Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

In a room full of old friends, long distant, Gary asked what did we miss from our youth? Ronda said clouds of chalk dust at the end of the day in Mrs. Nesmith’s class. Her favorite teacher listened to her more than other adults in her life. When the last school bell rang, she ran to clean Mrs. Nesmith’s blackboards. Terri said summers with her cousins whose parents were less stern — walks to the ice cream store long after sundown. Trey said he missed his body. He was a three-letter varsity athlete in high school. Back then, he never gave thought to joint aches. Angela loved putting on makeup and dancing at school parties.

As we talked, I could sense a longing rising in the group. The silence between us said: What happened to our younger selves, to our levity and our play, our confidence, our carefree and curious hearts?

In that relative comfort of our parents and caretakers, we moved in endless possibilities of becoming and connection. But then, we learned about broken promises. We learned that bullies exist and that cliques are mean, that people are imperfect. We learned maturity is a rite of passage that requires a banishing of “childish things.” Some of us couldn’t wait to access the world of adults, another type of freedom. Others went kicking and screaming. Along the way, we learned fear of others, disappointment, and soul-rending pain. We learned to protect our vulnerability, to pretend that softer, gentler parts of us do not exist.

Today’s deeply reflective poem encourages a return to ourselves as open and loving, even at the risk of seeming dewy-eyed and idealistic.

Naïve
by Tim Seibles

I love you but I don’t know you
                    —Mennonite Woman

When I was seven, I walked home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm

slung over his skinny shoulders,
after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.

So easy, that gesture, so light—
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.

It was 1963.
We were two black boys

whose snaggle-toothed grins 
held a thousand giggles.

Remember? Remember 
wanting to play

every minute, as if that
was why we were born?

Those hands that bring us
shouting into this life

must open like a fanfare
of big band horns.

Though this world is nothing

like where we’d been, 
we come anyway, astonished

as if to Mardi Gras in full swing.
There must be a time

when a child’s heart builds
a chocolate sunflower

while katydids burnish the day
with their busy wings.

This itching fury that 
holds me now—this knowing

the early welcome
that once lived inside me

was somehow sent away:
how I talk myself back

into all the regular disguises
but still walk these streets

believing in the weather
of the unruined heart.

My friends, with crow’s feet
edging their eyes,

keep looking for a kinder
city, though they don’t

want to seem naïve.
When was the last time

you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder

and walked him home?

"Naïve" by Tim Seibles. Used by permission of the poet.