the big, and now old and solitary house _would once again be all mine.

Always that same radiance in the big kitchen and in the lovely old dining room that had shed light first upon the sour quarrels of my parents during my childhood, and next the same between parents and children…all coming to an uncomfortable silence at the dinner table over a sad and monotonous voice of the radio commentary from the old Blaupunkt radio on the corner console.

When we are young we never cease to find enthusiasm in every day, in new things and new friendships. Youth enlivens hope which contributes in enriching and to render interesting even the simple daily grind, always from the prospective of something new, change, and expectation.

When out on the town's promenade by the sea…Even in the constant company of friends, I would always find ways to retreat in solitude for a few moments_ to reflect and harvest ideas and bits of observations that in the winter I would then collate in my head and put together in writing.

My friends and I would always proceed into the English gardens flanking the promenade …the heart of the city, where the crowds later in the evening would again come together in front of the outdoor Gran Café ...

[Van Canna]

... down at the end of the promenade, small and humble, in proximity of the sea shore, the church of the Franciscan monks with its predictable Gregorian chants sobering the crowds, now and then.

One evening, after wishing good night to my fellow rowers on the Pattison team, and ambling back home, I suddenly stopped, observed the rituals of the retiring crowd, and as the night beckoned, the profiles of sea and mountains began to dissolve…the church bells slowly tolling… I somehow knew that only a great silence, as later in life I discovered, would help in restoring peace to a wounded soul.


Tomorrow … would be another day, maybe warmer.

[Van Canna]

Before falling asleep I catalogued minutely the landscape of the sights and sounds of that day…the throngs of the young people happy and carefree… until a great semblance overcoming all …began to annul consciousness… but not before reflecting on the mystery of life:



As time goes by we don't realize that we die every passing day_ every passing minute _ and that life gets consumed like sand in an hour glass that slides in silence towards the bottom.

Our biggest mistake is in believing that death is something that is yet to come someday…

…but in truth, wherever that damn shadow may be, for the most part it has already inundated us.

Every passing hour comes out of our safe of life …and passes into the domain of death.

Good night my son. Rest in peace.