[Kzyxtalk] prose poem

[Tim Gregory]

what the hell this has to do with kzyx totally escapes me.

[anybody attend the board meeting?]
---

THE MAN I WANT TO BE
Many years ago, in 1980, I visited the Edgar Cayce Institute in Virginia Beach,
Virginia, with my first wife, Patricia -- a feminist, a Marxist, and an historian
who was asked to leave her position as a teaching fellow at the Johns Hopkins
University for being too radical. She wasn't. She was brilliant, and the Art History
Department at Hopkins at that time was sexist.
The department was chaired by a misogynist and closet white supremacist, Egon
Verheyen, who had actually been a member of the Hitler Youth, or Hitlerjugend, as a
teenager. Not surprisingly, Dr. Verheyen's chief scholarly interest was the art and
architecture of the German medieval period.
Patricia and I were living in Maryland, and our first daughter of four daughters had
just been born. We had traveled all the way to the Edgar Cayce Institute from
Koinonia, a Quaker community in the northern suburbs of Baltimore in the Greenspring
Valley Historic District.
It was lovely at Koinonia. Beautifully-landscaped. A historic Tudor-style mansion
and carriage house.
We were so lucky to live there.
Built in 1902 by Alexander J. Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and
brother of the American Impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt. the estate was
presented as a wedding gift to Cassatt's daughter, Eliza. Later owners included the
prominent Brewster family, one of whom became a Senator from Maryland. In the 1950s
the estate became home to the Quakers and the Koinonia Foundation, a predecessor of
the Peace Corps
Patricia and I made that 263-mile trip from Koinonia to the Edgar Cayyce Institute
in an old but glorious 1962 Chevy Impala SS -- a convertible.
Roman red, my Impala stood out in the crowd. Lots of horsepower in that V8 engine.
Lots of noise coming from the pipes of the dual exhaust.
It was my first car, and our first road trip as a family.
The trip took about five hours.
Patricia was a believer in the whole clairvoyance thing. Me? I was a skeptic.
Patricia, herself, had considerable psychic abilities, and not all of them were
positive. She was "witchy", for lack of a better word.
Once at the Edgar Cayce Institute, Patricia had her reading first. It was a private
reading -- just Patricia and the psychic.
Then, it was my turn for a reading.
I was a little anxious. I didn't know why.
I was described by the psychic -- a rather portly, older, kind, grandmotherly woman
-- as "the last centurion guarding the last bridge to Rome." She said I was the last
centurion guarding the last bridge to Rome.over the Tiber as the Visigoths advanced
on the city.
The psychic went on to say that as this "last centurion" I had been trapped between
the precarious and chaotic reign of Rome's last emperor and Alaric, and, of course,
his barbarians at the Salarian Gate.
The date was 24 August 410.
The Visigoths had nothing but the Sack of Rome on their minds -- rape, murder,
pillage, and either ransoming the few survivors or selling them into slavery. And I
was the last trusted centurion of Stilicho, the last honorable Roman general.
Stilicho commanded Rome's last legion while treachery consumed Rome from within.
Honor was all. For both of us. Stilicho and his loyal centurion, me.
Me.
I was the last centurion guarding the last bridge to Rome. In her trance, the
psychic further called me a "warrior monk" and a "warrior poet".
She said she saw me, and the group of centuries of 80 men under my command, all
being slaughtered by the Visigoths -- our bodies mutilated, in fact -- but later,
many lifetimes later, the psychic said she saw all of us going on to be reincarnated
as the first Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici, also known as the
Order of Solomon's Temple.
In France, we were known as the Ordre du Temple or Templiers,
Our Arabic name is فرسان الهيكل‎‎ .
We were known by most simply as the Knights Templar.
That future incarnation to serve again was the reward for our sacrifice for Rome.
Our reward for honor.
>From the moment of our deaths, we were destined to become the very first Knights
> Templar.
Was it true?
Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe it was just a bunch of New Age mumbo jumbo.
I don't know.
How could I possibly know?
Nevertheless, I shuddered and shook and felt like crying when the psychic at the
Edgar Cayce Institute told me all this -- it rang true. Or I desperately wanted for
it to be true. I wanted to be that man.
I still want to be that man.

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