The Secret of Everything

 

This is how I know you. Comfortable... talking on the phone, making plans in a language I still can't manage to understand.  Arms length from your whistle that still calls the cows home no matter what city we are in, no matter how far.

You are always mythic in my mind.  I forget you are real.  Then I see you again and you ask me to come sit beside you and listen while you play the music you learned as a boy herding the cows in the wide open plains of Uganda.  I go over the stories in my mind and try to imagine what it could possibly mean to be seven or eight or nine and possess nothing but this whistle and the confidence that comes from knowing undeniable love in the face of unimaginable suffering.

To be together is to erase a thousand sorrows, you tell me.  And I know from the whistle, it's true.

You pull out a neon orange mouthpiece you sawed off a recorder I brought to Rwanda so many months ago.  See? you gesture as you attach the plastic to the crude black plastic tube.  I listen, but it's not the same.

How can anything improve on what you already possess?  How could anything compare to the secret of everything, the power of together being all you've ever known?