Bedazzled

Bedazzled

Noel Laflin

2-11-15

When I was very young, we would take Saturday drives to visit my godparents.  They owned an orange grove - not far from where Angel stadium stands today.

These good folks had a son named Henry, who was just a bit older than my brother - and back then they were inseparable. But with these two young men being twice my age, I was seldom welcomed in their company, let alone their adventures – except for the day they invited me to their sanctuary deep within the old grove.

We were well out of grownup eyesight or earshot when the boys finally stopped walking, looked about carefully, and bent down to lift a well-camouflaged piece of plywood.  There was a dark tunnel hidden beneath the flimsy wood.

 They told me to wait above and be the lookout guy as they got on hands and knees and crawled, one after the other, into the narrow darkness below.  Before disappearing, Bob told me that I would get the all-clear in a couple of minutes and could then join them. 

 A few moments later, my brother’s head popped back up and he waved me in.  I slithered downward.  And like a promised afterlife, I could see light at the end of that tunnel, as it soon opened onto a large bedazzled cavern. It was then that my eyes grew wide in amazement as to just what these two boys had taken weeks to excavate.  The light was being produced by dozens of lit candles they had placed into the walls of the earth.  It sparkled down there like a beautiful sunken sanctuary.  Looking back on it, I am sure the whole works were incredibly unsafe and additionally hazardous with that many candles burning up all of the limited oxygen - but it was a sight to behold.  And I was transfixed – still thankful to this day for that unexpected gift from an older brother and his best friend.

I can’t recall the rest of the day, once all of those candles were extinguished, or what eventually even became of the hideaway, but the magic of that incredible image has been with me all of my life.  I spoke of the memory with my brother a couple of years back, after we received word that Henry had died.  Bob recalled the cave with fondness.

I sometimes wonder as to whether I had ever thanked those two for that illuminating day so long ago - a day perhaps when those boys felt that they had to share their creation with someone other than a parent, figuring that a parent would mostly likely have shut the whole project down.  Thus, they needed a kid to bear witness - and I drew the lucky straw.

 That awe-struck lucky witness, despite all the years hence, has never forgotten the light at the end of that tunnel, on a fine Saturday afternoon, hidden beneath an old orange grove now long gone – but not entirely forgotten.