Looking out: Thinking of you, Amelia

Thinking of you, Amelia

"The food here is so tasteless you could eat a meal ... [then] belch, and it wouldn't remind you of anything." — Redd Foxx
Sensory deprivation can cause unusual, even strange, responses. Prisoners are among the most deprived in all so-called civilised societies. In an effort to maintain sanity, prisoners create and develop a myriad of coping techniques.
One of the ways I cope is to constantly be on the lookout for a shred of good in even the worst of daily experiences. The task is not for the faint of heart and soul.
For example, I love wood; and, unless you like hanging out with a mop or a broom, there is little wood to be found in prison. So I began to compensate for the lack of access to wood by going to the visiting room as often as possible. In the visiting room there are steel posts bolted to the floor — on top of which are two-inch-thick circles of wood, which serve as stools. Touching that wood is good for my soul.
As I do not get very many visits, I had to develop lots of other wood strategies. I soon gathered up a bunch of wooden pencils. When you hold several wooden pencils in your hand, you have, albeit in a somewhat fractured way, a single board of whatever you want to imagine it to be.
It was not long before I had worn all of those pencils down to nubs. When I tried to purchase more of them from the prison store, I learned that wooden pencils are no longer sold, for reasons not entirely clear to me. Plastic pencils are all they sell now-a-days.
Some time ago a cracked broom was sent into the cell block. When I accidentally dropped the broom, while sweeping out cell 51, a small piece broke away. I turned the broom in, and went back to the cell. I picked up the small piece of wood, closed it tightly in my fist and sat down on the bunk. I saw myself in my mind's eye, and for a moment I felt like a crying infant whose parent had just shoved a pacifier into its mouth: that tiny piece of wood had brought a quiet calm over the storm within my soul. Unfortunately, in less than a week, during a routine cell search, a corrections officer found and confiscated my tiny wooden treasure.
For three years after that, I went without wood. Then one day they served spaghetti, with the usual prison meat sauce poured over it. Prison food is, charitably speaking, bland at best. It takes a bit more courage than I have to eat a serving of prison spaghetti and sauce.
In my never-ending quest for something good, even if it looks so bad I dare not eat it, I always stir around in whatever is served. You never can tell what you might find. It is not uncommon to discover a toe nail, roaches or every kind of human or animal hair you can imagine. In that particular batch of meat sauce I found a bay leaf, but nothing more.
I picked it out, took it to the cell, washed it off and placed it between two layers of wax paper. I then put it between the pages of my heaviest book. That was over six months ago. Yeah, I know: just because it is all dry, flat and hard, that does not make it a fine ebony board, but for me, it does share a kinship symbolically (in a leafy fashion) with the tree of life that is rooted deeply in my soul. I thought I should share it with you. At three years old, all of this is a little hard for you to understand right now, but one day when your mother shows you this essay, and that old bay leaf, you will know I was thinking of you, Amelia.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]