Saturday I performed at the Morris Jumel Mansion with Dubblex and Demetrius Daniels. My son called me. An old friend called him to report his father had died. I spent the rest of the day in prayer and solitude, some of it with my son. We lit a candle and spoke about him, recounting memories. My son told me how when he was about 6 years old, his father visited him at my father's apartment. I was in school. My dad was in the kitchen and he noticed things had gotten very quiet so he went to see why. Joey was taking apart the TV and removing things while Felix sat laughing and smiling. That would be him.
Joey was good at that. I remember once when he was about 9 or 10 months old I had a shoelace that I used for my keys. I quadrupled the string, put my keys in the loop and tied a double knot at the end. It was tight too. I had no clue how he did it but I had been in the kitchen making dinner and when I came out Joey had the string and was retying it the same way it had been with the keys. I kept the string and still have it in my drawer till this day. I couldn't bear to throw it out.
We talked about Felix's craziness and retold old stories about him sitting at my kitchen table watching the candle slowly burn down. Strange that he died directly after Yom Kipper ended. Over the last year I often thought I'd see him soon. I'd been thinking about it for the past year a lot. It's not easy to find him though. Felix owns land in several places and he travels around the island visiting different people. Felix has no house either. Last time we went to see him, we had to call several people in his family before he heard we were there and came to us. It took 2 days to make contact. After we found him we drove for 2 hours and left the rental when the road ended. Then we got out and hiked for over 2 1/2 hours. We finally made it to a little one room wooden shack nestled in the woods. It was small and basically one room. There was a table and 2 chairs and wooden shelves. It was very neat and clean. I could see a bed in the back with a dresser. That's all there was. Felix said he had a few places like this. I wrote a poem back in 97 about this visit after we returned home.
link to the poem:
Now the opportunity to ever see him again has passed for my son and I. I had hoped to see him before I die. I have to accept I'll never see him again in life. I miss him knowing he's no longer on the planet.
On his aunt Nena's farm. That's me, always finding stray animals.
