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perhaps someday someone can locate him, if he is still alive. He too, must have seen Baba that morning.

 

The farmer remembered bringing out some blankets to cover the people who were lying on the ground. Then, he recalled, a few minutes later a second car arrived, ". . . and I guess they were some sort of kinfolks to the people in the wrecked car, and they were taking care of them, so there was nothing for me to do." Then he remembered something else: "There was this one man . . . the others were all calling him 'Grandpa' . . ." We three all looked at each other, and instantly it clicked: Czechoslovakian: Grandpa: Baba, of course! I pulled out my wallet and opened it to a picture of Baba from 1954. Was this the man! "Yup! Yup! That was the man! I remember him!" Then he added that the man's nose had been broken and his face was very bloody, " . . . but I'd remember him anywhere."

 

We all just stood silently in the field for a few moments. Only later did it occur to us that we didn't really "tell" the farmer anything about Baba verbally; didn't instruct him as to Who had lain in his driveway. We never thought of it, anymore than we would have thought to declare to the nurse, "you know, that was God you treated!" We felt Baba too much from them all, felt Him in all the little acts of love and friendliness, and we had no desire to impose upon this Love our small, mental conceptions of "who" Meher Baba is.

 

Very feelingly, the farmer told us that he had talked to a state highway patrolman a few days after the accident, and had been told that " . . . those people were healing-up just fine . . .yup, they were just fine." He said this almost as if he was trying to reassure us, as if the accident had happened that morning instead of eighteen years before. We told him that we were friends of some of the people who had been in the accident, and they had indeed healed-up just fine. "Yup" he said, and then added, "and the man?" We said that He had passed away, physically, just about a year before, but He was still very much present. "Yup!" We walked back towards the house together, all smiling and saying "yup!" and things like that. I asked where the car had come to rest, and where the people had been thrown, and he answered: ". . . right about where your car is now." Then we exchanged warm handshakes, and good-byes, and the three generations moved on to the barn, and we to our car.

 

We stood for a long time. Eastward, the hills rolled away from us towards the town; in the dazzling spring light, it seemed that we could see to the end of the world. I remember a sense of stillness underlying the morning-sounds of the countryside, and a feeling of having come to rest, momentarily, in the eye of a storm. On either side of us the American continent rushed away an almost equal distance to the seas; a land only beginning to awaken to the mystery that the One who created it had come and travelled its roads, and suffered His blood to be spilled on its poor clay. We looked down at the dark red earth under our feet; no wonder the nurse would always associate the color with what had happened on that morning long ago. Bending down, we discovered tiny purple flowers pushing up out of the clay, wonderfully delicate, each one half-revealing a brilliant, yellow center. Dot picked one to send to Mehera, and we took a little of the clay in a paper cup (a few days later it sprouted forth a tiny plant). Then, filled beyond measure, we drove away.

 

Note from the Editor: It would be a kindness to busy Dr. Burleson, not to visit him on your way thru Prague.

 

                                                                                                                      Photos on following page

 

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