Yesterday's Tomorrow is Today

Dean, Dean, I have seen you riding high; clean, clean off the highway, fiery eyes are flashing, fast and free—you look so free, my friend, you're flying. So young now to live and be and see the sun roll to the red behind the trees: I see you. Dean, I know you. Friend, I love you; so now I'll tell you:

You're running from the battle for your might. You're cutting out the vision for your sight. You're giving up the Giver for your life. So you know that you deserve to die. The day is dying: All because, now, you deserve to die.

Grass is mown and the flower cranes, but the Word of God remains. Days on loan (all our children groan), but the Son of God remains.

The day is dying.

Remember your Creator in your days of youth. Days will come with hollow charms and pale gray morning clock alarms—your cancer days when lovers die, these days of which you'll groan and sigh, “I have no pleasure in them.” Your soul was made for greater things than high-built cities, mud pie trash. Go find your glory in his face; there stands no time here now to waste.

The flowers in your front your front yard may line your grave. And yesterday's tomorrow is today.

The Photo of the Fake-Smiling Boy

My first day on the job, I found a couple of Polaroid photos wedged down behind a baseboard in a living room closet. They had been there for years. One framed a black teenage boy, kneeling down on the carpet with an awkward Christmas heap splayed out across his lap; wrapping paper spilled wider yet, wilting to the floor. I think it was a day-planner. A large, wood-paneled television hunched in the corner. Behind it stood a white wall with a window—curtains drawn, shades shut. Lifting the picture in the muddy light, I could see that, past the Polaroid square, there stood that same wall, with that same window—curtains loose, blinds bent. The TV was dead on its face. [Read the rest]

Prologue

Trash-Out

I was told not do any serious cleaning—“it’ll only make it easier to see the broken stuff.” My job was to descend upon a vacant evicted home, and to empty out the trash; trash-out, we called it. Trash was everything that wasn’t part of the house: dressers, clothes, garbage bags, Polaroid pictures. Everything that wasn’t trash was house; we left the house. If a shelf or a banister was broken off of the wall, and was thereby separate from the house, this item would be lumped in with the trash. And so it goes.

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