Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept

 

US Interstates 41, 24 and 75 Between Terre Haute, IN and Atlanta

I've decided to focus my current writing on the places I've slept in that were not comfortable, physically or otherwise. This is the most recent. Our family, my wife, her mother, and I, made a very sudden decision to move from the Midwest to Macon, GA to both avoid the cold and the Seasonal Affective Disorder from which we all suffer. This involved my retirement so I could collect social security and selling our home by Lake Michigan, packing two homes’ worth of belongings and furniture, buying a new home in Georgia, and preparing a new and more southern mindset.

I donated 900 books from my library to a friend who had opened a used bookstore in the city. We gave away hundreds of dollars in clothing, appliances, equipment, as well as throwing away a lot. At one point, we hired a company to haul away junk from our garage. We segregated what we were tossing and what we were keeping and Jayne, who was home when they came by, pointed out the corner of the garage where the toss pile sat. But they took everything, including wheelbarrows, tools, bicycles (fortunately the ones we were moving with were in the basement), even shovels and rakes. Who takes shovels and rakes?

The weeks between our decision, finding an appropriate new home and selling ours seemed very, very slow but in retrospect they went incredibly quickly, and the day we closed on the sale of our house the company moving our belongings was packed by about 3, we loaded all 11 of our dogs and cats in my wife’s larger car, signed the papers, and drove 17 hours to make it to the signing for our new home in Macon at 10 the next morning. We made it there at exactly 10.

My wife doesn’t much like it when I drive so she did most of it, sleeping only when she felt exhausted. I was crumpled in the front seat, but as I’ve proved over and over, I can sleep nearly anywhere and in any position. Once the sun went down and we’d passed through Illinois, I slept off and on with a few waking periods. The photo above shows my wife driving with one of our dogs on her lap throughout the journey. Because I had the greater freedom, I rode with 2 of our dogs on my lap, only to discover, about the time we reached the northern outskirts of Atlanta, that one of them had been incontinent in his sleep. I attended the closing on our home in a pair of pants with a long dark pee spot down the left leg, which was indicative of our new journey as possible.

Celebrating a Chinese poet

 

“TO LIVE IS TO SHOUT AT THE SKY”

(With apologies to Nianxi Chen, whose title I have appropriated)

 

I woke because I had heard my name

Muttered in the lyrics to “Diamonds and Rust.”

I’d fallen asleep over an article about

A Chinese miner, an explosives worker, who

Had also been a poet. Waking, I sat, a dog

Curled against my haunch, my customary

Middle aged position, the middle finger

Of my right hand holding closed my right eye.

The second knuckle curled against the lid, thought-

Lessly, holding down a broken window shade

That keeps flapping up.

258 candles-6 days

Yes, I know, I won't feed Pedigree to my dogs either. And I know I'm just perpetuating the notion that a commercial maker of substandard kibble really cares about the political atmosphere rather than raking in a few million more shekels from rubes who say, "But look, a dog!" But look, a dog. Political animal though I am, some things are truer than politics. What unites us is more important than what divides us.

258 candles-days16-14

 Rabbinic wisdom holds that we were created so God could talk to himself. Another take is that God wanted us to learn compassion so a plethora of us were made. Someone else also said God wanted people to love and care for others so dogs were created. If all that is so this woman squares the circle. "Taking care of dogs is my religion."

258 candles-day 78

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Sometimes the best, most humane we can be is to simply be there. 

258 candles-day 3

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Rescuing Kalu. (Warning: Kalu's initial appearance is disturbing. He appears better by the end, but for much of the video he can be frightening. Part of the reason for my choosing it is that, as much as I'd like to think I would do the same as these people, I'm not convinced I could overcome my revulsion.)

who expects 30 year old wishes to be granted?

I had an epiphany recently about a wish I'd forgotten about. Some 30 years ago, unattached, lonely, desperate to be somewhere I could think about my life and where it might be headed, I longed for the opportunity to housesit someone's home on a beach, preferably on the Atlantic, where I could winter taking long solitary walks among the scrub, maybe with a dog (not necessarily mine), reading difficult books, and writing, writing, writing.

My epiphany, of course, and it came as I was on a deep and solitary walk without even benefit of dog, was that wholly sans realizing it's what I was doing I have stepped into that wish. The fact it isn't an ocean I live on is more than compensated by the fact I'm not housesitting or even renting but own this Great Lake beach home. I don't even need to borrow the dog.

our old friend

This is my buddy Papaya, also called Pappy. He's been with us nearly a year and a half. He was the dog of a couple renters the sister of a woman involved with our rescue was evicting. They said they couldn't take him along and intended to put him down so the rescue took him in. They didn't give anyone a clue how old he might be, so he could be anywhere from fourteen to eighteen.

He had a poor reputation for being snappy and easily angered by the time he came to us for fostering. We discovered after close watching he is nearly blind and deaf, and so long as he wasn't surprised or startled he was all right. We got in the habit of touching him as we passed to get him used to us and that's all it took. After a few days he bonded enough to me that I could lift him onto a vet's table and in and out of the car. He started sleeping on a dog bed beside us or sometimes on one in the living room. A few weeks later we came to the conclusion no one would ever want an old, crabby, snappy dog so we adopted him.

Monday, the day after Easter, our vet is coming here and if the weather is good we will take him outside on the grass and she'll inject him and he'll die.

Pappy isn't sick, at least not physically. He's got stomach issues and arthritic hips we've given him multiple medications for and the little walking he does has probably completely shred the ACL joint of his rear right leg so that it swings almost free when he takes more than a few steps. Beyond that, he could probably live another year or two. But his behavior, never really the best, has grown worse. Our largest dog, Beans, alpha of the house, took it on himself to teach Pappy where everything was, it seemed, as he'd either lead him or nudge him in directions for doors and up the deck stairs. But in the last seven months Pappy has taken to barking almost non-stop when he sees Beans and has attacked him several times. We don't know if Beans may have hurt him or if Pappy is only imagining he's a threat, but after a while of this Beans retaliated, going for the top of his head instead of his throat, and leaving a deep gash there. That was around Christmas and after that we secluded Pappy in the kitchen, calling it his "Greg Brady" apartment and referencing his groovy room divider beads.

His animosity toward Beans has only increased, to the point where he goes into a fit of barking whenever he sees him or, in the past month, imagines he is nearby. We put a towel and then a blanket over the baby gate that seperates the rooms, but Pappy would mark constantly on it--and sometimes in other places in his room--so we've folded a shower curtain over it because it's easier to clean off.  His attitude, never the best toward anyone beyond us, sometimes blooms into full-blown paranoia when he barks and snaps at things he seems only to imagine. Our greatest fear is that he will bite someone who's come to visit and who we can't warn to move slowly first, especially a child.

He's a Shiba Inu and we had never heard of that breed before he came to us. After a year and change the most we know about these dogs is they are independent, often unaffectionate dogs that act more like spoiled cats. They have a high pitched shriek often called a Shiba scream that can be ear-piercing. He's nipped at us occasionally, fortunately never breaking the skin. Dogs can't tell you what they're experiencing, of course, so we can only assume he's growing more senile and sensing imaginary threats.  He developed a dolphin-like grin in the past month that the vet explains is the mark of a stressed dog in panic mode.

Still, as I say, he could live another year. Maybe two. But what determined our course is what he enjoys rather than what he fears. He loves to go outdoors, sometimes putting a peppy step to our walk down our long driveway to the mailbox and back, after which he's exhausted and can sleep so soundly we think he might have solved the issue by dying in his sleep. He loves to go for rides and tonight we took both Kiwi, a dog we're considering adopting, and him on errands with us and then for a drive to Dairy Queen where the employees treated them to little cups of vanilla ice cream with a dog treat on top. He sometimes cries out at night and one of us will go in the kitchen and lie with him on the floor, petting him and talking soothingly, until he starts to drop off again.

Sometimes his life is full of joy. In this, his final week, we've bought expensive meaty canned food to mix with his usual fare and we give him fatty treats and sometimes even food we're eating. Dogs and cats should leave this life on a good note and we want Papaya to die knowing there are still moments of pleasure and exhultation in his day rather than it becoming a chore he--and we--must labor to get through.

Most of our other animals have been creamated but one, Rayzen, was buried out back. We've often wondered, if it's true animal souls remain where their bodies are, if that's a lonely spot, and decided Pappy should join him there. I dug the hole today. They never knew one another but I don't think that matters. Besides, we don't think his remains should be closed up in a can tucked on a shelf but allowed, like Rayzen's was, to give sustenance to the worms and grubs and other crawlies under the grass there.

this is what valentine's day means to me

My wife and I used to keep track of our years the same way most people do--by holidays and anniversaries and birthdays, and by the gifts we'd gotten for each other. But in the past few years, between the financial hits we've taken and the lessening of whatever capitalist sense we may begun with, important times have come instead to be tracked by the animals we took in.

Thus, my birthday in May is when we took in Beans; late summer is when we allowed Chicklet to move in. Easter is when Nilla came to live with us, and Boxing Day is the day she drove to the southern rim of the Cities to keep Mango from being euthanized. Late January, perhaps MLK Day, is Pappy's anniversary of taking up residence in our our comfy lives; and this year my birthday came around full circle to be the date Taffy became our baby. Similarly, Jesse came to us at Thanksgiving and Magellan was taken in near Father's Day. I could locate all the other animals we've ever taken in to some other day celebrated differently by other people.

Except for the cats and Beans, all of these beasts were intended to be short-term occupants. Now Olga has come to live with us, hopefully for only a week, on the night before Valentine's Day, prior to going on to live with another family. As much as our ministries have come to be for other people outside our home, inside it is a ministry of beasts. We see ourselves as a couple meant to either save an animal from death or provide it with as good a death as possible. As I have said for our two decades together, we don't get a happily-ever-after; for some animals, we are the happily-ever-after.

enlightenment is dog piss

"Being a community" is thinking small. Our ultimate goals and purpose cannot simply be about ourselves. Unitarian Universalists, like members of every other religion, are trying to change the world by encouraging people to live a different way. By word and by deed, Unitarian Universalists are trying to change people. It is time for us to acknowledge and proclaim this, and to see that building a religious community is but a means to that larger end...

What I am talking about is related to the "missional" trend in Unitarian Universalism, in which people are committing themselves to living out our values in real, embodied, particular ways in specific communities, "to love the hell out of the world"...Our purpose is to cultivate people who can feel such passion...

The contemporary understanding of Unitarian Universalism is in truth a utopian and demanding vision of community: we are trying to gather not the community that is, but the community that ought to be...The religious community to be built...[is] one that deliberately includes the formerly excluded. Our goal became to build on the experience of...people who...realized that they could be themselves in this church. It followed that everyone should have that experience: the historically marginalized and oppressed, the disabled, the mentally ill, the chemically sensitive. Even those on the margins of traditional religious community--the children--are to be brought to the center...

Inclusion has been our goal. But inclusion is about "bringing in." We should now be thinking about "going out." Now we should turn ourselves inside out to turn the world upside down.

--From "Religious Community is Not Enough" by Tom Schade in the Winter 2013 issue of UUWorld

We must turn ourselves inside out to turn the world upside down. That is, and should be, a frightening proposition. I know I'm scared. I'm scared shitless of it. I've been turning inside out the past two years (at least) and all it's brought me thus far is depression and frustration. Sometimes I see Something, Something That Is I miss and most people miss, and it's a great moment. And then the crushing reality of How Things Are--the need to make money just to live, the fact that I'm in my 50s and my time left on the earth is finite and growing smaller by the minute, and the overwhelming  effort of work like that (and the fact that it pays no money)--overtakes it and leaves me eating ice cream in the middle of the night because I need to get numb and I don't want to get drunk.

But I keep returning to it, I keep turning myself inside out because I know that it's work worth doing, maybe the only work worth doing. The Real Work Gary Snyder called it. It's tough to admit to myself I want to turn the world upside down. I don't want to rock the boat. I want people to like me. I ought to just keep my head down and get along, I got my own shit to worry about. Paying the mortgage, keeping the house warm in the winter, getting the smell of dog piss out of the carpet. There's nothing more crushing when I'm trying to meditate and get myself together than the ripe, fishy reek of dog piss.

But when I'm honest with myself that's what I want to do. Turn the world upside down. At least one small part of it, the part I'm in contact with. It's a tiny, tiny part but the recognition I came to yesterday was that working at the microcosmic level is where the real action's at. It's where real change can occur. I haven't a clue how or what the change looks like. But change is needed and it's already begun with me. And that's horrible because what it does is open my eyes to injustice and wrong all around me and know there's a better way to be. When I was in Montreal in sesshin I spoke with the abbot one day and said, "I think I've made it, I've become enlightened." And he appraised me and looked really sad and said, "I'm so sorry."

That's where the depression and frustration and anger come from, this open-eyed, frank regard of the world as it is and how it ought to be and how wide the margins between those posts are. And how much work that is and how little time I have left and how can I find meaningful work that pays me enough to help us live on and GODDAMMIT! I can still smell dog piss.

In my best moments I know that smell of dog piss keeps me grounded but it also distracts me. My frank admission is that I know I have gifts and the urge to share them and I know how--or at least imagine some of the ways--but I'm either too timid or cowardly or caught up in my own shit to take whatever the next step may be. Some days I imagine the next step is to bake bread and take it to places where the homeless gather and share it. Some days it's to just sit down in the sun and meditate.
Some days it's to visit friends. The issue becomes recognizing all those things and not acting on any of them because it's a lot easier to surf websites while waiting for the vinegar I've soaked into the carpet to work. Turning myself inside out has led me to falling into a First World Problem: I've got the shits and I'm faced with two dozen different remedies. I know better than to think someone will come along and say, "This one," or to think that's what I want. But the varying claims and prices and dosages keep me occupied until suddenly I have to go again. I waddle off to the public toilet thinking, "Next time I'll pick one."

wedding homily

One of the things I'm discovering in the course of conducting weddings is that some terms with which most seminarians and religiously-interested are familiar, like homily vs. sermon, are not understood by the general public. So that yesterday, after I'd conducted my tenth wedding with my ninth couple, the bride asked me, "Did you know all along you were going to change the service?" from the previous night's rehearsal. I said I didn't understand, and she said, "All that stuff about dogs and dirt you said, you didn't say any of that during the rehearsal." I said, "No, that was the homily, I hadn't finished it until this morning; but I mentioned last night during rehearsal, 'here's where I read my homily, about five minutes.'" It turned out she had no clue what a homily is, so my wife points out I ought to rephrase my comments about it in the future to "short sermon."

Here, then, is my short sermon from yesterday's wedding.

Most of you are aware that [the bride's] dog Mistie ran off a month ago. Some of you may be aware that my wife , [the groom’s] sister, and their [other] sister and I joined in searching for Mistie for two days before she was located safe among a nearby pack of dogs. I searched the north and southwestern ends of the farm property with one of our dogs.  What many of you are not aware of is that when I first moved to Wisconsin in the early 90s I worked the farm here with Joe and his dad in exchange for room and board.  If I hadn’t had the realization before then I figured out working here that I would never make a farmer.  I’m a good farmhand:  tell me to make this big pile a littler pile I can do that.  But it never occurs to me to make the pile littler. So when I didn’t have a shovel in my hands I wandered the property. Searching for Mistie gave me the opportunity to do that again.

          While I don’t ask you to take your shoes off, this is nonetheless sacred ground. This acreage hasn’t just fed [the bride and groom]; trillions of creatures that have wandered across it over millions of years found sustenance here. Some of those creatures are still around. If you’re a farmer or a hunter or just a wanderer like me you’re likely to recognize and identify a lot of them. My dog and I noted all kinds of life as we ranged over the farm, including twice visiting the spot we’re now standing. Mistie wasn’t here, but we took pleasure in looking here anyway. Dogs are great for experiencing the sacred, maybe because they have no agenda. My dog wasn’t looking for Mistie, he was just ranging with me. You people with dogs, watch them when you walk a new place.  Their ears are more alert, they hold themselves a little taller and straighter, and have a certain bounce in their step that suggests they’re dancing. 

Mistie, of course, made it back home.  This farm is home to Mistie and Buck, of course, and to [the bride and groom]. If you haven’t spent appreciable time here you owe it to yourself to do so.   This farm is home as well to turkeys and deer, coyotes and fox, rabbits and shrews, ants and gnats, the large-footed and the tiny-footed. It’s also home to trees and brush, rocks and soil, algae and moss, bacteria and protozoa, and good old-fashioned dirt. There is life here, not only in what breathes and grows but in the plate tectonics that shift like the earth’s crust is exhaling and push stone forward and up, a kind of growth. Some of you know that just a gram of soil may contain more or less a billion microbes alone. If you climb one of those deer stands you can get a pretty good aerial view of portions of the property and help gain a better perspective of just how much life goes on here. 

          Unfortunately, [the bride and groom] can’t demand rent from these billions of neighbors but on the plus side they are unlikely to stop in to borrow some sugar or the lawnmower.

          Like any other ecosystem, marriage is composed of living things. It’s in the nature of living things to grow. [Friends], you have no intention in your second marriages to have children but that’s not to say you aren’t raising a family. Consider the improvements you’ve made on this land. Consider the improvements you’re making on your home together. Then there are all these children, sons and daughters and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews. Whether any of them continue to live here after you yourselves are dead doesn’t matter. Their being here now is an improvement, a gift to you.

But in addition to Buck and Mistie, in addition to the kids, in addition to the horses and cats and raccoons and mice and flies and tadpoles and corn and soy beans and aspen and milk weed and thistle and tiger lily and blackberries and fungi and earthworms and thermophiles and bacilli and rhizomes, your marriage itself is a living being that breathes and grows in the same mysterious manner all the other things do.  It isn’t, can’t be, an inert thing that, once this service ends, comes into sudden existence and, years from now, suddenly ceases to be. Your relationship, like the soil and grass on which we stand, is a holy thing and it has its own life.  Keep your marriage safe, keep it well, keep it fed. Like a dog, like a plot of land, it will reward you with long service, a kind of love itself.  

olana and memory

 In 1825 the young English painter Thomas Cole made a sketching voyage up the Hudson River.  Even by 1825 the valley was tamed and pastoral, hardly wilderness, but just to the west in the Catskill Mountains, Cole found a wild as yet unpainted landscape, with high craggy peaks, precipitous valleys and falls, and a dark forest that ranged ever westward to the Great Plains...[Like] many of the Romantic painters of his time, he was attracted to the noble, ancient scenery of the classical Italian landscapes, with its inspiring ruins and its tamed, pastoral vistas. But after his return to America, Cole discovered a land that was new to art.

His metaphorical landscapes of the Hudson River Valley found willing viewers in a swiftly urbanizing nation, and his work drew a number of fellow artists to the region...Although they painted outdoor scenes, these artists were not plein [sic] air painters. They would make sketching trips into the wilds and then return to their studios to construct immense, narrative canvasses depicting, sometimes with exaggeration, the pastoral landscapes they had witnessed. Although they never thought of themselves as a group, the painters were given a name, the Hudson River School. They spawned in midcentury another school of American landscape painters led by Frederick Edwin Church...[who] concentrated on the awe-inspiring wilderness of the American West.

In 1836, having found his querencia, Thomas Cole settled in the place, on the west bank of the Hudson in the town of Catskill.  His disciple Frederick Church had by the 1860s ranged far beyond the Valley and was best known for his bast canvasses of sublime, terrifying scenes...By the early 1870s Church was one of the most popular and also one of the richest painters in America, and when he decided to build his dream house, he returned to the wellspring of his inspiration. He selected a height on the opposite bank of the Hudson River from the home of his mentor and there constructed a great neo-Persian manor with sweeping greenswards and grand vistas down to the river. This was not simply a dwelling place for Church and his family; the site was carefully chosen for what the Chinese geomancers, had they been consulted, would term feng shui, a sparsely treed height above water where the air and the wind were propitious. Furthermore, Church designed aspects of his own life and travels into the house, layers of meaning and metaphor. Students of the design of the place, which he named Olana, see it as one of his greatest works of art.

--from Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place by John Hanson Mitchell

As I was growing up Olana was a regular visit, both for school and for personal/ familial pleasure. One of my first memories of being outdoors somewhere unfamiliar I recognize now as among the great open space of the parking lot.  I associate the tang of cedar smoke with the place. Decades later, divorced and staying in my parent's driveway, I would cycle to the house and sometimes along the wooded trails that lead down to the road to the river; and later, remarried and smoking a pipe, I'd take our lone Good Grey Dog walking along the same trails, discovering all kinds of physical connections between the house and the adjoining property of the local community college.

tee shirts and ice

Today is the second day running with seasonal temps here on the rim and everyone is taking advantage of it.  On my drive to get stamps this morning there were guys in short sleeves and yesterday I saw a girl of about 10 running pellmell down her family's very long driveway in baggy red shorts, her very white legs kicking behind her.  I've got sheets and blankets hanging out to catch as much of the fresh air as they can to keep it snug in its fibers so as we sleep in them we breath it all in.  Yesterday we took a walk on the adjacent trail with the littlest ones who have never set foot on it before and the looks on their faces, wide grins with their tongues out and the eldest one panting, made our hearts sing.  In the evening we met my sister-in-law for beer and patty melts at one of the local watering holes and listened to a fellow on acoustic guitar covering the Dead and the Allmans and Johnny Cash.  We dropped $10 in his tip jar and felt right in the world.  Now today I have just walked in from a long walk with the youngest and spriest of our beasts.  It was an odd thing, wearing a tee shirt while tramping through the woods stepping on the patches of ice and snow to keep my feet from burying in the mud, the musky smell of wet hay leaving me intoxicated.  And then to sit down to write this, and the below--the song that converted me to punk--suddenly playing on the local radio station.  Such a day is as perfect as can be, the sort one hopes, if there is a heaven, that can be lived over and over and over.

not alone

I'm a sucker for sob stories and it sometimes helps and sometimes hinders my capacity to be pastoral.  I've had to learn just to let things flow and accept that my subconscious--with a little screening from my superego--knows better what to say and do.

Last night my sister-in-law called after her dogs had been hit by a car.  I say "her dogs" although they are actually my two nephews' dogs, "hers" by dint of loving and caring for them.  She was in tears as I think anyone should be at the sudden and accidental death of someone she loves.  My wife went over immediately to help her get the dogs off the road, keep the older dog who hadn't been able to keep up with the two safe, and comfort both of them.  The dogs, big, dumb, littermate beasts of golden labs who loved nothing better than chasing a tennis ball ("C'mon, uncle Bobby, just 300 more throws!"  "Sorry, kids, 500 is my limit."), had been outside to whiz, heard something by the road (most likely a deer), and ran directly into the path of a passing car.  Both were killed instantly, and in some fashion it's good that they were, since either of them were probably incapable of going on without the other.

My wife got the call and left as soon as she dressed.  She found her sister knelt over their bodies having covered them and dragged them as much away from the road as she could (they are huge dogs).  My brother-in-law, their brother, having been called by their mother, soon joined them and hefted the two bodies into the trunk of his car to deliver them to our vet on Monday for cremation.

Why didn't I go over with her?  Because we have had our own drama and I had to stay home to deal with another dog.  Two days prior my wife had driven nearly to Canada to take in a dog that had been brought from California to be adopted, only to have bitten two people at his foster home.  He had been starved, had numerous food aggression issues, and where any food or anything food-like was involved, the lizard part of his brain kicked in and he would do anything to have it.  He arrived at our place Friday at 1 in the morning.

He's a good dog, by which I mean he's clumsy and playful as a pup, with huge soulful eyes that draw you inside his head where you've got room because there's almost nothing else there except bad memories.  He's malnourished, thin as a rail, and has renal issues.  But he's loving and trusting as only a brainless dog can be.

By 6 that evening he had bitten my wife.  Not hard, but it broke the skin and it causes her pain.  He snapped at her for reaching down to pick up a used tissue.

I had spent the day with my father-in-law--this is a post all about family--who is in hospice care while he suffers from COPD, so his primary caretaker (my mother-in-law) could get out of the house.  I got a message on my phone from my wife with the simple line that the new dog bit her.  We knew what that meant.  Three strikes is more deadly in the animal world than even in American jurisprudence.

Since we are fostering him, it isn't our decision to make.  The agency that "owns" him convened its board and decided that it was best to have him euthanized.  I don't blame them; they operate by volunteer and on a shoestring budget and to knowingly adopt out a dog that bites is worse than bad publicity, it's legally actionable.  But we cried.  Long and loud and hard.  I cried as if I had been given the sentence.  I was angry and bitter:  this dog had been brought all the way from California, where he already faced death for having been a stray, to Minnesota, where he had no clue what was happening.  He'd been placed in one home where he'd been confused and struck out, and now in another where, promised the loving care he'd been denied all his life, it was to be cut short because his lizard brain was controlled by his once-empty belly.

Even in the midst of my tears, I knew I was crying about myself.  It was a selfish feeling, that he had been brought just close enough to touch my heart, and then snapped away.  I hadn't even known him 24 hours and I would miss him.  My crying was all about me.  I knew it and couldn't stop anyway.  But when I did I recognized he had come to us for a reason:  we are to give him the affectionate care he had been denied.  Some people are allowed to be special that way.  We were, to use my wife's phrase, to give him a lifetime of love in a weekend.  This is our blessing.  To be capable of and willing to do that.  My nephews' dogs had had long, loved lives.  This new dog had not.  They died in a moment because of a single act of listening to their lizard brains.  He will die because his lizard brain is all that's kept him going.

Tomorrow we're to take him in.  In my rational state I recognize he has many other issues that keep him from having a painless life:  his renal problems and something involving his spine that causes him to walk with a swinging gait like a sailor suddenly taken off the sea.  He is too weak, despite his youth, to jump on the bed most times, so we help him up.  He rolls on his back like a happy, secure dog.  He plays with toys like a puppy just discovering his teeth.  But his teeth are also dangerous and a child or another animal could easily be the next thing he uses them on.  His death will be necessary not because he's inconvenient or difficult but because he is dangerous and his life could become too painful for him.  But my wife and I will accompany him tomorrow and we'll hold him and tell him he's a good dog.  He will not be alone and he will not be unmourned.

coyote on the trail

that there are wild beasts here on the rim is something we all know.  there've been bears spotted a mile south  and one was shot at the local ramp onto the interstate north of here after being struck by a car.  we've seen turkey and deer, of course, and feral cats, some feral dogs, and there's often stories of wolves.  we often hear coyotes at night, sometimes close by, usually in the winter and spring, but this summer we've heard them since late june.

a couple days ago I was out walking the dogs north on the trail when one dog, the younger husky mix, sprang off into the underbrush and didn't return for about 5 minutes.  that's not unusual.  what was so was that further down the trail, just before he returned, I saw an animal I took at 1st for him emerge from the trees and trot quickly south.  when I realized it wasn't my dog I took it for a fox but then realized it was larger than that, and by the time it had jumped back into the trees and darted into the cow pasture to the east I'd identified it as a coyote.

my dog hadn't barked or growled or made any sounds I could hear and then he plowed back out onto the trail, obviously seeking the coyote.  I say a lot of stuff about them but they're basically well-trained dogs and so when I called him he came right over and submitted to being leashed.  I kept him on it although he pulled and whined as we went by the area the coyote had come out from, and when we passed by the spot where it sprang into the field he went absolutely nuts, tugging and twitching and for the next couple yards kept turning around and whining.  at last I turned too and there, about 40 feet behind us, trotted the coyote.  it was an immature one, not a juvenile I think but younger than an adult, and probably a male.  it hesitated for a moment when I turned, affording me a good look, and then darted into the undergrowth and back into the field.  this was fewer than 10 minutes walk from our house and within spitting distance of our neighbor's homes on both sides of the trail.

what I imagine happened was that my dog smelled the coyote and came perilously close to it resting.  now, my dog is not a bruiser.  he is a big, knuckleheaded, playbowing, overgrown pup, although to an especially near-blind and unable-to-smell coyote he might look like a wolf.  we checked him all over for bites or scratches after we got home but there were none we could find.  what is especially of interest to me is the coyote's trotting after us on the trail after he'd been safely passed by.  my wife said our dog's twisting and turning was his getting into protection stance but I say he was trying to invite the coyote home for a sleepover.

an important part of me is glad I live in a place where there are still dangerous animals prowling.  would my opinion change if one of them attacked and killed my dogs or cats?  probably, at least for a little while.  but that's my problem, not theirs and not, I suspect, even my pets'.  we should be aware of the dangers that surround us and remember that, despite our current position at the top of the predator list most places, that placement doesn't always hold.  nor should it.  I'm not about, like timothy treadwell, to go live with the grizzlies in order to try my luck--I appreciate my securely closed door--but I like having to be aware that, once I step beyond the borders of my property, and at night, even within those borders, there are animals that could and would do me harm.

in the time of humiliating defeat

I'm tired of living on hope.  out here on the rim we made history by forcing a recall election of scott walker, only the third time in american history, and then put up against him the same guy who was trounced by him two years ago and who was now trounced by him again, only by a larger margin.  depressing doesn't begin to cover how some of us feel.

it's gutwrenching to see this happen, to have our hopes, which are all we have, really, dashed so completely and irrevocably, to have to watch the opposing team, carried to victory, dance in the end zone and then rub our faces in it.  that, of course, is politics, but it's depressing to no end.  and disheartening.  and humiliating.

in the midst of all this, as I sat and watched the returns and got further and further into a funk, my dog who is nearly always nervous and afraid came in and lept onto the couch with me, then leaned against me until she was folded on my lap and compressed against my chest like she was a blade and I was the handlecover she was melded to.  I petted her, saying "you really do count on me, don't you?"  her respoonse was a soft, thick thump of her tail.  her eyes closed and she fell into a deep sleep, trusting that I would keep her from sliding off me.

this, in the midst of all the rest, is what we must do.  we must hug and hold one another and be equal to the trust of our dogs. 

haunted by hayrolls

we're absolutely haunted by the presence of hayrolls here on the rim. every field has dozens either dotting it or lined up along 1 end--usually closest to the road--and there is a field every other mile. this time of year the hay smells of sweet decay, the scent of mouldering books and the tar or pitch or whatever it is that coats twine these days. the tang blends too with the odor of woodsmoke, oak or cherry or cedar or pine, that wafts off the roofs of farmhouses we pass.

when I walk my dogs this time of year I have to be ready for the sudden snap of wind that slaps me at the tops of hills until my face feels flayed. I'm taking a course in buddhism now, which is like drinking coffee with an old friend, and getting back into practice as much as I can. I practice tai chi most mornings and meditate while walking. but the monkeymind--the name zen writers give to the ceaseless roil that's in our minds--in me is strong. one is supposed to turn off monkeymind but I don't think mine has ever even slowed down. it's like a springfed stream in me, constantly refreshing and splashing and bubbling and babbling. I try to let it go by without focussing on it and sometimes that works and sometimes it is a woodpecker knocking against the walls of my brain.

I don't live in silence much--I have the radio on all the time in my car and in the house, and even when I'm walking with the dogs I have a constant litany of 1 or 2 songs rumbling through my head. today it was this tune, altho why I couldn't tell you. there's also the roar of the wind across the snow and the crows and the faroff trainwhistle to the north and the rumble of trucks on the interstate and gravel crunching under my feet. it's a symphony.

if this paper is wet

most of my writing the past few days has been of little interest outside a very narrow audience. (really. locating proof of the jewishness of the author in the 1st 2 chapters of the book of luke.) but I have also been writing yesterday's sermon on the topic of forgiveness, particularly apt since rosh hashanah begins in a few days, after which is yom kippur. on my way into the hub to deliver the sermon I realized the congregation, like most uus conversational under the least circumstances, would want to gnaw at the topic like it was a bone, so I cut about a page from it so we would have a 25 minute congregational dialogue. I've marked those incisions with brackets.

“If This Paper is Wet, It’s Because I’m Crying So Bad”
A Sermon Delivered to DUUC,
Burnsville, MN, on September 25, 2011

This past July I drove out to Pennsylvania to spend some time with my dad. Having most of the summer free I avoided the Eisenhower Interstate system in favor of the old interstates and back roads. While there I drove out to my sister’s place in southwest New York and the Hudson River Valley where I grew up and then back out west toward Jamestown to meet up with my wife who was flying into Cornell to share my final week with my dad. Together we took another two days driving home.

What I noticed more than anything else on that long, circuitous route was the number of homes for sale and houses that have been abandoned. And not all of them were on the typical Hooterville-type roads that may have been paved at one time but now the only remnant of that is the occasional even patch where if you’re driving a car rather than a truck it might bottom out because the road has washed out lower than the transmission is slung. These were state and county roads that were in very good shape, where the bracken on either side is cut low and the signs are all new. I counted hundreds of such houses—all right, “counted” is not accurate because I didn’t count—but it’s fair to say I noticed what must have been hundreds of such places.

We live about five miles outside the little town of Baldwin, Wisconsin, where I’ve noticed that along the back roads between town and our house there are five homes for sale and four abandoned houses. You know the kind of places I mean by “abandoned.” A home up for sale, besides the telltale sign, often has the lawn cut and the hedges trimmed and all the buildings are in fair shape. Sometimes there’s a welcoming wreath on the front door and a nice little landscaped garden in the yard. An abandoned house can often be seen from the road only by a corner or a sagging porch end jutting out of the greenery. The grass has grown as tall as the top of the porch and the trees have shouldered together to keep the place seluded. Where I come from back east it’s not unusual to see large patches of fields where the farmers don’t plow because of variations in the terrain, but in this part of the country wherever there’s a clump of trees in a field or a flat place it surrounds a weathered empty house or the foundation of one. Sometimes in the winter in an area you’ve just moved to the bare branches uncover one of these places and on your drive home one night you’ll say, “I never knew that place was there.”

As a thought experiment I started keeping track of homes for sale and abandoned houses within a five-mile radius around our house but I gave up when I reached thirty-five. Perhaps the most disturbing part was the number of homes for sale where the house is still being kept up but the sign proclaiming it available and giving contact information is itself obscured by weeds or branches or overgrown by grass and shrubs, as if the owner has given up hope and is only willing to keep up part of the pretence that someone driving by might want to buy it.

It’s a sad time in this country, we all know that. [In some ways it strikes us as a sadder time than ever before even when we remember the turbulent 60s or 30s or even if we reread our history and recall the 1850s and the Civil War. Sadness is often the emotion of the day. We read about young girls sexually abused and murdered and we say, “that’s so sad.” We read about men, high on amphetamines or cough syrup, or women on crystal meth and with nothing left to lose, provoking a standoff with police and pretending they’ve got a weapon or threatening a cop with a car, and the official gun comes out and ends their miserable life and we say, “that’s so damn sad.” Everything around us seems so rotten and people seem hopeless and, well, it seems as if there’s nothing we can do that can make it better. ]

The title of my sermon is “If This Paper is Wet, It’s Because I’m Crying So Bad,” and some of you might recognize that as a quote from a recent sad story. It’s one of the messages Steven Cross, a divorced, unemployed man with a young son, left his 11 year old boy in a note the morning he disappeared. Let me remind you a little of that story. It’s a local one so you might have heard it. Sebastian Cross is an 11 year old boy who woke one morning back in July to discover that his dad, architect and single father Steven Cross, had left him alone in the house with two letters. One, addressed to Sebastian, explained that Steven had left for good, and directing the boy to the home of a neighbor and good friend, to whom the other letter was addressed. Sebastian’s letter included this heartbreaking sentence, “If this paper is wet, it’s because I’m crying so bad” as well as the astonishing news that his mother, whom the boy had not seen since he was 2 after which Cross explained she had died from cancer, was in fact alive.

Sebastian’s mother, now known as Katik Porter, had never expressed interest in contacting either of them and her whereabouts at that time were unknown. To be fair, Porter, who has a history of substance abuse and arrest, has since reemerged and asked to be a part of the boy’s life.

In his letter to Sebastian, Cross explained that things were mighty bad and had been for a long time. Cross had been out of work for a while, had been the subject of several litigations by former clients, and his financial problems had been accruing since at least 2007. A bank was scheduled to foreclose on the house they lived in. In booking photos since police discovered him in Cambria, California, Cross looks like a shell-shocked 60 year old for whom the world has turned out to hold more misery than he’d been told it would. After spending a month living out of his car in various California towns, Cross had finally found work at a deli where he was known as a tall-talker for the stories he told employers and co-workers. Doug Lindsey, co-owner of the deli, has said, “It’s a horrible situation…It’s just a sign of the times.”

It is, isn’t it, a sign of the times? Cross has explained his leaving Sebastian as his attempt to keep the boy from seeing the father homeless and destitute. Most of us in this room are fortunate enough not to have to leave behind our kids and our homes in order to start new and better lives. But the chances are that we know someone, maybe intimately, children or friends, only a step or two away from feeling that packing it in, packing up, and walking away is the only honorable solution left. Who is only a paycheck or a job or a marital argument away from that home becoming empty, the grass growing chest-high, the trees slowly merging as if hiding from the world the shame of someone’s failure.

What do we do with those people? And by “those people,” of course, I mean us. Because much as we might think ourselves outside that demographic, if nothing else the current economic collapse, often referred to as the worst in American history since the Great Depression, is a visceral reminder for many of us that we are not that secure in our fortunes. It can take only the loss of a job, of an income, the closing of a place of business, to break out the sweat on our foreheads and make us start to look around wildly for what we can jettison from our lives, the boat or the motor home or the cable connection, the weekly dinner out, the new clothes, the
Christmas or birthday presents, the relationship, what we can do without to keep the wolf from the door another couple weeks.

The other day I had a knock at my door but it wasn’t the wolf. It was one of my neighbors come to ask a favor. Dennis, who looks and sounds like the Canadian actor Graham Greene, is a farmer about three miles to our west and he’d had four stray dogs show up on his property that week in sets of two. The dogs had obviously been cared for and he could see the outline of collars on each neck, although there were no collars on any of them when they appeared in his fields. He already has four dogs and they weren’t getting along with the new ones. He surrendered them to another farmer—our township long ago eliminated the budget for an animal control officer after the county pet shelter also went belly up, and the farmer, who is also the township’s council chair, has been the unpaid acting officer for years, holding strays in one of his barns—but they were scheduled to be shot in a few days if no one claimed them. Would we be willing, Dennis asked, to hold them at our place until he could find adopters?

I want to note this happens, abandoning dogs, in our area often. We’re a couple miles off I-94 and there are wide stretches of roads where no one can see anything you do. It’s not unusual on my daily walks during spring thaw to find deer carcasses some hunter has thrown into a ditch after cutting off the antlers and choice pieces of meat, leaving the head and legs and guts for my dogs to discover. Just the week before last my largest one found where another person, probably after having cleaned his freezer, had dumped about five pounds of uncleaned pond fish by the side of the road. They had bloated and exploded in the sun and the smell tickled his nose a lot earlier than it did mine.

Last year my wife and I were walking our dogs, including the lab we found curled in a tiny broke-leg lump on the side of the road nine years ago, on the trail near our house. There had been flooding that spring that took out a bridge and we used that as a turnaround for our walks. A large brindle-colored dog bounded across the creek and joined us and after he and our dogs sniffed one another, joined us in heading home. He had no collar but he was in good shape and we assumed he was a local dog we hadn’t seen. As we got nearer home and nearer the main road, I was nervous about him following us onto the highway, so I stayed with him and Jayne took our dogs home and came back with a car so we could take him back to his home. He bounded in the back and we drove from neighbor to neighbor, asking if he was theirs or if they knew where he belonged. About five stops in, we realized he had been abandoned.

We couldn’t take him in so we contacted Jim, the farmer who’s also the council chair, and he said we had about four days to find him a place. This story has a happy ending. We put photos of him on Facebook that night and within a couple hours our friend Liz, who’d only the week before lost a local election and whose own dog had been killed the previous year by a car, contacted us to say that now she had the time and energy available to take him in. Liz drove over to Jim’s with my wife the next day and they had cartoon hearts coming out of each other’s eyes on meeting one another. His name is Murphy now and we get regular updates and photos showing how well he’s doing.

They don’t all have happy endings. Jim has had to shoot ten dogs already this year. Dennis didn’t want to make it fourteen if he could help it. I said yes, we’d find some way, and he said he had a couple leads but wanted to have a backup plan. He called me that night to say he’d found placements for three of them and then called the next morning to say he’d found a place for the last one. But he’s keeping my number on speed dial, he said, because he expects the situation will happen again soon.

[We figure, by the way, there are probably nearly as many cats abandoned out our way too, but aside from the few that take up residence at local farms, including one that winters in one of our barns, we assume the coyotes get them.

We say, “how sad” and we go on because what else can we do? Dogs and cats are even less visible than abandoned houses.] People in desperate times do desperate things. It’s not all bad news. Yesterday we learn that a La Crosse mother, citing Wisconsin’s 2001 Safe Haven Law, surrendered her three-hour-old newborn boy at a fire station where she also provided health and medical histories. This boy will doubtless grow up with complications from his abandonment, but I cannot fault someone who recognizes when she’s in over her head, especially in light of the reasons the Safe Haven Law was enacted. Perhaps the flip side to the American Dream, the idea that you can someday have it all, is that when it becomes too hard to manage, you can walk away from it.

Here is my question. Do we forgive these people who do these things? And if so, how do we forgive them? Relationships can be more quickly abandoned as houses. For instance, Dennis is certain he knows at least one farmer who has dumped a couple dogs on his property. He asks me, how can you do such a thing to an animal you’ve cared for? And also, how can you even bring that up when you know the other person?

We don’t all know someone who’s walked away from his home, his child, a pet, but we all know someone who has somehow crossed the boundaries we might think are well-established and inviolable. Here’s a for instance: I had a friend, a good friend, Bonnie. Like me she had been homeless and in need and had gotten back on her feet. At least it seemed so. Back in the late 90s, after she’d been working regularly as an accountant for a homeless advocacy group in the Twin Cities, Bonnie’s employer discovered she’d been embezzling money from the organization to fund trips to Treasure Island casino. Bonnie lost her job and was arrested but it never went to trial and she didn’t serve any jail time. It was, the mutual friend who told me about it said, a sign of the times.

I was incensed. I can’t fault stealing, I’ve found myself in positions where I’ve had to steal food. I’m not proud of those times, but I tell myself I took things that weren’t expensive and didn’t cause anyone much pain. What Bonnie did was to take money from people who least could afford the loss, who had already lost everything, and taken it from a group helping people in situations she had herself been in. It was the equivalent of spitting in the face of a nursing mother. In a fit of self-righteous apoplexy I dropped her from my life.

[You probably have an idea how this ends. Shortly after entering seminary I came to the conclusion that I need to forgive her. After all, if, as I keep hearing at United, the best way we can live out a life like Jesus or Gandhi or the Buddha is to behave as they did, then I need to live out my belief that no one is beyond redemption or forgiveness. If I hope, after all the wrongs and questionable decisions I’ve done in my life, to be at peace with who I am, then I need to be at peace with Bonnie.

It hasn’t gone any further than that.] I know this is what I have to do but the situation hasn’t presented itself nor have I gotten in touch with her through that common friend to bring the moment to its crisis. There is precedent for this. Pope John Paul II forgave Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish would-be assassin who shot him in St. Peter’s Square in 1981. Georgia Congressman John Lewis who, as a young civil rights advocate was spat on and had his skull fractured at Selma, forgave Governor George Wallace before his death. Bonnie didn’t shoot me or split my skull but I admit I’m afraid. She did a great wrong that hurt many people. Somehow the fact her actions didn’t affect me directly makes it harder. How do I say to her, “I forgive you” and mean it?

Someday Sebastian Cross will be faced with the need to forgive his father for abandoning him. Someday Dennis is going to ask that other farmer why he thought someone else should shoulder the cost he couldn’t anymore. Someday each person who walks away from a home or a dog or cat will need to face the need to forgive himself for having done that. Someday each of us will face the need to forgive someone we know, someone we love for having committed an act that, while it may not be the equal of abandonment or embezzlement, nonetheless pushes us away. What do we say, to them and to ourselves? How do we say it?

watching him

it was a meeting like most meetings I've attended: long, dull, and nothing to do with me. I was there in my capacity as intern to observe church process and administration and it was a typical church board meeting. until things were running late and some attempts to quicken the pace led to extra work being pressed on a congregant volunteer whose suggestions that the board get acquainted with new social media before determining a social media policy had been met with barely concealed contempt both for that media and people who participate in it. the visitor stomped out in a huff, someone chided the chair, "that was very rude and humiliating," and the meeting, rather than wrapping up in 5 minutes, went on another half hour.

I don't regret the meeting. I left tired and just wanting to be home and in bed with my family. I called my wife a couple times on the drive--one of our dogs, the one with picophilia aggravated by allergies, had been eating carpet fiber again and had a belly full of it and she had driven him to the animal emergency clinic in oakdale for surgery. he was an older dog, 13, and hadn't come out of surgery well, but over the hours had been progressing to the point he was resting more comfortably. she called back after checking in with the vets again: he had spiked at 100+ temperature but was cooling down and, while groggy, was responding to them and wagging his tail. it looked like he'd sleep the night and recover in the morning.

I'd nearly reached the wisconsin border 5 minutes later when she called back. "the clinic just called. merlin's in arrest, his temperture has gone up to 109, and they're doing cpr. can you get there?"

I said of course I could. my wife was crying, sniffing and bawling. we knew he was dying and she wanted someone with him. she couldn't make it. I turned around at the bridge and headed back on 94 at 85, keeping the line open so she and I could be together while I drove. I don't remember half the things either of us said, I just remember saying, "I'm at manning now;" "I'm on the ramp now;" "I'm on 10;" "I see the sign."

the clinic called on the house phone to say he wasn't responding to cpr and asking if she wanted them to discontinue. she said, "he's almost there." I rounded the corners and pulled into the lot, told her, "I'm here, I'll call you in a minute," and rushed inside. a girl met me at the door to let me in and take me in back.

his little white body was on his side, his belly shaved white and stapled, and a woman standing next to him, rhythmically pressing down on his chest while another inflated and deflated a bag whose tube was shoved in his throat. when I reached the table I touched him and I swear I felt his leg shiver the way he did when he was asleep and I gently touched him to wake him. the doctor was saying things to me that she needed to say, but all I caught was the drift that there was some more surgical things they could do but she didn't think he would survive those. I asked if I could be at his head and they moved around to accomadate me.

his eyes were focused on something directly ahead of him. his heart was still beating. I said, "hi, buddy, it's okay, it's all okay," and let my hand settle on his head in the space between his ears where his fur was soft and his head warm the way he liked me to do. I said, "you can discontinue now, it's okay," and they immediately stopped. I have seen many animals die in my life, and a lot of them animals I loved, and his eyes dimmed and blackened the way that animals' eyes do. I told him repeatedly he was a good dog and he was loved and it was all all right.

the doctor asked if I wanted to spend time alone with him and I cried. I cried like I hadn't cried for my mother when she died or for my older dog who'd been with me nearly 17 years. they wrapped him in a blanket and took me to a room with couches and soft lights and laid him on my lap. I kept stroking him. I called my wife, said, "merlin's dead," and cried some more. "he's still warm," I kept saying while I patted him and held him and we cried together. his fur was still so soft and silky, the sheen of polar bear fur, and I couldn't get enough of touching it.

I was on the phone with her I don't know how long before the vet came back, asking if I wanted more time. I said no, I felt I was finished, and asked if she'd take a photo of me holding him. she said of course, and we prepared him. I asked if we could have his ashes in a specific metal urn like we have other pets' ashes in and she said one of the vet techs would show me the book where I could order it. I asked too if we could have a paw print in baked clay like we had with other pets and she said of course.

the vet kept saying, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." I told her, "it's all right, I understand, it's okay." my wife would tell me later that the vet had been certain he was on the rebound when she'd spoken with her, and the vet tech would tell me the vet had decided at the last minute to take one more glance at him before she retired for the night. it all happened so fast. when I arrived, everyone was crying, the techs and the vet, the women surrounding him. everyone was caught flatfooted. I found myself in a familiar position, that of counseling the counselors around me, telling them it was all right, I knew it was a surprise and everything would be okay, I was fine.

we did paperwork and I paced in the lobby a lot, just working off energy. I called my wife again in the lobby and again when I left. I had his print in clay, his collar, and a tuft of fur I'd asked for. the drive home was long and I hit the scan button on the radio and just let sound wash over me. I dreaded pulling into the driveway because I knew it meant it had all happened and getting home meant it had been real.

my wife with wide red eyes sat on the couch surrounded by dogs and cats. we wept and held one another. then I put my shoes back on and went out to take the garbage bins to the road because it was garbage night and the truck that came every 2 weeks would be by in the morning.

alternatives to church

we got up on sunday with every intention of spending the morning at my wife's congregation but once we got outside we were sidetracked by the bright beautiful day and realized we would have a better time working on the yard. so we dressed down and spent our 1st 5 hours of the day hunkered down moving mulch, watering, transplanting and digging up roots. it was productive, a good, happy day, and the beer afterward was sweet and cold. it leaves us a little nearer to god (although in a bass-ackward way considering sunday is supposed to be the day of rest and here we are acting like it's the 1st couple days of creation; but the sabbath was made for us and not us for the sabbath, so like any good garden soil it's fungible).