The park was at its best in the fall. At least he thought so. In the spring the trees were still barren, and all the hundreds of acres looked hollow. Nothing but curbside puddle gray for as deep as the eye could see, and only the glimpse of an occasional birch to give hope.
In the summer the park could be stifling with the humidity trapped beneath the thick canopy, and an occasional swarm of gnats that, once slapped and killed, stuck to your skin like a three day old bandage, made it all the worse.
And, oh yeah, it was crowded in the summer too.
Of the winter, what can you say? Frigid, it could be positively frigid! The woods grew darker with the early setting sun, and that gave them an angry, foreboding look.
No argument, fall was the best!
In early October, after the children had returned to school, the park seemed to settle in on itself to rest before the brutal onslaught began.
The macadam road that wandered the periphery of the property still bore the weight of joggers, bicyclers, roller bladders and a small army of dog walkers. But the interior paths, the secret paths of muted footfalls, still provided a gay cover of multi-hued leaves that left the walker anonymous and safe from prying eyes.
Having grown up in this neighborhood, and having played in this park since early childhood, he knew these secret paths of solitude, and when troubled he still sought them out. For all of his twenty-six years he had relied upon these hidden places to provide him comfort and a chance to be truly alone and think things out.
The decision he had to make was a momentous one; divorce, under the best of circumstances, required a lot of forethought, and to act impulsively would be foolish.
So he walked the paths of his youth and tried to think things through. He walked and he thought, but it was to no avail. He was a spiritual person, and the woods were a spiritual place. But his problem was too big, too important to his future, and he realized that the guidance he required was not to be found there.
“You know,” his father used to say, “when you have a problem you almost instinctively know the right thing to do. The answer is there inside you. The problem we have is facing up to that realization because sometimes it’s painful. You have to set aside that pain,” he would say, “to get to the truth of the matter. We know what the answer is, we just have to summon up the strength to admit it to ourselves.”
“That sounds good dad,” he would argue, “but how do you find the strength if it’s not there?”
His parents were both deeply religious people, and they brought him up the same way. So it was no surprise when his father answered: “Look to God.”
‘Look to God,’ he mused as he exited the park. Then he realized that for all his life, that was what he did when faced with a seemingly unanswerable question.
The church he sought out was the church of his youth. While less than a mile away from where his parents now lived, it was light years away in terms of social condition. His parents moved when the neighborhood began to change, but the old church building still held a place in his heart.
He passed much of his youth there, he’d been an altar boy there, and there God first entered his heart.
‘If there’s an answer to be found,’ he thought, ‘I’ll find it there.’
He entered the dimly lit church and immediately felt at home. The churches in the so-called ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ always felt warmer – more real. Here religion was a living thing, a thing to be embraced and held onto for a lifetime. In other areas, he noticed, more sophisticated areas, religion was a sometime thing to be used in time of need, but only paid lip service to in happier times.
He chose a pew near a middle side aisle and looked around. Even before he entered the old building, he felt that he knew what he would find in there, and it turned out that his feeling held true.
There were three other people in the church with him: Two older women dressed all in black who were still mourning and praying for some long lost love, and an equally old, unshaven man, sitting alone and looking contrite.
None of the three congregants paid him any mind.
He chose a pew, knelt for a brief time in prayer, and sat back to think.
There were two things on his mind, and they were both causing him equal distress. One of the things was a woman he met. A pretty woman, a smart woman with a great sense of humor, and she seemed to be as attracted to him as he to her. The feelings he had for her ran deep, but they were in obvious conflict with the direction his life was taking. He knew he would have to make a difficult choice and his father was right, he was afraid to do so.
The other matter that was causing him so much distress was an incident that happened some two weeks earlier. While standing in front of his church one Sunday after mass, an old friend with his six-year old daughter approached him. The child had tears in her eyes. The man looked sad and confused.
“Pissed off,” the man whispered to him after his daughter walked off to talk to some friends, and then he related this story. About a week before, the man was driving somewhere with his daughter when they saw a dog tied to a pole on the side of the highway. “Nobody around, just the dog,” his friend said. His daughter saw the dog and mentioned how sad the dog looked and how hot it was outside. “His owner is around somewhere,” he reassured her, “he’ll probably be back in a minute.” They traveled on.
About an hour later they were returning from wherever they had been, and the dog was still there. Only then he was lying down and he looked like he was in distress.
“Daddy?” the girl cried out. The man stopped the car, and they both went to the dog. He was about a year old, and it was obvious that he had been abused. First of all, he was filthy and he smelled terrible. Secondly, the dog was injured. He limped, and there was a vicious tear in his skin as though a bigger animal had mauled him.
They approached the animal carefully, unsure of his temperament. The dog looked up at them, first in fear, but then with hope in his eyes.
“Daddy?”
“What could I do?” the man asked. “I had to take him home.”
He took the dog home and bathed him in the back yard.
“Finally,” the man continued. “We fed him and saw to his wounds as best we could. I tell you, he was the sweetest little thing that you ever did see. At first he wasn’t sure he could trust us, you know, he’d cower whenever we came near, but after a few days he warmed to us and seemed to know that my daughter loved him.
“But there was a problem,” the man went on. “His wounds. The limp cleared up in short order, but the stomach wound began to fester. That’s when I made the biggest mistake of my life, though, in truth, I had no other choice. I took the dog to the vet. The vet checked him out and said that with some medicine and tender loving care the dog should be alright.”
“So what was the problem?” he asked his friend.
“Shots. The vet said that there was no way to tell if the dog had his rabies shot. And because there was no way to trace the dog’s history, the vet said he was bound by the law to report the whole incident to ‘Animal Care And Control.’ He said he was sorry, but the law made good sense. People and other pets had to be protected. I told the vet that I understood, and I would take the dog in myself.”
“You brought him in and they checked him out? How was he?”
This is where it gets shitty,” the man answered. “They check him out and they tell me he may have something called ‘Scabbies.’ They said he either had to be put down or kept in isolation for a long time until they could be sure.”
“Isolation?”
“Yeah,” the man said with a sardonic smirk on his face. “Isolation. Only they couldn’t do it, I’d have to find a private place to keep him. That is, if I could find one. The vet said I shouldn’t waste my time or my money, they were ninety percent sure the dog should be put down.”
“You put him down?”
“I had no other choice. Even if I could find some place to keep him, I couldn’t afford it. So, yeah, I put him down.”
There were tears in the man’s eyes now.
“After they killed the dog, they did an autopsy. It turned out that the dog didn’t have Scabbies after all, and in about a week or so he would have been fine.”
He went on: “My daughter took it bad, very bad. How do you explain to a child something she loves must be killed? How could God be that cruel? It’s almost evil. So now we come to church so she can pray for her dog, but not me! I got no use for a God like that anymore.”
With that the man’s daughter returned and they walked off.
***
He kneeled down again and he prayed for an answer to his problems. He had a theory about prayer, but he never told anybody about it. He never told anybody because he wasn’t sure of it himself, and besides, it went against the church’s teaching.
His theory stated that God didn’t really answer your prayers, rather, prayer helped you focus your thoughts, clear your mind of extraneous thoughts, and through a sort of meditative process the answer came to you. That was his theory, but whatever the reason his answers came to him that afternoon in that holy place.
There were two things that were disturbing him. First was the story about the child and the dog. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t understand why God would let such a thing happen, though he didn’t. No, his problem was, should he ever have to, how would he explain such things. He simply didn’t know how to do it. Secondly, there was the matter of the young woman he found himself attracted to; ‘No,’ he thought. ‘Attraction was the wrong word.’ He was in love with her.
Two problems, the answers to which would forge the rest of his life.
Three weeks later he was again walking the secret paths in the park, but this time his soul was light. In that quiet church he had come to the realization that if he needed to ask God for help, if he had to pray, and pray, and pray for divine intervention, then perhaps he wasn’t qualified to be a priest. So, three months before he was to receive the final sacrament, the Holy Orders and be ordained, he divorced himself from the priesthood and dropped out of the seminary. It was a surprisingly easy decision given all the time he had put into it.
Had God given him the answers in that holy place, or did the quiet and solitude allow him to think things out? Whatever the answer, his father was right; the answers are there inside us, all we require is the strength to look.
