Grey Commencement

I felt the gray man come down again last night, graying into the grayest gray, graying graying grayed. I did not ask for him, he was not invited, and yet he grays down upon me, picks up the book I am reading, his gray eyes across its page, his gray curiosity seething into the world around me, the sea of babies all round, all coming down. Did he slip inside the car with me, did I pick him up at the gas station, the ATM, down the Loop, gray graying asphalt, derelict skeletons along the road, did I shake his hand as I paid the parking and turned right into the long evening's black and white?

I felt the gray boy's hand as I entered, was it fifty years since I had last walked into its space? Had I left him all those many years ago?

Smile through gray mud, fish up gray words slurred down a gray tongue, exhumations of buried dreams as he walks into the sea of children dreaming, dreaming their beginnings, dreaming their afterwords after all the words have ended. Four orphans exhume the gray man for a moment and then climb to their own nest. We've all come for one more dreamer who would dream beyond where the words have ended.

Have they begun the dreams or are they digging? The gray man walks down avenues of need, avenues of desire, avenues of fear. Shovel in hand. Digging up or digging deeper?

A sea of 700 children.

"16 million dollars worth of scholarship money here," says a gray speaker.

Gray man does the math. The boy's hand holds tight.

Two hours pass: he walks into the gray night, hundreds shuffle by with shining rectangles at their heads. He follows the sea drift, stands, and waits: the gray is heavy upon him. One of the hundreds approaches. Out of the gray the gray man calls his name, hugs him, more gray words slurring down the gray tongue's night. The boy?

Gray words said, God or God's stand-in ushers the gray man through the gray sea, through the one gray gate, and out into the rest of the night. There are hundreds, and yet the sea parts its blessing, a quiet one, the smallest of ones, the greyest eminence, eminence grise.

Hours later, he looks across a room, through a prism of tears, sees the woman he married, sees the feet he married, sees the colors he married, the stories, the dreaming, the dreams.

The gray man sits beside a red red rose. In the heat of the day, the cool of cypress shade is narcotic. A story lies in wait. The boy's hand is waiting...