John Denver lied.

John Denver lied.  That was my thought as I was heave-hoeing 15 forty pound bags of wood pellets into my basement in the drizzly pre-winter weather last night.  John Denver, in his ever-cheery voice,  sang out, “Life on the farm is kinda laid aback, aint nothing a country boy like me can’t hack:  it’s early to bed, early in the sack: Thank God I’m a country boy!”  I am not a boy – I am a middle aged woman and my life in the country is not any kind of “laid aback.”  I do not know the definition of “early to bed.”  In fact, as I microwaved my stouffer’s mac & cheese dinner at 8 pm and was talking to my sister on the phone and she petulantly announced:  “You shouldn’t be eating this late at night; it’s not good for you.”  To which I replied, “It’s better than going to bed hungry, which was the only other option.”

People who don’t live it, don’t get it.  I’m not complaining – I’m just explaining.  You work a forty-hour week elsewhere and come home to continuous catching up to keep the place functioning.  There’s one of me and a million tasks keep presenting themselves.  Life itself doesn’t seem to give you a break.  I had three dogs, each was requiring its own special attention for health reasons.  Then a couple of weeks ago, my big dog had a stroke which led to the Final Vet Visit, and the other two dogs were requiring some sort of special treatment at mealtime because they were protesting hard kibble.  You understand what a dog protest looks like by the floor around the dog dish being covered by individual pieces of dog kibble.  Every meal now involves ME making scrambled eggs, or French toast, or boiling chicken, or making rice…. Then the puppies will come in a week and it will be a whole new rhythm in the dog world and I will have to adjust to it.  This is because I am out-numbered by the dogs.  I should have seen this coming when I allowed Madeline to stay and live with us.  (But I love her and wouldn’t trade it for the world.)

The cat situation is quite a different story.  Cats are much less demanding.  My fourteen year old Snappi is on the retirement plan and just naps on the couch.  She really has worked out well for me pulling her off the city street so many years ago.  My younger cat, Gracie, has now eaten herself to the size of the cocker spaniels.  Somehow I think that whoever labeled her a sealpoint Siamese mix made a mistake.  She is not vocal or genteel like Siamese.  She is just a regular lovable housecat who is quite particular to have her head massaged every morning.  Gracie hops up on the bathroom counter to graze at her breakfast dish and I try to contort myself around her in order to not disturb HER as I brush my teeth and slap some make up on my face.  Finally I installed a mirror for myself in the hallway so that I don’t have to bend like Gumby around the cat.

Last week, I was just thinking out loud:  It is strange to live in the country on the farmlands for six years and no one has dropped off a box of kittens yet.  (For those not familiar with this, it is what lazy people do to avoid bringing “unwanted” kittens to shelters.  To be fair, if the shelters asked for a donation instead of demanding a drop-off fee, people might dump cats in the wilds a lot less.)  So imagine my surprise when I opened the door to find a beautiful long-hair cat that immediately began the hunger chant at me.  

A drizzling of rain was falling upon us.  She was just telling it like it is:  hungry, damp, cold.  I thought back to the previous evening when my neighbor told me, “I told my family NOT to feed the stray cat, let it go over to Chris’ house.”  Yeah.  He really said that.  And here is the very same cat asking for the hand out.  A stray thought went through my head:  It is too close to Christmas to make the mistake of saying “No room at the Inn,” and slamming the door.  I went inside and got a dish and filled it with fresh food and water.  I brought a cat carrier out to the deck and put a dry clean blanket inside.  I advised the cat that the barn next door would be warmer and I couldn’t bring her in to my house just yet.

Why couldn’t I bring her in?  Because all I was thinking about was that I have puppies coming in a little over a week and they will need all of me to take care of all of them.  The cat ate and disappeared.  Two days later she came back for another meal.  Two days later I saw her from a distance working her charms on the farmer next door.  He was heading for his pickup truck and she was reading him the riot act in cat language as he walked away.  I wonder if he is married and walks away when his wife nags him.  It was the same thing, really.

You would think that would solve the problem.  She could sleep in the barn and live off diseased mice and risk getting stepped on by horses or butted by goats.  Tomorrow I will go look for her and see what we can do.  I might as well put a “Bed & Breakfast for Pets” sign on my front lawn.

#############

The Mystery of Transformative Suffering

It’s not an official diagnosis, but I’ve got CDO.  It’s really OCD, except I put the letters in the correct order.  No, I don’t tap a pen on the desk continually until other people run out of the room screaming – I’m not that bad of OCD.  I guess I just like my ducks in a row.  I enjoy predictability as some sort of a pre-determinant to success in my various enterprises.  But that isn’t the way the universe is designed and it doesn’t build character in me either. 

There is an important place for trials and suffering in our lives.  It should shape our personhood so that we become more humble, more noble, more sensitive to the pain and struggles of others.  Yet despite this universal system in which even our failures can make us better people, we still fight against any kind of pain or struggle…. As if somehow it is tolerable for everyone else but should never happen to us.

Last Sunday morning I went through the crucible of angst in a way that is reserved only for people like me:  namely, dog-lovers.  My elderly big dog had a stroke quite early in the morning (4:30 am) and it put us on the obvious course of taking the Final Trip to the veterinarian.  Even though I knew this day would come, and I knew it was coming closer by the day as her various abilities waned (sight, hearing, getting up, navigating two simple stairs to the garage), I still hated the fact that I was standing IN that day AT that moment. 

I had one of my very closest friends at my side – not so much to grieve the loss with me, which she did – but also to chaperone ME in case I needed to be contained.  There are zones of our personality that we cannot predict or control, no matter how hard we try.  At some point that morning I had this absolutely naïve delusion that I was going to be composed at that final veterinarian visit.  The opposite happened; a grief came over me the likes of which I could not wish on my worst enemy.  I even asked my friend in the middle of it, “How many times can your heart break and you still LIVE?”  because I thought I was running out of internal stamina. 

I buried my face in the silver-chocolate colored fur of my dog’s back and stroked her very fabulous tail.  (My other two smaller dogs have docked tails; so you should appreciate a fabulous dog tail when you see one and it wagged for you for 13 years on a daily basis.)  And I found myself saying out loud:  “It isn’t fair.  It just isn’t fair.” 

What wasn’t fair?  That every one of us, both man and beast, has an expiration date?  Or the fact that I had to endure such enormous, separating pain – after 13 years of incredible fun and bonding, which I didn’t deserve either?  Why do we think God or the universe “owes” us a good time, all the time, forever? 

If one more person says, “That’s why I will never get another dog again …” I may get ugly.  But my friend DT said it best:  “If you didn’t feel that badly then that’s the person who shouldn’t get a dog again.”  Excellent point.  I confided that I will ALWAYS have a dog…. Until they put me in a nursing home … and if they don’t let me have a dog there, then I will probably threaten to burn the place down!  (well, just as an expression of passion for the subject, right?  I’m sure they will take my matches from me.) 

The kind of person my dog has made me is something I am aware of because of what we have lived through together.  I am persistent.  I am determined.  I kept her even when her character flaws were initially all on the surface because I knew that the abuse she had endured before she lived with me caused her to be that way.  I also had strong faith that I could bring her through to be her very best self.  I trained her with one of the top-notch dog trainers in the area because I wanted to do it the right way, the first time.  I have never been sorry for that investment.  She has laid her head on the laps of children that came to visit; she has helped teach and encourage a litter of my other dogs’ puppies as they were learning to explore and walk.  Her gentleness was an absolute inspiration to me.  I loved taking her camping because I felt totally secure with her guarding me.  Her beauty and happiness echo in my heart and all around me.

The day after she left us, I took my two spaniels to the beach to watch boats and smell seagull poop.  I expected that it would be a good change of scenery for us.  What I forgot as I packed them into the back seat of my vehicle was that my front seat would now be empty.  The sweet dog that used to head butt my elbow so that I would continuously pet her as I drove was not there.  The rawness of that moment flooded my eyes up in seconds.  And as we drove onward to the beach, I knew that somehow she would be with us – watching us as angels watch us – and that the loss and separation were somehow temporary.

I did not share my loss on Facebook – because that is too banal for this kind of suffering.  It would be disrespectful against an experience that was sacred and transformative.  And I don’t want people who barely know me just popping little crying emogees at my post.  I DO want to share this in a way that helps others process and heal their own grief – and to make sense out of the things that seem pointless.  Eventually, I will be able to speak about her with composure and that mysterious peace which comes to us when we have let our grief have its day.  But for now, I can tell pieces of the story when the opportunity presents itself….

Later in the week I told my mother that out of all the people on the planet, I am one who knows when I am going to die.  She said, “And how is that?”  I replied:  “Because one day St. Francis of Assisi is going to say to the Lord, ‘You have to pull her ticket Lord, because she keeps sending dogs up here and I’ve got my hands completely full!’”

############

  

From a Martian's Perspective

From a Martian’s Perspective

Question:  Why did the snake cross the road?  Answer:  I don’t know if he actually made it across the road but I sure as hell am not going over there to ask him!  It seems when I noticed him, and other cars zoomed right by him, he was having a “traction issue” with the surface of the road that was probably, oh, about 95+ degrees HOT at the time.  I kind of felt sorry for him.  Psych.  Not really.

There are times when I think to myself:  if I was a Martian visiting from another planet, what would puzzle me the most about this land?  First and foremost, it would be the strange obsession with one joke in America:  “Why did the chicken cross the road?”  It is classic because:  a) chickens do, indeed cross the road; b) nobody knows why due to the communication impasse we have with poultry; and c) the listener really anticipates that you are going to finally tell them a really, really funny answer to the question – and yet no one ever does.  Why this joke has lived so long is really a testimony to residual HOPE in the  human heart:  we HOPE someone, eventually, tells us a great reason…. But so far the ball is still in their court (the chickens).

Animals should not cross the road unsupervised.  But I can say this for sure and for certain:  woodchucks shouldn’t be allowed to DRIVE unsupervised!  And I am not referencing animal woodchucks.  I am openly satirizing the brand of human being that drives a pick-up truck, has only a few teeth that are not even necessarily situated next to each other, and live mostly on the outskirts of true civilization … and with good reason.  Here are my two best wood chuck stories:

I was driving to my dentist appointment last week – at the designated speed limit, which, as intended, gave me ample time to stop for the fiasco.  On this long country road which runs next to the Erie Canal (yes, that Erie Canal with a mule named Sal) there had been construction the prior week which led me to have a wary eye as I was driving.  You know, in New York, they actually have a sign that just says:  “Bump.”  And usually it should have actually said:  “CRATER.”  So I was watching for the bump or a sign or something and then I saw a Tree Service truck on the side of the road.  Heckle and Jeckle were parked next to a telephone pole that is in two pieces, still standing vertically, but snapped with jagged edges.  It is hard to imagine what mishap caused this situation but I am guessing it would have won the Top Prize on “Funniest Home Videos.” 

In a farm-sized driveway on the opposite side of the road sits an empty school bus.  A man resembling Ichabod Crane getting up from his long nap was walking around the front lawn.  I am hoping the two stories are not connected in any way.  Then as I came to a gentle stop, I looked up to see the wire from the telephone pole hanging mighty low – think “brush the top of my windshield” low and you get the idea.  One of the guys, with his bare hand, lifted the wire up so that the west-bound car could drive under.  Then he dropped it.  So I remained sitting there in the eastbound lane, waiting.  And all of a sudden from behind me, two Woodchuck Cowboys blaze around me in their big arse vehicles and JAM their gas pedals to go somehow through or under that wire.  I cannot repeat the phrase I said when I saw this.  It was sheer horror at their lack of patience!  The first guy made it under.  The second guy blazed through and I watched the wire fling something else up over the top of the truck.  I do not know if it was one of those triangular ice melters we have on our telephone wires here or what it was.  It just flicked up and over the truck and he blazed on.  

These types of incidents give me chest pains.  I really cannot grasp what was so important that they would be so foolish – maybe they were headed to a happy hour or a cow auction somewhere?  It was just crazy.  Eventually one of the tree service guys grabbed a metal post (??? to lift a wire that has some sort of energy in it???) and lifted the wire up for me.  Otherwise I’d still be sitting there.  I am kind of wondering if they are still standing there.  You can’t make this stuff up.

The other story is a tale of Woodchuck Camping.  (No details have been omitted for the purpose of political correctness or accuracy in journalistic reporting.  Again, you can’t make this stuff up.)     I had taken one of my dogs camping on Lake Ontario for a weekend.  In the morning, the guy two campsites over from mine walked over to the Hispanic young adults at the in-between-us campsite and proceeded to make his awkward introduction.  He had on jeans, a sleeveless tee shirt, and was nursing a can of cold and hopsy already at 9am.  The young adults were sitting in a friendly circle just chatting when he walked over and asked where they were from and then made some reference that presumed they did not work for a living.  It was like throwing a rock through a plate glass window to say hello.  BUT, they were incredibly gracious and informed him they worked in Hartford and had the week off from work.  “That’s cool.  Mind if I sit down?” 

Again, the picture of hospitality, they welcomed him into their circle.  He was a world apart from them.  And, truth be told, from most people I know…. He was just really, really rough around the edges.  I mean, when you run out of Nascar stories, what else IS there to talk about?

Later in the day I was entertaining some friends for the afternoon and dinner on the campfire.  They got up to leave and go back to civilization.  I asked one of my guy friends, “Pizza Dave,” if he’d walk me to the restroom before he left.  We had a bit of a moment earlier in the afternoon when he patronizingly  tried to correct me that it was “not nice” for me to call that guy a woodchuck.  Whatever.  Dave didn’t have to listen to the bragging and the nonsense all morning long. 

We walked in the dark along the unpaved camp road, each site marked by a fire pit near the edge of the street.  On the way past that third site there came a horrible snorting noise that made Pizza Dave jump a few inches off the ground, still nervous in the Great Outdoors.  He turned to me and practically shouted:  “What was THAT?  A BEAR?!”  I didn’t flinch for a second:  “No.  A Woodchuck.”

The guy had moved his lawnchair next to his fire pit and fell asleep there.  I kind of doubt anyone told him that mosquitoes do not consider snoring a repellant.  I bet he was one big welt when he got up in the morning… unless, of course, woodchucks don’t use deodorant. 

###############

A Brief Moment of Joy

A Brief Moment of Joy

It was like a family portrait of a brief moment of joy.  I slowed my vehicle down behind an old fire engine that was making its way rather deliberately through a small neighborhood on the outskirts of a city.  If you stretched out the viewfinder of your mind on this particular street for about ten miles you would have:  undeveloped country, old farmhouses that have seen better days sitting next to very suburban-looking colonial homes, one of those horse-and-buggy warning signs, an old country bridge with owls on it that crested up and then eased you down into the poorer neighborhood I was traveling through before you reached the cleaned-up city.  It was everything about human life in Central NY all jammed into one area.  (And if you are wondering about the owls on the bridge:  they are to scare away the avian poop factories known as “pigeons”.  Pigeons are like the energizer bunny:  they keep going, and going, and going …. only in a different way that doesn’t involve batteries.)

As this relic of a fire truck in front of me slowed for an intersection, I glanced to my left and saw four happy children waving and smiling at the firemen.  Then I observed a bit more – the children were sitting on steps of a dilapidated front porch and three out of four of them were holding very young kittens.  A fourth kitten was investigating a bicycle tire that was part of the ensemble leaning against the front porch step.  All things considered, this was the most joyful thing I’ve seen in God knows how long.  It was a picture-perfect Sunday morning.  And yet it was just a moment in time.

Within the hour, the sermon I was listening to also brought tears to my eyes.  The priest was telling of Archbishop D’Souza who had observed Mother Teresa of Calcutta one morning.  A small orphan boy was being cleaned-up by one of the sisters and giving her an incredibly hard time.  The child was struggling with the sister and finally was hitting her.  Mother Teresa from across the room had been eyeing the development of the event.  She went over and scooped the child into her arms and wordlessly held him in her embrace.  Finally, after almost a half-hour of wordless holding, the child began to cry in her arms.  Then he settled himself down in the safety and security of the love of a true mother. 

I sat there wondering what it is that makes a child that angry.  Was it orphaned?  Was it injured by someone?  Or was it just willful like the adorable little girl in the bench in front of me in church who was mad-as-heck that her mother wouldn’t let her use her “outside voice” while the prayers were going on in church?  But really, why should any child, anywhere in the world feel the kind of angst that young Indian boy was revealing?  And yet doesn’t the world we live in have just as much brokenness as it does beauty?  And perhaps we are better able to see beauty against the backdrop of pain and struggle.  Does suffering make us bitter people, or better people ~ the choice is ours. 

Just last night I was reading about William Donohue’s debate with one of Mother Teresa’s most (and among the arguable few) vehement detractors:  Christopher Hitchens.  So it was ironic that the story of her gentle love would cross my path this morning.  I wonder if she had hugged Hitchens like that, if he would have broken down sobbing.  Sometimes the heart that hates is the heart that hurts the most.  When we are on the receiving end of that, it is natural for us to want to push away the ones that bring their anger to the fore.  But it is supernatural to greet that disguised pain with love and win a soul.

Later that day, I drove the opposite way on the street to see the house one more time.  This time, there were adults there.  A man sitting against the porch wall pouring the contents of a silver beverage can down his throat.  No kittens in sight.  Children scattered around and one adorable girl about 9 years old sitting on the sidewalk wailing her curly-haired head off.  She was only hours after smiling and waving to the fire truck drivers and her little world had a completely different look to it.  In India, I could have held her.  In America, I’d probably get arrested.  I have no answers for this.  And I hate that.

#############

The 3 Night Visitors of Early September

The Three Night Visitors of Early September

He sat there among the rocks perfectly still.  And as I type this I wonder if he had ever been spoken to before by my kind.  Had his mother told him, in her own way, that people from my world should not be communicated with, and that he should ignore me?  Had his father said that my people were a danger to him – and that his very life was jeopardized if he even acknowledged me?  Some children might throw rocks, or women might scream and jump up and down in a silly, non-productive way – and perhaps accidentally cause him to go to the Great Beyond?  Who knows the thoughts of the average toad as it sits among the stones, in natural camouflage, hoping to go unnoticed as it waits for bugs or whatever it is that toads do on dark muggy nights when people should be in their dwellings?

But I looked down at him in unfeigned curiosity, without fear, and said, “Hey.  I see you sitting there.”  He tried to flatten himself a bit, but was too plump to pull it off.  His belly seemed askew.  Frankly it was kind of like a Plus size woman trying to fit into tight clothing:  you may be able to move the bulk and shift it, but you can’t make it go away by wishing its invisibility.  Physics gets you every time.

I observed for a few moments and marveled at his speckling.  Then I dashed into the house for my ipad to grab a picture of him.  Even by the light of the lamp post, it was impossible to get a picture of him.  It came out the same as a great picture I heard of entitled:  “Black bear shoveling coal at midnight.”  No toad.  You just have to take my word for it.  And I may never see him again.

Just the week before, as I came up on my front step at night, a frog appeared.  He was in an even funnier predicament than his toad cousin from last night because he did not blend in ANY way with his surroundings.  The corner of my porch, at a 90 degree angle, provided a goal of sorts for him to commandeer.  He managed to use his Super Frog Suction Cup Feet and stick to the puckered aluminum siding.  And I imagine he was having a field day in the corner grabbing the little bugs that flock to the light of my kitchen window late at night.  They are so minute that if I leave the window up and the screen down they can pass through the screen to come to the light.  There’s a lesson in their somewhere.  I’ll let you, my reader, work with it.

I don’t want to bog down in speculation, for there was a third amphibian to make his appearance.  Like the third of the ghosts to visit Ebenezeer Scrooge, he had the most impact on my tired psyche.  After I saw him, I went back to bed and laughed until I had tears in my eyes.  Well, perhaps I was over-tired.  It was 3:30 in the morning and one of the dogs requested a potty run.  I dragged myself out of bed, through the house, and out the door to the dog pen.  There was on the threshold some sort of debris.  At quick glance I thought it was a piece of dog poo.  Then I leaned down a bit and saw that it was a very small frog.  Thus for the reasons of both his appearance, and my reason for being out with the dogs, I nicknamed this new species The Crap Frog.

My sense of humor is not typical; I am guilty as charged.  But I will say this, he made me think.  How many times are we just about our own business and people who don’t know us judge us or our purposes.  They judge us by what they see, and what their interpretation of that is.  We disappear off their stage and they never got to learn that we were the best singer in the swamp – or whatever it is that frogs put on their Amphibian resumes.  My three night visitors came to teach me, perhaps, to pay attention to the humble ones among us.  They may not speak the way we ask them to, but they have their own purpose and mission…. Should we choose to accept it.

###############

A New Heart, a Beer Can and a Broken Flip-Flop

A New Heart, a Beer Can and a Broken Flip-Flop

There is an amazing story I heard on the radio about a cardiologist who allowed a pastor to observe a surgery he was doing on a patient.  After the doctor had done all of the technical/surgical things he had been able to do, he leaned over to the patient, a woman, and whispered to her, “Okay, I’ve done all I can do – now you have to take over, tell your heart to beat again…”   And Christian songwriter Danny Gokey took that inspiring vignette and penned these lyrics:

Tell your heart to beat again
Close your eyes and breathe it in
Let the shadows fall away
Step into the light of Grace
Yesterday's a closing door
You don't live there anymore
Say goodbye to where you've been
And tell your heart to beat again

I cannot begin to tell you what these lyrics have meant to me in the last eight months.  As some of you may know, I was the victim of a group lynching at the place where I should have been the most emotionally safe:  the church where I did part-time ministry.  I was misconstrued by one group of people, who ran to the power brokers and complained, who in turn went to the pastor, who called me into a private meeting that was not in fact private.  It was five people – two of them very angry, having already jumped to conclusions that I was a bigot.  They did not use the word, they painted the picture – and it was skewed by second and third-hand interpretations.  They did not respect me as a professional educator and minister and try to understand what I was saying to them.  They just shouted at me while the pastor sat there and let them do the dirty work. 

As my brain and emotions reeled from the treatment I was getting, I tried to re-group and figure a way that I could continue doing the job I loved under the eye of people who had stopped loving me a long time ago…. The same people who stand there week after week and sing a song that has the lyrics “all are welcome in this place.”  The hypocrisy was painful. I had presented over the past seven and a half years what I know to be the philosophy and teachings of Christ, and subsequently the interpretation of that by the Roman Catholic Church.  They on the other hand refused to listen to what our party line is, thinking somehow they can endorse something else.  Well, you can’t say you are this, and in actuality be that. 

As I left that room, I could feel my heart being rent in two inside me.  It was scary and horrible at the same time.  Some dear friends supported me, and one of them went in to the room to give them a clearer picture of what they were doing to me…. in a pretty direct and loud fashion.  And she was met with, “that wasn’t what we intended.”  As anyone who has been through this sort of experience will tell you, you cannot cross back over a bridge that has been blown up.  So I resigned.  And thereupon became, in a particular sense, “churchless.”  I still believe what I believe.  I still am who I am.  I still value what I value.  And I could not do that with that group of people watching for me to cross their own lines…. So I have been a nomad on Sunday mornings looking for a church to worship in, while at the same time, not looking to put down roots or trust too quickly that I have found my spiritual home.  My spiritual home, in fact, I carry within me. It cannot be a building or a particular group of people because I have learned that this will, in the end, fail you.  As my great grandmother once said in her broken Polish accent, “peoples is peoples.”

As I travel on Sunday mornings to find the faces of faith in a variety of different congregations, I am feeling a little better.  At times I have even been entertained or inspired by some pretty good homilies.  And other times, not so much.  I have been to multi-million dollar churches with a congregation so large they have to have four Masses to accommodate their people – and each with a different style or flavor to it.  You know, the 9:00 am has the guitar music; while the 11:00 am has the organ, etc.; the pastor and associate banter back and forth creating a friendly vibe – they keep it light.  I found a sweet little back country church where the priest actually faces the East (symbolic of waiting for Christ’s return) and consequently with his back to the congregation as he does the Eucharistic prayers.  It was like attending the Old Latin Mass, only in English, well mostly.  

I attended an evangelical Protestant church mid-winter that had a congregation of 25.  Twenty-five, period, end of sentence.  And half of them walked in 20 minutes late.  I found that kind of entertaining.  All these years I beat myself up for showing up five minutes late, like somebody cared, and half their church is late!  I liked the music; I liked the sermon, but then the next three weeks were going to be about marriage and that is kind of not on my grid right now so I continued my sojourn. 

Last week I went to a far-flung place with a big, traditional physique as far as the building goes.  The deacon gave the homily.  I just remember that he started out by saying how long some material things last, and that eventually everything gives way to time and the elements…. including us.  And he launched into making a point about us preparing for the moment of our death, when we meet our Maker.  Except he gave no practical tips, like say, pray the rosary every day or read ten minutes of the Bible every morning.  So, I just stopped listening.  This is a privilege I am allowing myself in my middle years:  if you stop being interesting or don’t get relevant within the first eight minutes, I am no longer interested.  It’s just the brain screening out the extraneous in order to last longer itself. 

At the end of the Mass, the pastor got up and said something kind about the homily the deacon gave.  He then remarked that, as the congregation was aware, he himself is a card-carrying, lifetime member of alcoholics anonymous.  (I love him for his authenticity.)  He said:  Deacon told us that a beer can left in the woods lasts about 80 years and I am pleased to report that I have just turned 81!  In other words, he outlived the beer can.  The entire congregation chuckled at that – it was great.  And I love it when a group has a sense of humor and doesn’t let their “church-iness” put a veneer on their sense of humor.  Nonetheless, I was and still am not ready to meet and greet new people.

 

I tried to slip out the side door where he was saying good morning to people.  I tried very hard to be invisible.  I don’t even know by what childish magic my brain thinks that someone in an adult body like mine can become invisible by just moving quietly around a group of people.  Well, the next thing that happened was my pretty black flip-flop with the fake diamonds on its strap just BROKE.  I could not manage to get a flat foot on the ground and did a series of awkward, Big Bird-like movements to maintain my balance and grab the flip flop without falling over on the sidewalk.  I walked back to my vehicle with the flip flop in one hand and a barefoot on the ground as well.

It is likely that my predicament was not un-noticed by the very people I was trying to skirt.  However, it is for sure and for certain that Someone Else has not left any of my predicaments and awkward scenarios unseen.  He is watching (and probably was laughing divinely) and I feel loved by Him.  That’s all that matters now.

###################

When Hump Day is on Thursday

When Hump Day is on Thursday

They say some things are best left to the imagination.  But I have to admit, my 30 second exposure to reality as I drove to work this morning is something that my imagination never would even conjure up.  I guess I am still getting used to living in the real country.  Permit me a digression before I really tell you what view I was treated to enroute to work.

It always –and I mean ALWAYS – irritates me when people from out of state talk about New York in terms of “the City.”  NYC is such a small –and allow me a bit of spirited derision here – miniscule, and consequently congested and overwhelming (to me), part of the interesting things about this state.  In fact, they wouldn’t even have the right to call it “The Big Apple” if it wasn’t for the fact that almost ALL of the rest of the state grows some of the greatest apples in the nation. 

Even the history buffs tell you that there was some sort of a fight when Downstate wasn’t allowed to be the Capitol of New York – Albany claimed the prize.  Although, if I had been in charge, I would have moved the Capitol to a more central location but, silly me, I think in terms of fairness for the entire state and not just for some.  At least the State Fair was put in a central location.  Someone had their adequate dose of coffee the morning that decision was made.

So all that being said, I do want to reiterate the point that a vast part of this state is incredible agricultural property:  dairy farms, horse ranches, corn fields, apple orchards and (gasp) vineyards that take your breath, if not your sobriety, away.  Frankly, there is not enough gasoline to fill a lifetime of my vehicles in order to satiate my desire to see it all.  The greatest thing that could happen to me right now would be to win a brand new vehicle with zero mileage so I could start all over in my travels to take in every borough and country lane.  And need I speak of the miles of antique stores and flea markets on Route 20 – that route cuts clean across the state and is the coolest road to drive when the leaves are changing colors in autumn!  Even up into our own forests of the Adirondack mountains, there are adorable little gift shops and corner pizza places and creeks a plenty.   And yet …

And yet when I pull out of my driveway and travel less than a mile down the street, the oddness of reality strikes me.  I glance across to my right and I see something that at first does not make sense.  I’m thinking:  “Why does that cow look awfully high up in the air?”  And as my eyes re-adjust in a split second to the entire picture, here’s what I realize.  It isn’t a cow.  It’s a bull.  And the bull is standing ON a cow, ahem, and he is quite serious.  And there are farmers in the doorway of the barn watching to make sure that the goal is achieved.  And I wonder if they laughed at the expressions on the faces of those of us who drove by and saw fifteen seconds of “Life on a Dairy Farm,” and inadvertently dropped our jaws ….

In retrospect, where did I think that pasture full of baby calves came from, anyway?  The storks are too busy delivering to the hospitals to work on the farms as well!

################