be good

Learning how to listen is about discovering more meaning behind less words.
Papa used to tell us that "it would all come out in the wash" but we are second language learners (thank God) and the cliches are reappropriated more often than not (read: another reason for gratitude).
So when you read it you probably thought he was referring to stains or filth but I figured, even very youngly, that he meant that things would even out somehow. He said it so often and each time I found myself hoping (trusting him, really)
that all the injustice in the world will somehow get stirred around,
tumbled until its head aches,
and its wonky sense of fairness will be adequately flopped over so that when we take the laundry out of the machines and give it a good shake and fold, we would find it was all there but a little more clearly. I thought he meant that the little lost socks caught in the sheets would be found or the coins would fall out of the rich man's pockets and I would find them at the bottom of the dryer drum and I would be rich.

But even more often than he told me about the wash, he told me
Be Good.
and sometimes I think he means I should behave myself
you know: listen to wisdom, weigh the facts first, tell the truth or wait quietly, be careful, obedient and do my best.
Other times I think he means I should be good
you don't know: sometimes listening is impossible, the facts betray the feelings that follow, the truth doesn't arrive in time, careful is a myth and being obedient is not the best I can do.
These days neither of us knows what it will mean for me to be good.
Instead we trust that I am good, that
I am the good I was created to be and that I should be that, only that, just that.
I should just be.
Be myself, even if it means I will be by myself, I will at least be with myself and he will be thinking of me with a far off loving look in eyes below a troubled brow, and lit up the way they were even only by the very sight of me, the thought of me before he heard me cry for the first time, before I had done anything to earn his trust or break his heart or
make him laugh or make him cry,
lit up by the hope he has always had that I will heed his words and whatever they might mean to the woman I have become in his care
which is why he keeps telling me--now that I am too old for admonition his words have become premonition:
and I hear him say it like a sort of benediction sending me out with a blessing to go out there and be all the good I want to be because there is a lot of good out there for me
a lot of good to be.