Once upon a time, when Papa was just a little boy,
he first experienced something he would get to know on intimate terms in later life, that odd fishy feeling of "this has happened before, hasn't it?" The feeling otherwise known as déjà vu. It was just a tiny incident, this first foretaste of eeriness, utterly weirdness, a surrealistic impression of I shouldn't be feeling this right now, but I am!
He was playing in the big room, about eight years of age, and he was making noise, laughing to himself and batting a red balloon up and down, bouncing it against the closet doors, just goofing off, when Dada, seated nearby in his big gold leather recliner, in a bad mood as Dada often was, snapped: "Would you stop making so much noise? Just calm down already!"Dougie continued to bat his balloon against the closet doors, but did so more quietly.Dada looked at Dougie. Just a second before his eyes were closed but now they were opened and they were staring at Dougie with that cold, blue steel. Dougie held his balloon and looked at Dada."That balloon better not pop," Dada said, and the way he said it Dougie knew that the balloon had better not pop. Dada looked away and closed his eyes, reclining in his big leather chair.Dougie batted the balloon against the closet doors again, when all of the sudden he felt very weird. Things went almost white, or his vision faded out for a mere tic of a second, or else his eyesight turned to another reality, vividly, a bright light, and it was if a whole lot of things happened all at once, if only in his mind, or as if he saw something inside of himself, something that was actually outside of himself, but had not happened, not really, or was it real......because the balloon pops and dada leaps out of his chair yelling about something and Dougie realizes he has disobeyed dada, and has been bad, he has been very bad, and he needs punishing and suddenly he is snatched up by his neck......and then he was just seated there, the red balloon in his hands."Whoa," he breathed, staring at the balloon.What had just happened?Something terrible had happened. It was some series of events that had happened, something outside of Dougie's control, it was a series of dominoes knocking themselves over and going to a place they were not supposed to go. A child's game gone horribly askew, the last dominoe pushes a button that sets off a bomb.This sensation was overwelming. Dougie felt that something terrible happened. This had all happened before. It had really happened.Or no, that it had not happened, but that it was on the very cusp of happening. All he had to do was throw the balloon against the closet doors one more time, and the balloon would pop, and this small thing would initiate a series of events that would end very badly.Dougie sat there, and all this happened in perhaps two seconds. It was as if a whole movie had unfolded itself in Dougie's head, and he didn't know what it was or what it meant, and he did not even know what to call what he had just experienced......but he believed it!He weighed the balloon in his hand. Such a small thing. Almost weightless. Just a taut fabric over too much air. Balloons often popped all on their own, giving way to gravity, or just stretched pressure. And there was a static charge built up on the balloon, from landing on the carpet, from rubbing against the wall.How weird, this feeling, a feeling of foreknowledge, that he knew something was about to happen, Dougie knew, something bad was just on the edge of happening and only a little nudge really, just a little brush of air, just bat the balloon against the closet door, just one more time, this awful feeling of knowing it would be, that it had to be, and the irresistible urge to bring it to completion, this predestination, that the future is the future and when you know it is the future why resist the irresistible?All of this thought passed in two second and still the balloon was in his hands. He was an eight-year-old boy and he had never heard the word déjà vu before, but he understood its meaning 100 percent, in every fiber of his being, and now only three seconds had passed and the balloon was rising in his hand and he knew, without any reservation, that what will be, will be.Dougie laughed. He carefully set the balloon upon the carpet and backed away from it.Dada was still sitting there in his big chair, his eyes closed, rubbing his temples with his fingertips.As he quietly exited the big room into his own bedroom, Dougie wondered. He wondered what would have happened. Still, the weirdness was upon him. The feeling of being drawn on, irresistibly toward the dark hole at the center of the whirlpool. But he pushed against the current, away from the darkness at the center, away from predestination, away from the bad thing that was supposed to happen, that almost happened, the very bad thing from such a small event, a popping balloon, how silly, and yet the knowledge was heavy upon him, he had escaped, for now, and he had a sense of buoyancy, an ineffible wonder at the foreknowledge of escaping an unfair destiny, of receiving a message and listening to it, heeding the distant echo, heating and obeying.Dougie laughed. "What in the world?" he wondered. And he laughed some more.It was going to be bad, whatever it was. Oh yes.But from that day onward Dougie realized that even when you are fated for bad things, you do not just give into them. You must stand up against what you feel must happen, and strive toward what is right, even if it is impossible. Move toward the light, always, pushing away from the dark, even when the dark seems irresistible.Or maybe, it was just all silliness. You know, just déjà vu, everyone experiences it, and no one takes it serious. Perhaps it was just the brain fart of an eight-year-old, and what do kids know, anyway?But Dougie knew.Douglas knows.All Stories © 2009 Douglas Christian Larsen
important - FIGHT THE FLU WITH HERBS - important
