After my sophomore year of college, I had a job doing
maintenance on a huge 19th Century mansion in the University of
Chicago area. It is now, incidentally, the Chicago home of the Obama’s. There
was a wrought iron fence surrounding the double lot, perhaps 1500 feet of
fence. My job included painting that fence. Maintenance had been deferred so
long that the paint wasn’t just flaking, it was bubbling. And some places it
looked just fine.
But if you were to poke that fence, you finger could go
right through the metal. The corrosion was hidden, invisible under those many
layers of paint, silently destroying the fence.
So, too, this carcinoma, eating away inside, silent but
persistent. Every once in a while, the corrosion breaks out, pushing up a bible
and breaking into the light.
Scraping that corrosion out only goes so far. Burning it is
only a temporary fix, for it is deep in the substance of the fence. Slowly,
individual bars corrode through, bend, and then suddenly, with no more than a
touch, crumble away and leave a gap where there used to be a protective
boundary, leaving a hole in the fabric.
Is than an opening? An opportunity? An entrance into some
unguessed reality?
Or is it just loss. Maybe which of those is my call.
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