Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: SHIFT (05/27/21)
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TITLE: Night and Day | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
06/03/21 -
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I guess I got used to walking by holding someone’s hand and just kept holding on. My ear tuned to the rustle of cloth, the tread of a footstep, the swish of the dog’s tail, the passing of a vendor waiting for a sale. At the market, I soaked in the sunshine and sometimes the rain if I was left too long. I distinguished voices, learned to distinguish the tinkle of a shekel or another denomination of coin and marked morning by the first birdsong and evening by the first cricket chorus. I never expected things could change.
I remember the day I asked my brother to describe a sunset and the afternoon he told me about a rainbow. Black was the color of everything in the world around me and I assumed that when I passed away, I would slip from one realm of blackness into another. No one told me different.
One particular morning as I sat by the place of worship, soaking in the sun, I felt a small line of ants crawl across my toes. It was the smallest of sensations but I knew they were there. I relished this joy of sensing what others could not. On the morning of the ants, new voices flooded through the river of speech flowing by me. At will, I could dive into that verbal stream and single out the conversation of two men arguing about the tax or the sacrifice or the restrictions of the religious rulers. I could isolate two workers heading to market as they anticipated the bartering for cloth or vegetables or a lamb.
Other beggars had stumbled into my area by the gates but my gentle persuasion and the energy of my two brothers had convinced them to leave me sufficient space. Of course, that meant long hours alone between moments when a child might stop with a coin, a worker might stop to complain about a task they were trying to avoid, or even a pilgrim would stop to ask for directions before they realized I wasn’t much help.
“Who sinned?” the new voices asked. “This man or his parents?” As if I couldn’t hear. As if this was a new question undebated by the religious leaders or even by my own family and even by me. The usual response eventually highlighted that something in my life perpetuated the condition if I hadn’t caused it. I reached for my walking stick. The piece of carved olive could still strike a blow if I swung it hard enough. People rarely stayed in my space for long.
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” another voice responded, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
Not me? Not my parents? This was a shift.
The man knelt nearby. “Trust me,” he seemed to say. He put a gentle hand on my wrist and then spit on the ground. He wasn’t the first to spit around me. Too much of that spit actually landed on me. Not this time. He touched my eyes and left a residue of mud. This was the ultimate humiliation and yet there was something different about his touch. “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.”
I’d tapped my way down into the lower city many times. The Gihon Spring supplied the refreshing water for the Siloam Pool and I loved to soak my feet in those waters on hot days. How would he know? I tapped my way along the wall and down the stairs from the royal porch by the temple. The Huldah gates were busy with worshippers pushing through as I tried to exit. I tapped my way down through the Valley Gate and along the path into the Tyropoeon Valley. And then I was there.
I knelt and scooped up the water. The shift was instant. Night became day. If only the ants could see me now.
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