Time Wounds All Heels

I've been reading Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detective novel The Big Sleep. In that seedy underworld culture, a "heel" is a bad guy, somebody who will look out for himself without consideration of anybody else. He's tough and callous and low (as in mean)--like a heel. This translates into the world of old school professional wrestling, as it developed during the time of Chandler's writing career, where the good guys were known as "faces"--or "baby faces"--and the bad guys--the roughians to whom rules were meaningless--were known as heels. (More and more I believe that wrestling--from Jacob wrestling with God to today's farcical television melodrama--is the perfect metaphor for our lives.)

So, I've taken the old hope that time heals all wounds and twisted it a bit to come up with the idea that time wounds all heels, which is to say that all the bad guys will get theirs in the end. I don't know if Hendersonville's pissedoffredneckwoman is a heel or not, but if she is, she'll get hers. Maybe I'm a heel. If I am, I'll get mine.

I guess the key ingredient in all of this is time. Time takes care of everything. It rights most wrongs--those capable of being righted, at least--and levels each and all and everything. This is probably one reason why we're so unfortunately obsessed with time.

Last night, in the timeless darkness of my old room at Mom's house, I tossed and turned, dreaming those kinds of dreams that often follow a day like I had yesterday, dreams that are disjointed, disconnected, off-center, troubling in unidentifiable ways. I remember the edge of a precipice. I remember flat tires on the van of friends currently cruising to Alaska and back. I remember something about a police officer I know who was supposed to be teaching a children's class on Speaking of Faith. This latter element, which never progressed beyond the idea, probably cycled through my dreams in some connection with the Captain Shrimp, who wrote my ticket yesterday. (A heel in early America--British bad boy Thomas Morton--referred to Pilgrim military leader Miles Standish as Captain Shrimp, because he was short and had a ruddy complexion.)

This morning I got up long after sunrise and went out to walk four miles. The long night and its weird dreams and rest, the long walk and its music and sights and exertion have done me much good. But what I think is really behind it all is time.

By the way, September's class reunion is still homeless. Maybe I'll work on that next week.