The Question is

This morning I went for a run with Ben.  We ran up University Avenue and around the Square and over to the cemetery.  It was 5:45 a.m. on the first day of summer, and the pale pinks, and yellows and reds kissed the tops of the oak and pecan and pine.  The rolling hills carried on their backs the marks of all the years that had come before today.  I found myself thinking about all of those markers that stand above the hopes and dust of hundreds of years . . . the old exhausted dreams, the young and barely realized. 

What was left?

Were those dreams lived out, or were new dreams settled for?

The old toppled and sunken headstones spoke through the moss and lichen that clung tenaciously to the granite.  They spoke of life and those old dreams.  And, as the sun reached its cool hand under the limbs of the cypress, I thought of my dreams.  The early ones I had as a child of being Batman, the more recent of being a teacher, and the most recent of being a school leader.  The one that brought me here.  I realized that they were all the same.  My dreams and the ones that lay under those stones.  They were all more a part of the sun than of the earth in which they lay.  The dreams of something better.  The dreams of what could be.  Some were lived out, and some, for whatever reason, were discarded long before time ran out. 

I am reminded of something an old farm hand, Asalon, told me when I was a boy in Panther Burn.  He said, “Morgan, days are funny things.  The more you get the more you want.  Which works out for most people. Until the end anyway.”   

* Written by Morgan Dean, former English Teacher in the MS Delta.