PeteFree.comA friend's untimely death reversed a Trump bobblehead's meaning
© 2019 Peter Free
06 February 2019
Speaking of President Trump's unimpressive 2019 State of the Union speech . . .
. . . an aside about reversed meanings.
Thirty months ago
My wife and I briefly joined three other military families in London for a promotion ceremony, birthday and two days sightseeing.
At the breakfast birthday, one of my "conservative" friends — who made a habit of needling my "liberal" tendencies — gave me Trump bobblehead.
The table fell silent, everyone recognizing that Pete was not a big fan of the aggressively amoral blowhard there depicted. This awkwardness quickly passed, partially given my ability to tolerate political extremes in this chaotically selected pack of friends.
Afterward
The Trump bobblehead accompanied me back to Germany and then to Texas, undoubtedly home to many more such.
One day, still unpacking from that last PCS, I came across the mini-Trump in a box. With his life counterpart having proven every one of many hypothesized character defects, I threw him out.
The plaster toy landed with a cracking plop in the street-side refuse container.
Good riddance
Until, two days later, I received the starkly upsetting news that my conservative friend had unexpectedly died. At an age, decades younger than mine.
The bobblehead came out of the trash. I glued his right hand back on.
In memory of you, Ted.
And not too long later
Birthday girl (from that London day) also passed. From breast cancer. And in a comparatively true youth that would make anyone with heartful sense, wail.
The moral? — Death reversed this Trump bobblehead's trash-talking meaning
The concealed irony being that:
needling Ted,
a "conservative"
presented me with the Trump bobblehead
in Tamra birthday girl's always love-glowing
quasi-socialist presence.
With those two ideologically extreme passings, bobbling mini-Trump came to mean something opposite to what his manufacturer and gift-giver had intended. The trash-rescued bobblehead physically points to the emptiness left behind by my two friends' deaths. It now presents an antithesis to the man, and to the competing vacuum-brained partisanships, that inspired its creation.
An awareness-sparked life is often like this. With examined experience, pre-conceptions drift off. We are left with a continually exploding, dying and rebirthing Reality that one cannot presume.
You pay for love with death. Spirited focus reminds itself of this, daily. Zennish equanimity does not try to fill what is bereft.
The rescued Trump bobblehead tremble-marks Time's vanishing moments with each persona-rejecting nod.
Paradox. Closer to Tamra's perspective than Ted's. The Universe frequently teaches with dark irony.