Dust

When we passed into Mexico, south of Chula Vista in July, my husband looked around and saw that it was beautiful. All that God created.

Until we crossed the border the teenagers in our van -- a SKV  they called it, which stood for serial killer van -- looked out onto a concrete Euphrates flowing south to Tijuana. They looked upon the fish. Chevies. Mercedes. Audis. Sonatas. CRV's. They looked out of the side-slanted windows, into the eyes of these animals. Carp. Guppies. Druggies. Warlords. Boreds. Gangstas. Smugglers. Mothers. The collective teenage consciousness in our white whale looked out on the paradise my husband saw and declared it rife with weakness and duplicitous motives.

North of the border boasted the best of human superiority. Grand villas. Manicured. Landscaped. Cultivated. Controlled. Balanced. South of the border broadcast the bildungsroman of humankind. On its way to civilization, greatness mashed against trash. Homes founded on piles of tires. Towers of hotels arrested a floor or two short. Rebar crowns and tin slips, pavement dying away to dust. Below the cat calling billboards -- autoplastía, anaplastía, abogado immigracíon, -- men walk down the dust between our highway and the eyesore of concrete and wire between us and them.

"Really?" I am flabbergasted. "Why do you think it's beautiful?" But the kids jabber too loud to answer and he's soaking up the vista. And calling it beautiful.

_______

The square mile looks the same as it did when I saw it first four years ago. I drove a rented guppy with my daughter in the front passenger seat, two boys from our Midwestern church in the backseat. The guppy's transmission choked on dust. I prayed the white whale in front wouldn't race away from us, The white whale behind us would let us be a barnacle on its nose if this transmission failed. I divided my energy between observation, the art of a writer, and driving, the responsibility of a team leader.

To be fair, the first trip into Tijuana was 2011. Even our town in Indiana looked like hell. 2008 came, stole our bread, stole our factories. Thrifty scared and bored, people in our town built labs in their attics for cash and entertainment. Our century's version of a still, my generation's version of hooch kills as many of us, or more. Houses blow up, or burn. Back home our main street looked like an abandoned Western town. The saloons, the lawyers, insurance agencies, pawnbrokers, tanning shops and motley folks put out their wares. Mostly everything looked beautifully abandoned.

Imagine Tijuana in that. In Mexico during the crisis, the government made the Tortilla Act. Farmers south sold their corn north of the border. Corn for ethanol sold better than corn for food. The two room, concrete-and-chicken-wire houses we came to build protected a family's claim. They squatted in something more permanent than tin and tarp.

_______

The tires that triggered quiet "ah's" and "that house is literally built on" from the teens, those were part of well-designed repurposed buildings. The longer we rode, the more I saw rows of white and vibrantly painted homes inside compounds. To me, Tijuana had burst forth. It was reaching towards beautiful. More like the pretty side by side compounds of Guatemala City's neighborhoods, which I'd seen only once.

I traveled to Guatemala City in August of 2011, a few weeks after we returned from Mexico. For both my husband and me, this was a first. Our first travels out of the US. When we disembarked in Guatemala City, we walked past armed soldiers across the tarmac. Guns and guards seemed to swarm. I thought of New Orleans after Katrina, images I'd seen, not experienced. Now I walked among guards who couldn't care if I spoke only English.

My husband says he found Guatemala hard to look upon with love. I saw its zoologico and the uniformed students, waiting to see if today the striking teachers would show up to unlock their schools. I saw uniformity, not graffiti and dust. I went to bed at night inside the twenty foot high cinderblock walls surrounding the Hogar Raphael. The shipping trucks rattled until late. They picked up Sears furniture from the factories nearby. Nightclubs on the four corners of the compound took over the noisemaking around midnight. I heard weeping and music, hollering and fighting.

"Once, we found a knife in the grass," said Madre Ivonne, the nun who supervised the hogar. A man had been murdered on the other side of the wall. I thought about that every night as I fell asleep. I felt safe because we had check in with the armed guard at the steel gate of the compound, even with Jorge driving. Jorge was Madre Ivonne's brother.

 At four am, I woke up because no one sang, hollered, honked or cranked an engine. I heard clicking across my floor. I flicked on the switch. Large black beetles skittered under the crack into the jardín separating my room from my husband's. I shut off the light. They came back like that every night. I shuddered thinking of them ending up in my luggage, but what bothered me more was the wire in my showerhead. It heated my water at the spigot, but if it shorted I would be electrocuted. Our handyman warned me to take a cold shower before trying to fix anything myself. No worries, Joe, I thought. I would moan my way through a cold shower, wash away a little sweat and dust, and huddle in my covers. And flick on the lights if the beetles sounded too close. 

Several nights in a row, I did just that. But one night, when I flipped off my switch at ten pm, light seeped through cracks above me. I'd never seen it before. A swishing sound and dust sprinkled down on me. Like a subtle hint, I understood that I had someone above, the older hogar girls or Madre Ivonne. My late night light defense against the beetles probably disturbed the sleeper above.

 I loved Guatemala City, even Zona Una, even though the mothers said they had to get the kids out of there, it was just too ugly, too dangerous.

Coming home this summer, my husband told everyone he thought Mexico was beautiful.

 "I thought Guatemala was more beautiful myself," I said.

"I didn't," I take his response as a bit defensive, a kind of retort, as if we a have passive resistance to the mystery of beauty we each see. It's not true  but he sees something so expansive he has yet to capture the beauty, though he's been playing with lyrics and chords to get it across. "Whatever is lovely, whatever is true, think on such things," admonishes Paul, a writer, a saint and sinner too. We're all reaching to these mysteries, I think. It's no easy task wrestling with beauty. Sometimes it's easier to entertain with dust than mystery, with violence and ugliness rather that what is lovely and faithful.

Pairings- Happiness: Watch, Listen, Read

A new ditty for me. Consider these. I think they talk to each other about what makes us happy and what doesn't. I'm sure there is a TED talk out there on this too. My goal is to get you thinking about why less makes you happier. Fidelity makes you happier. What are your rules for happy?

1. Watch: Hector and the Search for Happiness

Listen: Walk the Moon's Spend Your $$$

and Apartment Story by The National

Read: The Happiness Project or A Path Appears. I recommend the latter highly.

Final Blood : How you lose a baby

A fiction. An exercise. A memorium. An honorarium to dear friends.

How to lose a baby

Want one. Cheer for every ovulation like your husband cheered for the Colts to slaughter the Saints in the Superbowl. When your body bleeds again in a few weeks, wonder why he cheered against the Saints.

You know this fails the synchronicity test. What you have is myth, so you actively dismiss the thought, what business did he have cheering against saints? What if the Saints symbolized saints?

What if it all importuned bad luck?

 What business do you have questioning the (insert word here: mercies? faithfulness? ways? goodness? love?) of God? Talk yourself down. Wait. Those who wait upon the Lord. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. Surrender to the Scriptures and snatches of hymns that give you hope. Wait upon late blood. Hope it turns to no blood, to two lines, a plus sign on a pee stick. Jiggle your breasts for an ounce more of weight. Brush the nipple, hoping it aches.

Late in January you begin the second wait. The one from the cash register at the drug store to the bathroom. Two minutes in the public restroom? Or ten minutes home and two more minutes? Open the box without tearing the package directions. Squat, careful not to pee on too strong, too far up the stick, or on your hand. Perch the damp stick on the box. Watch the second hand click and jerk on your watch.

Negative. One bar. Stash the other three tests, the second from the box in the back of the medicine drawer. Wait to bleed. Wait to cry until you bleed again.

Make plans for dinner this Valentine’s day. Be pressure free, says everyone. Have fun. You have the best date. You wonder while you stare into his eyes if this will be the release valve, or will adopting be that? Everyone says once you adopt you conceive. Such pressure to squeeze your ovaries or his vas deferens. You should have started bleeding three days ago. Because you don’t see red, you don’t order red, or white. “Mineral water, please.” Later decaf green tea. He sees. His squeeze on your hand as you walk out makes you both tear up.

You walk the cold blocks to the theater feeling like you returned to your twenties, when you got hot involuntarily, when your body clotted and cleansed like a clock, before the clock hit thirty and it broke.

Try not to picture sperm meeting egg when your husband makes love to you. On following mornings, begin taking your basel temperature before you swing out of bed. Record changes in the journal. Check for the quality of your emissions. Imagine a twinge. The egg burst from the ovaries and flings itself towards your husband’s school of sperm, like salmon hurtling upstream as frenzied as your most joyful lust.

Great Lent starts later that week. Still you don’t bleed. Your journal reads with years of morning temperatures. How long have you longed for this baby. Basel, basil. Bleed. When March idles in, almost Annuciation, the Feast of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary her pregnancy, when the sweatshirt you pull over your head hits your breast wrong, you wince. You sneak into the bathroom that morning before your husband knows. Lock the door. It does no good to get his hopes up. Tremble. Tear. Box. Impossible plasticvinylaluminium package. Squat. Pee. Swear. You forgot a clock. Guessing time by counting and saying the alphabet you wait. One line never materializes. Negative. Damn the single pink stripe on your character.

Try not to want the baby too much. Well-meaning friends opine, “It’s stress. It inhibits conception.”

It’s a kind of lust, all sinful, this hope. With it comes contempt for the fertile careless seventeen-year-old who decides to keep her baby because “babies-are-so-cute.” Shudder with contempt too whenever a pious friends suggests spiritual hoodoo, one of your hippie friends suggests a diet cleanse and some aromatherapies.

Three more days repeat the sneak, tear, squat, squirt, wait. This time: plus. Two lines. Lay your forehead down there on the peestick. Jerk it up at the moisture. It’s your urine on your forehead and you don’t know if this annointing is holy or disgusting. In one month from today, the Feast of Annuciation. It’s thirty days off but it feels like serendipity.

Now how to tell your husband with all the joy and poetic justice? Thirty-three you are. See. I’m not too old. I am Sarai. I will be transformed into Sarah, you think.

Tell him and no one else. Oh, almost no one else. In a week your mother knows. In two, you tell the one best friend. In three your husband has told your priest and a few confidants.

All of March and April. In May, at your friends’ wedding you pretend to sip the toast, but a few friends who hope secretly for you notice when you push the glass towards your husband, like a recovering alcoholic discreetly passes off his drink at these functions. They inquire discreetly. You demand secrecy.

Memorial Day weekend will mark three months. Then you can announce.

Saturday your husband fires up the barbie and the buddies come over. You have a headache and feel nauseaus, a bit crampy during the euchre tourney. A backache kicks in while you stand at the sink after everyone leaves. You swirl water, warm and comforting and think how nice it would be take a bath, but those are no-nos. Keep your body temperature from getting too hot. Realize you are grinding your teeth a bit. The cramps and the back ache may be worse than you’ll admit. Go to bed by ten. At midnight wake up in waves of cramps, gripping you. Stumble to the bathroom and push down your panties. You already feel the damp, and in the dark – you kept the light off afraid too look but knowing you could reach over and flip the switch in your small bathroom – you smell the iron. Warm blood. Lay your head down on the cool sink. Sit on the toilet. There will be a crick in your spine but you’ll not know the difference. Cry.

Mewl. Heave. He comes to you and rubs your back and sits on the side of the tub. This is your funeral parlor. It will take days for the cramping and bleeding to subside. Doctors will kneed and prod and stroke. They offer options, discuss a dialation and cutelage if it doesn’t bleed out fully. An ultrasound to confirm.  Your mom comes to you. She massages your back. Strange that it feels like she’s helping this baby spontaneously abort, commit its own leap from the ledge, but really, your mother wants only to ease your pain, soothe your nerves and minister.

Every clump could be your baby, the size of dime, with fingers and toes and a beating heart. You would like to bury your baby. Do you save pads, clumps of toilet paper, do you dare evacuate your bladder. There’s no proof there, except blood, blood, blood. Tears. No tears. Numb. Crushed. Grief. This is how you lose a baby

On turning forty

"Which anniversary did you most dread," one marriage said to another.

Do you even remember the first one? It's the paper one. The modern gift-givers suggest we skip the paper and give a clock. Because what? Because for the first year we paid no attention to time. We slept late, we worked second and third shift, skipped church, learned to map each other from tip to toe by wasting hours and doing little else. My husband expected me to play alarm clock on Sunday mornings, which is why we missed so much church, and he'd count the good days as the ones I jumped him. We ate terribly at all hours and with not concern for health. Jamocha shakes, curly fries and shaved beef with Au Jous at Arby's. Fazolis when we ran out of money, because they gave us free bread sticks. On Friday nights, we took date night. We split cheap fajitas on Fridays at Don Pablos, rented a dollar classic from Family Video and split a pint of Ben and Jerry's. We made pillows of our flesh, rotund and protruding.

The first year, did you think it was the sweetest and hardest when you look back?

It took one year, just one, before we tiffed over the wakey-wakey protocols. After our daughter's birth, I refused to wake him up for church any more, and we had to go to church now, for a soul other than our own.

What habit had worn you down by the end of the first year? When did you start paying attention again to time? Was it with the bills, thirty days from one big one to the next? Or payday with a little splurge? Was it the miles until the grinding began, like the brakes on our Dodge Shadow, that American piece of crap we polished and cursed together, kicking the tires and hating Kmart's Service Department for the two-hundred fifty smackaroos they gauged from us. Finally Dad helped us grow up a bit by teaching us how to do the brakes ourselves for a tenth of the cost.

On our first anniversary, I could hardly sit up from the stitches across my bikini line, where one week earlier they'd extracted my organs, stacked them up, lifted out my daughter and put them all back in the right spot. It hurt to swallow the cheap Chinese we ate.

How did you feel on that paper anniversary? What ephemeral sentiments did you exchange? Do you remember? What did you do with me?

I was born by your first anniversary, a fact that would not dawn on me until I was nine or so. I would have liminal memories of those early years. Flickering TV's, illegal scents, a Fisher Price horse you gave me on Christmas Eve. I scooted around the dim twinkly room front room. I can't recall if I rolled fast on linoleum or worked hard to motor myself over the shag carpet. Later, when I calculated the timeline of my birth and your anniversary, I learned what it means to do the right thing. I understood some of the fractious shoutin' after hours. I understood you took the harder, righter way, for things bigger than yourselves.

I never dread anniversaries like people talk about dreading birthdays, but looking back, some were warmer, felt more like the exhilarating accomplishments that a tenth-thirteenth-sixteenth-eighteenth-twenty-first evokes. Mostly, those are on the fives, right? Sometime in our fifth year, another wife in my Bible study asked me to count wood under the covers, burned, spent, (wink, wink) you know. Thousands of fires set, burned, ebbed. How beautiful, but sometimes exhausting. And I had only one child in all that time. You had three. You found the quiet escapes and how much work it must have been.

I remember our fifth, when my husband gave me the first piece of expensive jewelry since our engagement. The waters on the Chicago canal sparkled beneath us. The gift -- either the sapphire and diamond cross I'm scared to wear, lest I lose it or the white gold braided bracelet that I think I ruined because I rolled it over my tiny fist rather than fight to re-clasp it around my wrist -- sparkled less than lights of the city. We'd parked our car on the first stop of the CTA train, dragged our luggage onto the train, exited at the Randolph Street main stop. We hefted our luggage blocks and blocks past homeless men asleep in corners under the passes. Our arms ached and I stung with worry that the valets saw how poor we were, having saved up for this getaway. When we collapsed in our room, I cried as I stared down from the twentieth floor of the Sheraton. We ate at the seafood restaurant you suggested, even though we were vegetarians who wouldn't eat meat anyway. We'd budgeted fifty bucks for the meal and it wasn't enough. My pride stung, but my husband took me back to the room and we danced again in the diamond lights twinkling.

On my tenth birthday, you said, "You made it to a decade. A whole decade. That's an accomplishment. Two digits now." No one could take those from me, I realized. The decade that mattered, that helped me make it so far so happily had happened behind the hollow panel door of your bedroom. It hid in waves of that crazy waterbed, the rocky-rolling years already tempering. Later in the year, you'd drain the bladder of the bed and for over a year, you'd share every corner of your life with all of us, like we lived on the prairie in a camper. I was cognizant enough to realize that you had no time alone but your need for such private moments, to that I stayed oblivious.

Was there an anniversary you dreaded, or anticipated? I remember my friend Mark saying you sneaked  off once for a celebration in a hotel and split a bottle of champagne. He said not to repeat that back to you, since you did not imbibe in front of your children. I thrilled to the idea that you'd paid for the pop and that your love spilled over like that still. For in the tiffs of your early years, I wanted nothing more than for you to make it. I needed you to make it.

We made it to year five in August, two months after you made it to twenty-five. None of us had enough money to splurge for you and yet we knew we owed those five years to you. How does one marriage repay another for its breath and life? We started saving then, all of the kids, squirreling off little bits for another ten years. What's thirty-five but middle-aged, coral, according to the traditional gifting list. Shell.  We'd learn between year five and year fifteen just how fragile marriages are. In our fifth year, three marriages of kids our age dissolved. When we married, you said, wait until year seven. Until then, you're just playing house. That's the year it gets real. By real, you meant hard.

In our fifth year, another of your children's marriage was born. And another the next year. The baby marriages kept coming

By the fifteenth anniversary, I'd witnessed the violent deaths of adult marriages. Like a case of Benjamin Button, I ask "how can something like this die like that?" Consider how we all feel when babies die. How have my friends survived the grief of still births, children who've died of cerebral palsy or in accidents? We acclimate ourselves to deaths of baby marriages and old people dying. But we question the loss of life in childhood and long marriage. This year, twenty years of marriage achieved, adultery and acrimony ganged up on a fifty-year old marriage. Ax-murdered it. When two, ten, fifteen year marriages died, my husband and I did health checks. How do we health check a fifty-year old one? Isn't there a stage where life is a given? No. The mystery of marriage is truly a mystery, a sacred thing, a secret, a sacrament, the centrality of who we become.

In A Grief Observed, Lewis writes that marriages that last to death does part often lead to marriages arrested, never ending but changed. Many widows and widowers still feel married. I imagine that even the widows and widowers who remarry have a closet identity, a person within still married to the deceased spouse.

Which anniversary do I dread most? That one. My mother-in-law faced that tenth this year.

As time passes, I accumulate clocks. Clocks tick and tock like a madness in my head and in my cells. I read clock faces that all have fragility behind their second-minute-hour times.  Fragility like a witching hour, bookends our lives. Our early marriages seem hail and healthy, like lively children, but children thrive with strong parents. Late marriages seem stalwart and strong, but time grinds us down. In our early years, your marriage took care of ours; in your late years, I hope to support it as an adult child honors her parents. It's a kind of herd health. Immunize my marriage, exercise it, support the healthy habits of marriages around me, and in turn, when the years of brittle bones and faltering flesh strain the capacity of joyous pleasures, find ways to celebrate your accomplishments. In twenty years, I want hale and healthy young marriages to look ahead to the anniversaries and find no dread in them.

Thank you for showing and teaching us to remember our Creator and to honor that which comes before us, before we ourselves grow old and stooped and the danger of finding no pleasure comes. For in doing so, we guard against losing our pleasure and joy.

A Panda Bear, A Priest and Mercy

What gave me the right to think, let alone speak aloud, “Maybe we ought not take that stuffed animal home with us?” It was his gift, from the girls, after a week of him, playing father, instead of builder. He might have preferred swinging a hammer. How does a man with two nearly grown children remember the games that entertain seven-year-old and eight-year-old girls? How does he navigate those games with bubbles, coloring books, a soccer ball, a volleyball and a language barrier? He knows phrases in Spanish. Katy and Kimberly knew no English.

Fr. Joel with "Katy" or Katherine outside
the house on the last day of building.

He clutched it to his chest as he heaved himself into the rental van, babying his damaged knee, not thinking about what might be crawling from the furry panda onto his shoulder and into his hair.

“They gave this me,” he said. They are Katy and Kimberly, who hover behind him, having hugged him goodbye. The teenage girl on our team who also played with them all week invites them into the van to hug us all, me included. To do so, they must bust through an invisible barrier under the shadow of the van out of the sunny street in front of their compound.

Did my husband see me grit the back of my jaw make psychic waves of objection, subtle but as real as if the words I was thinking took form as sound waves?

“Oh, honey. Probably we should not. Probably we should not take that back to the States. I mean, that’s so sweet of them. Do they really want to give up their toy?” To a grown man, a priest. I mean we don’t know what’s in that fur, in that stuffing? Are there bed bugs in Rosarito? Or worse vermin? I don’t know native insects in Mexico, except the black widows we crushed with our shoes back at the orphanage and the earwigs that I would smoosh in my purse as we inched along towards border security.

I wondered at once from what house did the toy usher forth and would it make a difference? Had the girls cuddled it after cuddling the feisty kitten, the one that their mother scowled at them for handling, even though our teenagers had picked up with pity? “She says it’s sick,” said the Spanish teacher on our team.

Katy, Kimberly and Sofia lived with family around them,
like this aunt' next door until we finished with the house.
By the night after we finished,
 Sofia had put in beds, a refrigerator and they'd slept there.

Had the panda been cuddled by the Chihuahua putzing around our feet with stole of ticks around its neck and a squinty left eye that leaked pus. Frankenhuahua, the kids had called it. Its face looked fused from parts, the scars of fights from bigger dogs on the street. Dogs, everywhere dogs: pit bulls mostly, but other Chihuahuas. The fire that had burned most of the girls’ house, the fire that brought Sofia to the mission organization asking for a house, had nearly killed this little guy. Sofia, who had lived between her tía next door and her tía in front of her once and future home, had shuffled between the homes since the fire in January. Her tío, a bombero, had rescued Sofia and the girls from the house, had ushered the other bomberos and stopped the fire from spreading past her house, then had given Frankenhuahua mouth-to-mouth.

He put the panda on the seat next to him and positioned his knee using both hands to stabilize it before we started the drive first out of Rosarito, then onto unpaved dust roads to the orphanage. We rocked and rolled in the fifteen passenger van. He winced up and down, side-to-side.  What had he done to earn this toy? In exchange, our team provided six packs of pompas, distributed among the neighborhood kids. Crayons, markers, coloring books of Disney Princesses, and two other bags of Dollar Tree treats. Cheap plastic baubles and diversions with half the shelf life of the panda.

Sometimes life humbles us.

He meant to go to Rosarito as he’d gone to New Orleans three years in row after Hurricane Katrina, ready to beat the heat, bust thumbs and even brave the roof, even asked. He hates heights, but the modest constructions of Mexico, two rooms, one floor, the size of a one-car garage with a concrete slab floor, stucco walls and barely sloped roofs, would seem a breeze. Compare these to the single story, two or three bedroom homes north of Lake Ponchartrain or more brazenly compared to the two story, multi-gabled Victorian in which we lived in Indiana, this would be an easy construction. It takes a couple months to finish a house for Habitat in the US, a week to finish what we put up for Sofia and the girls that week. No wiring. No plumbing.

Katy helped sponge wet stucco. Sofia helped build.

Is that worth the panda he clutched? The indulged American in me thinks not. I’m coming home to wi-fi, hot showers, flushable toilets I keep clean enough to drink from. Potable water from my garden hose, wine with dinner, chocolates for dessert.

On the side of the hill, where Sofia’s tía tossed out scraps, two small tomato plants, sporting a dozen cherry-sized tomatoes survive most of the week. I’d eat these for lunch at home. I have five times this started in neat five-by-five boxes along my driveway in Indiana. By the time we stack two lunch coolers, spread a white table cloth over them, perch three icons, of Christ, the Theotokos –the Mother of God -- and a cross for the final blessing, the tomatoes have been doused with stucco water from tambos of water to clean the cement tubs. I feel sad that tia did not pick the half ripe fruits to mix into the red chile sauce she served with stewed chicken, rice, carrots and macaroni and hot fried tortillas. Verderas, vegetables, are a condiment here, though we drove through market day where bins of napolito, tomatillo, tomatoes, fresh chiles, greens and beans were sold with second-hand clothes, shoes, household goods and tacos or tostilocos and dolces, that is sweets, like hellado or ice cream bars. Why so few vegetables? Why did the vendor at Tacos Manuel seem confused when I asked for a plate of vegetales but when a local translated verderas he allowed me  a whole plate of roasted jalapenos, radishes, cilantro, peeled cucumbers, chile salsa and guacamole? He kept offering tortillas maiz or flor (wheat flour). How could I explain that queso, wheat, corn, and meat were foods my American stomach no longer tolerated?

Gringos, I insulted myself, as I peered around my husband at the panda. Perhaps we could give it to Melina for the tiendita on the ranch? He could pose with it for a picture before we left it behind, with its Mexican vermin? The violence of the thought, the belief that we bring something cleaner, when I’ve been ushered out of Philadelphia resorts due to the resurgence of bed bugs, when my friends and family suffer from the long-term effects of untreated tick-borne Lyme disease, when we American gringos sprayed Mexican day workers who crossed the border with chemicals no less poisonous than what has reduced my diet to mere fruits, vegetables and completely unprocessed animal products? What makes me think we have it cleaner? I will go home to water that tastes like a chlorine pool. The kids in my town will die, one a week or more, from heroin overdoses.

He says to me, “We can leave it at the tiendita.”

 I reply, “I have an extra plastic bag. We’ll wash it in hot water when we get home. It’s part of the story.” He replies, “We use it for the presentation.”

We are quiet together until he says, “It’s really beautiful here.” He says later, “This was just what I needed.” I know he was humbled by his broken knee and by not being able to show his muscle on this trip. He was glad to escape all the other poison of our native culture- Facebook, texts, emails. He says, “We’ll be returning often.” Then we need the panda to tell the story. For we cannot pay for annual work trips to Mexico without all the people who cannot travel but who can support this work.

The make-shift altar for the house blessing
included Frankenhuahua, sleeping at its base.

While the panda tumbles in the washer and dryer at home, waiting for its perch on our church shelves, and its turn in the narrative of our lives, the lives of people who put us in Mexico, he says, “That was my kind of vacation, you know. We build. Sure, we work, but we get to see the people too.” And we did. We vacationed in a way that feeds my husband and me. We stood on the cold Tijuana beach. We bargained for futbol jerseys and a few gifts at the market. We watched fellow American tourists, mostly college students with their American buttcheeks hanging out of their doily-swim bottoms, wearing what they call “drug-rugs,” the hand-woven warm cover-ups perfect for the mild days and cool nights in Tijuana.  While there we and the team prayed morning and night, at the site, all the time. We prayed “Padre Nuestro, Que estas in los cielos, Sanctificado sea tu Nombre”—Our Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name. And privately, we prayed, “Lord Have Mercy.” But on whom? Us, with our prejudices or the kids who gave us their best in exchange for a bit from us, a week, two rooms, dollar tree toys?

A Turtle, An Easter Egg, Resurrection and Death Questions

Cracked like an Easter egg, spilling out more eggs. Is this what death looks like? Like a snapping turtle, a venerable mother, head split, guts spilt and all her unborn progeny aborted, nesting arrested.

Or does death look more like what I used to think, like the Death Star laser imploding a planet entire. Black oblivion and silence perceived by someone most sensitive to the quiver of life.

I've been writing about death for over two years now. I cannot decide if death is sudden, as if energy is swallowed into a black hole. Matter neither lost nor gained, transformed from parents or children or friends into molecules. If so, are there souls or spirit flapping between? Are they the dark matter?. Is death the disembodying of souls? Is there a final anguish followed by silence? A song ended abruptly after the climax of timbre and cymbals? After the walls of sound, the track cuts. For the living, is there such a thing as silence? Something is always there humming.

Or, does death best resemble decay? Does it detach the living from the dead?. The corpse swells and rots revealing all symbiotic life it once sustained. It hints at its progeny, its DNA, what it did, where it went, what it might have been.

~~~~~~

When my father-in-law was dying of pancreatic cancer, he saw work to be done until the last three or four weeks. Perhaps, he proposed, his church needed a strong man still, for the young fathers who never had one, the boys without, like his grandson. Perhaps, he still had a witness of the faithfulness of God to the nurses, the doctors, the men on the radiation ward. In the last few weeks he gave up such final tasks, it was enough just to breathe. When my uncle took interferon for the melanoma that peppered his white skin, like the moles on him, he too felt a great final purpose. He preached the gospel at all times, sometimes with words. For a few months, he came close to death first from gangrene, then in a car accident. Now he is cancer free. Three months before he died, my grandfather shuffled up to the Ambon of the Church of the Brethren, laid his great, shaky hands on my head and my husband's. Give them a great spiritual purpose, he prayed, until one lays the other into the arms of God. 

When his wife died, C.S. Lewis did not believe himself any less married. My grandmother, my mother-in-law, both old widows never believed themselves unmarried. I have no such experience to relate; I'm not hurrying along my spouse's death. The closest experiences are my own losses. When my aunt died at fifty-one, I felt tethered to her. I hadn't visited with her in some years and I missed her terribly. Now I had the haunting memory of missing her for all time. Some songs, some scents, some color blends bring her back to me with force. I feel my Uncle John's presence in who I am. His faith formed my parents and, as a result, mine. When my brother-in-law died, I saw him for months driving around town in his van. Further in the recesses my grandfather's voice booms, he spits watermelon seeds and teaches me how to bounce the lawnmower deck to unstick the wet grass before it gums up and kills the engine.

"No man is an island," wrote John Donne, "every man's death diminishes me."  If there is such a thing as a disturbance in the force, it must be the sensation that part of me died.

Seeing those eggs, tucked inside that turtle, made me think of all that would not live, like all that stopped with the deaths of family members. Such purposes they might have fulfilled, had they had a few more days.

The older I get, the more I realize that I live in overlapping concentric circles of interdependence. Human lives sustain each other. But the habitat, all its beings sustain me too. They drink the same water, breathe the same car exhaust, muck around in the waste we all produce. They die under the crush of feet or wheels or by disease. Each one sustains another, purifies, feeds.

The mother turtle with the crushed head and the top of her broken open along her perfect eggs nesting within accosted me in such a sorrowful, violent way, She will decay. Her eggs will be stolen by raccoons. The promise of life will be unfulfilled. I used think of death as inevitable and natural. I mocked Dylan Thomas' idea that we should rage rage against it. Now, when I see how each death represents in an immeasurable loss of beauty and hope, I feel enraged, a little twinge at least. I know that the relinquishing of my life allows space for another. But death remains a conundrum. I will go on wondering if it is a void, a vacuum of what once was, or if death includes legacy, the progeny, the DNA, the lasting affect of one life passed on to another.

Why I don't have a Joel-ology

BAM! I'm really writing to persuade you to read another blog post! Be warned. "What Matters Most" swipes at "theology" as we conceive it.

As I read Fr. Stephen Freeman's piece, I realized that none of us would propose to create a systematic"-ology" about another person. I don't have a systematic Joel-ology for my husband, though I think I know him well. I don't have one for my parents, either of my children or my closest friends. We don't have president "so-and-so"-ology, or Kierkegaard-ology because we know that we cannot truly distill the essence of another person (we can't even agree on when personhood begins, for Pete's sake). We can know a person. That is how we know God.

Last night, while editing short essays for submission, I re-read a piece I'd written about knowing God through the bearing witness to a friend's stillborn son. I'd just listened to one by Cheryl Strayed from the Dear Sugar column collection Tiny Beautiful Things about a woman with a newborn on the brink of death. Both Cheryl and I said we could know Jesus (a mere person to her), who is Christ (a person and divinity to me) through being witnesses to His suffering, often through historical accounts as well as through others' suffering.  I worried a bit because I'd penned an almost identical denouement as Strayed. What would it mean that I, a believer, seemed to say something so similar to someone who says she believes Jesus is only a very admirable person?

I checked myself. Not a problem, I've concluded. It was His humanity that opened the door to our encounter with and "knowing" of Divinity. He is fully human. (Most heresies started by trying to dismiss this.) And, He is fully God.

So, if you are inclined, this short bit by Fr. Stephen Freeman is a good reminder that theology is not what we "think" about God but about knowing Him, the person of God, who knows us.

What Matters Most by Fr. Stephen Freeman