Living Where You Die: A Craft Essay on Parable by Craig Kirchner
I’m retired and always looking for something to write about, but this has been true for me since high school. I went to an all-boy’s Polytechnic Institute. In my sophomore year, first semester, my English teacher taught sentence and paragraph structure. It was an eye-opener. Up until then I had thought of words only as something I had to read to get through school. Realizing there was a method to how these thoughts were being put together made me want to give it a try; it became a challenge to write a paragraph that created interest, developed the theme, and closed making a point. Second semester, I had a new instructor who looked like Indiana Jones, had fought in Korea, and loved poetry. I was hooked and have never had the opportunity or taken the time to acknowledge what these two gentlemen did for me.
The first stanza of “Parable” is true. I heard this line—“Where you live is more important than where you die”—and couldn’t put it aside. It struck me as one of those punch lines that are the end result of a life story, a parable. The word of course immediately invokes Christ’s stories of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and the lesser known Ten Virgins (Mathew 25: 1–13).
I thought back on the tell-the-tell moments that I grew up with as well as where I got the right stuff that helped me develop my own. My father was never one to sit me down and reflect on his history or to deliver words of wisdom, but watching him be a friend was a lesson he didn’t realize he was teaching. He had a special love and respect for his friends and was always doing for them, often unbeknownst to them. He had a lot of friends.
When I was in my late twenties, I was self-employed and would take Friday afternoons off and play gin rummy with Harry the Horse, a bookmaker three times my age. Harry was full of one-liners that reflected his colorful life and style. They were intended as life-lesson distractions from the game which he took very seriously, but they were also altruistically his effort to convey wisdom to his young friend.
As is often the case I try to put the subject or concept I’m working with—parable, living where you die—through the funnel of my experiences to give it different contexts. I had a 1960 Ford Falcon that was a death-trap, but it was the first car on the drug store corner and so was nicknamed Dreamboat.
I did give the wrong day as an answer at the beginning of a cognitive test with a new GP, we saw it through to the end with the ten of eleven drawing and I asked him if it was alright if I wrote about the whole thing. He said he didn’t see why not. We’ve become good friends.
Like most things these days I was writing my way through the existential crisis of mortality and the anxiety of where our country is headed. Sometimes, lately, I feel like I write so as to avoid seeing a therapist, which I’m sure I can’t afford.
Whether or not you are Christian, whether you believe Christ even existed, the Christ story and the words in red in the New Testament are some of the best words any of us know, so listing them in the last lines of the poem with other important things being considered like what’s for dinner and what day of the week it is, was an effort at a bit of humor at the end of some serious musings and stream of consciousness.
I was asked recently what inspires me to write. Early on I would have answered that “falling in love” is what inspires me, understanding that with youthful exuberance you can fall in love with any new thing or any person you meet, and for many different reasons. I find myself now writing to clarify some of those moments and to reflect on the journey that got me to where I am now—being awed by the totality of it all, and what a small, and yet intricate part we play. I enjoy trying to put all that into context and make the moments as real as possible for the reader.
My advice to writers, no matter your age, or your ability to fall in and out of love, is that writing is good for you. It is good to keep moving, thinking, solving the puzzle of the next word. It is food for the soul that for me has no equal.
