A REVELATION ACCORDING TO JOHN

> Say, John... tell me about how you met a god.

Well, it was a long time ago, which in human years means over a decade. I was young back then, not quite as goofy in my thoughts but much more weird in my ways compared to today. I dressed funny, even for the eighties -- punk/poseur/neoromantic, whatever, it involved leather, lots of zippers, black or blue jeans (worn and torn from lack of budget), and dangly earrings, occasionally with eyeliner.

The eighties, y'know. My life was interesting back then; much more care-free and less constraining than now, but a little on edge and uncertain. Maybe I was trying to find a niche for my personality or something.

In such a prolonged wandering, perhaps deluded state, people often (at least in stories) find themselves encountering supernatural beings, and I was no exception. If you seek such encounters, chances are nothing much will happen; but if you are somewhat lost for long enough, lost in thought or in purpose, something may come of it. Here's what happened to me.

I was walking up a dirty sidewalk in Washington, DC, with some friends. It was a pleasant day, with clearing clouds, a light cool breeze, and very little pollution. We were all (three or four of us, I guess) in a good mood, and not in much of a hurry, because we were heading nowhere in particular. As we walked up the street, we passed homeless people which, at least at the time, were very abundant in that city.

I'm a sucker for the homeless. I'll drop some change in their paper cups, or give away half a sandwich, and occasionally I stop to chat. I had more time than money back then, so I would usually supplement my meager dimes with small talk.

My friends knew that I was like this. They wouldn't stop with me, but they might slow down a little so that I could catch up after my conversations with strangers.

The particular homeless man that I targeted that fateful day didn't look like he was looking for a handout, but he did look homeless. He was an old sun-wrinkled man, with long scraggly white hair and a long unkempt white beard. His hands were toughened with dirt. He was wearing blue jeans, and a blue denim jacket, and though he himself looked old, dirty, and weathered, his clothes looked relatively clean. He was standing on the wide sidewalk and looking thoughtfully at traffic. The wrinkles in his face were obviously put there just as much from laughter as by wind and sun.

Which was probably what made me curious enough to stop. Most poor street people have sadness or anger in their eyes, even when they smile, but this man looked at me with a pleasant smile, like he had been waiting for me to drop by. He took my quarter in a nonchalant way. I remember he had a strong, friendly handshake and a black patch over one eye. The other eye was bright blue.

My friends continued silently up the street, as I shook his hand and began our short conversation. "Nice day, huh?"

He nodded. "You missed the parade."

"Yeah? Here? I didn't know there was a parade today." A third of the homeless are alcoholics, another third are just plain batty. Some are a little of both. I couldn't quite pin this guy down. Maybe he was high or something. His voice was calm and not at all loud.

"Yep," he said, "there was music and everyone was joining in, dancing down the street, in all sorts of nice costumes. It was a nice day for it."

It was about noon, with no evidence of any parade activity, but I was willing to believe him, at least until I found out otherwise.

"Well, it's great weather for a parade," I said, glancing up the street, where my friends were still in sight, walking slowly with their backs to us. "Looks like the sun's coming out." I had secured the weather channel for the rest of our encounter; this conversation wasn't going much further than that.

"Nope," he countered, shaking his head slightly, "it's about to rain."

Then, just as I began to say "I don't think so..." it began to rain, slightly at first, but increasing as he looked up to the sky, smiling, his one eye squinting in the increasing breeze.

"Hey, I have to go, my friends are waiting," I said, and I felt that my sentences were becoming more like questions while this guy was listening.

"Alright," he said slowly, still looking into the far distant sky as I turned my back. "We'll see you later, Johnny."

I stopped, mouth open in surprise, and slowly turned to see him turning back from the clouds to smile at me once again. We were now separated by about seven feet. I was suddenly very happy, and yelled through the rain -- "Hey! How did you know my name?"

His voice was still calm, though his smile was a little more mischievous. "Oh, we know lots of things, Johnny, Lots of Things."

It was raining pretty hard now; I had to turn and run to catch up to my friends. But throughout the day, and then into the week, images of the old man and others of his ilk -- not the drunkards or the crazies but those others, the ones that seemed to know something that we do not -- kept whispering through my head.

It only took me a few days to convince myself that I had met Odin. There are many ancient stories of The All-Father coming down to earth to be among mortals for a while; sometimes to test, sometimes just to observe. He usually assumed the form of an old man in a dark blue or gray cloak, with long beard and blue eyes -- one eye was often patched over. The story goes that he lost the eye (and pierced his side with a spear and sacrificed himself on a tree) to gain wisdom. He got it, supposedly got it in spades, enough wisdom that he was thereafter also called The All-Seeing (even though he only had one eye, so maybe his depth perception wasn't all that great). His son and sometime companion in the sagas was called Thor, the storm god.

A lot of the stories of Odin have to do with him dropping in on some nobleman to see how well that person has been treating the common folk. The moral of such stories seems to be that one should treat strangers with hospitality, because they could be really powerful entities that could ruin your whole life. I don't pretend to have any nobility in me, so maybe Odin was waiting for someone else (there are plenty of big shots in DC) and decided to have fun with me while he was waiting.

So, did I throw away all my possessions and become a pagan worshipper of The One-Eyed God? Nope. But because of this incident, and a few other weird happenings in my life, I've tried to become a little bit more accepting of other people's versions of reality, and a big respecter of belief as a reality inducer/amplifier.

Belief in something changes one's perceptions, and therefore (at least in the land of subjective-type philosophy) it changes reality as well; for at its very core reality is only what our senses and reason make of it. (That's a belief -- try it out for a while.) Belief is a mind trip, much akin to imagination, and it thrives on exercise. Someone, a great writer I think, once said that he tried to believe in six impossible things before breakfast . I think one impossible thing is hard enough, but otherwise it's a really cool exercise. I do it to aid my creativity. It helps to believe in fairies for a day or so if you want to write a poem about them. Being of proper Irish blood, I choose to believe in fairies at times. And I choose, most of the time, perhaps just for the fun of it, to believe that I ran into a god on the streets of DC.

(A side note: a few years after running into Odin, I read a book by Douglas Adams called The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul. Part of the book was about how the outdated mostly under-worshipped gods are still coming to earth, only now they show up as street people, because their power is diminished. It's a decent book. I don't think it's quite as good as its predecessor, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.)

Granted, the guy with whom I chatted certainly was some crazy vagrant, but for a minute of my time he was also a nigh-omniscient being, and I thank him, or fate, or (as the Indians would say) "the mighty something" for picking me. There're not too many people in the world who can say they met Odin. For some reason I won the visitation sweepstakes. And who knows? I may see a god again someday, and maybe I'll be ready to talk about something other than the weather. After all, a certain homeless god once said this to me -- We'll see you later, Johnny.

modified 1/27/99