In those days, I was afraid of Hell.

Fires licking my feet.

Eternal Pain.

Eternal waking.

What if Hell is a time for us to pay back, piece for piece, every wrong we did to man, animal, insect? Then we will be released to Heaven with confidence and equality.

Then I think:

“Oh, God!–

that June Bug I burned alive for an hour!”

My nephew has been keeping his worries in a bag in the middle of the table.

This isn’t a metaphor for anything.  A clear plastic treat bag freckled with leftover holiday images is filled with small slips of paper and tied loosely with a silver twist tie.  A few of the slips have the nervous markings of a 6-year-old’s biggest fears.  The rest are blank in anticipation of bigger fears.  Lately, he’s been overcome by the fear of accidentally killing the dogs, born from a stern warning to stop dropping his food on the floor.  The eruption is brief but traumatic, as his mom or dad or my Someone or myself explain that, yes, while it’s important to not feed the dogs chocolate, one M&M will not kill them this time.  Other fears include forgetting his snack at day camp and accidentally getting his handicapped classmates sick, for fear that he might worsen their handicap or, well… kill them.

His wall to wall posters of superheroes seem to be no match for the unpredictable casualties the day might bring.  No amount of Batman and Superman pajamas seem to protect his skinny body from super villain Ferocious Fear.  So now, he has been instructed to create a bag to put his worries in so that they are stored in one place, and are only permitted out once a day for 15 minutes of Worry Time.  When Worry Time is over, the worries may not be spoken of again.  And if a new one pops up in his anxious brain, he has to write it down and put it in the bag to be brought up on the next day’s Worry Time.

This is information I didn’t know when I asked him about the bag in the middle of the table.  This is information I wish I had before I opened the bag in the middle of the table.  This is information that became clear enough by the time I calmed him down from his fear of accidentally hurting his friends on the playground and closed the bag, tying it tightly with that silver lasso of truth.

He took a deep breath.  He stared at the closed Worry Bag.  He left the table to go play with his sister– a game of make believe that had nothing to do with the contents of the bag and everything to do with successfully slaying the bad guys.

Today, the doctor called to confirm my blood work.  Negative, she said.  I am not, contrary to my body’s protest, pregnant.  I was relieved.  I was confused.  I was scared.  Because for the last month, I had left my Worry Bag open, and it had been funneling directly into my uterus.

They call it a pseudocyesis, but I am calling it being a crazy person.  It’s a strange condition wherein all symptoms point to pregnancy.  And sparing the more intimate details, by all accounts, the body is pregnant.  Except it’s not.  There are a few speculations on the cause, one being extreme stress.  Due to lack of attention or too much attention, I turned my Worry Bag into a Worry Baby in one month flat.  What they don’t tell you on Wikipedia or the doctor’s office is the amount of embarrassment you will endure immediately after.  My world wasn’t ending, but I had already burdened a few of my closest friends with my confident proclamation and deepest anxiety.  And now, it turns out, my brain tricked my body with the standard tactic of fear.  My Worry Bag was sitting in the middle of the table, clear and untied for everyone to read back to me: my insane projections of the ways in which the world was working against me were up for grabs.

My Someone assures me that I am not yet in need of being committed to professional care, no matter how much I feel like curling into a straight jacket.  Now I begin the waiting for my body to catch up to my brain on the reality of the situation: that I still have my same stressful and worthwhile life that I had before– now with the added benefit of being a little more able to laugh at my biological fragility.  And, fortunately or not, I still have plenty of blank slips of paper left in my Worry Bag of worse-than-this-worst-case-scenario.

I’m not sure what the life lesson is this time.  Maybe investing in stronger twist ties.  Maybe remembering to open my Worry Bag with more frequency and less resignation.  Maybe buying those Wonder Woman pajamas after all.  Or maybe to be less ashamed of the worries so that when it comes occasionally to an embarrassing end, I can leave the table to go on slaying the real bad guys.

My nephew has a new chapter book all about worrying.  He and his dad are reading it each night before bed.  I can hardly wait til tomorrow night.  That’s when we learn all about how to talk back to worry.  Maybe he can give me a few pointers.

It was my first New Year’s Day since I was 22 that I didn’t wake up with at least a twinge of a headache and a wave of wooziness as I surveyed the empty green Adres bottles with one eye closed.  It was my first New Year’s Day in a decade that I didn’t have at least one more cigarette lingering in the pack for me to sit alone and take in the fresh year with the old year’s tainted lungs.  I didn’t feel righteous or unsettled, I didn’t feel different.  I felt like it was time to make New Year’s morning biscuits and spice the black-eyed peas for the early lunch Hoppin’ Johns– a tradition I’ve come to savor in the last few years– while my friends slept in rooms around a house that isn’t mine.  It has been my personal feat of strength to trudge through my hangover from New Year’s Eve’s celebration while everyone else bemoaned their choices.  But without the hangover, without resistance, I found myself a little disappointed.  No adversity.  No proving myself strong.  No outlandish tomato juice-vinegar concoctions to punish myself further for what I wished I hadn’t done.

There’s a mild fear that I am growing up.  And then, a small hope that I am growing young.

Everyone woke and ate, recounting the countdown, gathered their things and left– some through the front door, my Someone back to bed (as is his custom of taking care of himself in less brutal ways than me), and me to the kitchen to pick the smatterings from the bottom of pans and scrape half plates of leftovers from the night before.  I scavenged like a well fed impostor in a soup kitchen line, diligently following my mother’s rule that if it doesn’t touch a plate, it doesn’t count.  I pecked after I was full, and then pecked at my book, and then pecked more at cleaning.  It wasn’t time for anything– not for dinner, not for sleeping, not for working.  So I ran a bath and waited more.

Enough.

I had Enough.  The word has been floating with me to day two of a new year, and I can’t seem to get enough of Enough.  This feeling of time moving not quickly and not slowly was a result of me having had Enough the night before– enough to drink, enough to eat, enough sleep, enough company.  I could have had less.  I could have used more.  But I was in the simple state of Enough, instead.  And that is a state I have rarely visited.

I waited for more clarity while the water dripped and I heard my Someone roll over in the next room.  But there wasn’t more.  There was just Enough.  I tripped over the word as I drained the tub and picked my dirty clothes from the floor.  I hadn’t worn this shirt Enough to put in the washing machine, so I put it back on.  My stomach ached a little as it digested more than Enough food, and my legs started to itch with not Enough exercise.  I got my shoes on.  I went for a long walk.  It was Enough exercise for both me and the dogs.  I decided to stop begrudging my Someone halfway through the afternoon for wasting our day, because I have had Enough begrudging and needing sympathy, instead.  I swished Enough of a small taste of wine around my glass that night when we went out with my sister and brother-in-law, and came home to watch just Enough of a movie to not keep me up too late– so I could have Enough sleep.

When I woke up again, I had Enough of being disrespected by some, and not Enough forgiveness for others, and I noted this.  I remembered I had not made Enough time to play my instruments last year.  I had Enough of a mimosa in the afternoon and decided not to have a second.  I have too much work coming up this week, and– hesitantly but deliberately– delegated some of that work elsewhere.  Last year, I complained about warm clothes while we froze in Wyoming.  This year, I hope I remember to double up those leggings to make enough warmth with what I have instead of wishing for what I don’t.  I will have Enough out of hope instead of regret.  I’ve had Enough regret.

I’m not going to write a book about my Journey through a Year of Enough.  I’m not going to fly overseas to try and find it.  I’m not going to turn a memoir into a workbook full of rigorous schedules and lists to prove the point.  Maybe outside of today, I’ll forget about Enough completely.  Next week, someone may find me face down blitzed on the sidewalk dressed only in my skivvies.  Or maybe starting this year knowing that I have Enough is Enough to make Enough difference.  And maybe when I am not looking for More, I can get to the important work of making sure everyone else around me has Enough, too.

It’s my eyes that never seem to know what to do, darting around the floor and the food, glancing up to see if I’m the only delinquent.  My hands somehow have retained protocol, instantly grasping each other.  Maybe to curb the possibility of having to reach for another’s hand around the table, and therefore being exposed by my shaking and sweating that I don’t belong in this custom.  Maybe to keep from reaching for the nearest doorknob, returning only after the first clink of a spoon on a dish.  But my eyes: I can’t will them to tradition.  And then, taken by some unexpected reflex– like a knock on my adolescent bedroom door– they snap shut at the Amen, and then swivel wide and open and expectant at the others in the room, congratulating everyone on that long and illustrious holy haven of a moment.  Like being surprised by a nap, and waking somewhere new.

Praying makes me squeamish.

Thinking about the pre-dinner Christian tradition at family holiday celebrations makes me feel like I have to simultaneously defecate and push my brains back in through my ears.  This isn’t for my lack of know-how.  Back in my Christian hey-day, I was a world class, state-of-the-art-president-of-my-youth-group master of all manners of evangelical praying.  From the prostrate-unworthy-oh-Lord’s, to the petition-forgiveness-for-someone-else’s-dire-sins, to the round robin classic popcorn-style-speak-when-you-will-and-prepare-to-be-impressed-with-my-thoughtfulness-and-intimacy-with-God.  I grew up and out of “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food…” by the time I reached Junior High.  I was on the advanced track to Holy Roller-my-eyes-at-everyone-else’s-infantile-invocations.

In the last few years, I can count the number of times I’ve prayed.  Always in secret, and always in desperation– for a lost husband, for a lost dog, for a lost baby.  Always, with a bargain to the Almighty: I’ve now divinely quit smoking… three times.  I’ve also quit drinking once, but it was a long time ago, and lasted only until a hallowed glass of wine arrived the next day.  The blood of Christ, right?  God works in mysterious ways.  Prayer changes things.  God never gives more than you can handle…

It isn’t as though I think praying is bad, or even that it’s unwelcome.  In fact, more and more these days, I am finding that I am jealous of other people’s Grandma Prayers.  My own grandparents have been gone for almost two decades, now, and I am often feeling a bit slighted by the celestial due to the lack of petitioning on my behalf.  I am in need of a bug to bend the ear of the Lord, and all kinds of people– including my Someone– have Grandma Prayers on their side, clogging the pious pipeline for themselves while people like me have only the nighttime consistency of parental pleas.  At least I hope my parents still pray for me.  Somehow, even if I don’t know how it works or if it works, I like the idea of someone having a thought or two for me and sending it upward or downward or outward or inward to something they think is bigger than themselves.

Grandma Prayers are a commodity.  These are the prayers of the persistent, the has-time-to-sit-and-keep-praying kind; the I’m-not-budging-til-something-changes kind.  These are the kind of bugs in God’s or the Universe’s ear that I need.  Every Christian I know will try to tell me this isn’t how it works.  Maybe it’s my overactive competitive gene.  But I think there is something to the collection of other people’s prayers.  These are the prayers that separate me from my Someone– why it’s my hand that burns accidentally on the kettle, why it’s my feet that trip on the hike, why it’s my ankle that sprains the same time that I get the flu the same time that someone close to me dies.  I try to tell my Someone this, but he’s on the phone with his Grandma.  Secure it while you’ve got it, bud.  If you don’t got your Grandma Prayers, you don’t got anything.

The prayer my own grandmother left with me had been filed away for years as Prayers That Don’t Count But Are A Nice Try If You Don’t Know Any Better.  My father’s mother, an angry woman with a soft spot for her grandkids, was the first person I can recount for whom I prayed that a Hell didn’t exist.  A racist with a phobia of cats, I knew from the vast spiritual inference and overt pulpit words that this woman had not put in the proper amount of time to have her prayers heard by the Lord.  She hadn’t yet said the right prayer that would make her current prayers come close to even the earlobe of God.  But somehow, the little ditty I spoke only at Grandma’s house as I put my head on the overstuffed pillows, tucked snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug under the heavy, white comforter seem more valuable than the loads of venerated vomit I spiritually spewed in the years to come.

Taking her cue, feeling the enormity of a sacred ritual, I would recall the words from my last overnight stay,

As I lay me down to sleep,

pray the Lord my soul to keep.  

If I die before I wake,

pray the Lord my soul to take.

Maybe I don’t have loads of Grandma Prayers going up to the sky that will keep me from snagging my favorite sweater or breaking my favorite mug, but at least this is the truest prayer I can imagine for me or my dead grandmother or anyone these days.  It’s not new and it’s not original: but at least it’s true.  I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if there is a God out there and she/he/it has any control over the next thing, it would be nice if we could be part of it, too.  That is, if you’ll have us.

If I turn my head to the left and tilt my chin down– like I’ve just caught sight of a Midwestern field mouse who finds me as interesting as I find myself in this spotlight– my body leans lightly on the door frame in my mud-brown-red dress, then click.  From behind, a perfect A-line silhouette.  From in front, a cross-ankled JCPenny ad, complete with old wooden steps balanced by three orange pumpkins.  And me, a model no one but an imaginary field mouse is here to witness.

I am in picturesque Nebraska: corn fields fading, twilight leaning, train whistle wailing Nebraska and its nighttime splendor.  And all I want is for someone to photograph my perfect moment as my perfect self as I stand at the top of a new stranger-to-be-friend’s back porch with a maglite spotlight glaring onto my face.  And then, I realize I am the most selfie-ish creature alive.

As previous blogs and friends and therapists will attest, while not as far as a Truman Show syndrome, I have a small growth in my outer consciousness that insists that at every moment, I am being watched and processed and delighted in.  For a minute, it was God.  Then Big Brother.  Then the abundance of iPhones.  Then, the Universe.  Now, it’s something like the Big Holy iPhone Brother of the Sky.  Regardless, it is these moments when I am so completely enthralled with how the environment is treating my beauty, that I miss the beauty of my environment.  Crickets.  Stars.  Rugged steps.  Falling leaves.  Click.  And still, only me.

Social media in its wicked and unruly ways reminded me last Friday that five years previous, a hundred witnesses brought a camera to a party to actually document my every subtle move.  White dress.  Brown suits.  Butternut squash ravioli.  Dancing.  Click.  I don’t hate looking at my wedding photos because I’m not married, anymore.  I don’t hate them because they feel gaudy or outdated.  I hate them because my face is not one of someone who is happy.  My face is one of someone who knows she is being photographed for happiness.  Look at the way my chin never doubles and my arms never press flatly and fully to my sides.  Look at how my head tilts just so and my ruffled hoedown petticoat sways correspondingly.  Look at how naturally unnatural I am as I pass from single to married in one perfect, without-a-hitch (except with one unfortunate hitch) day, fully documented, fully celebrated, fully unfeeling.  My perfect moment as my perfect self.  Click.

Maybe this began my obsession with capturing myself– a real moment in back woods Nebraska, maybe.  Or in the middle of the street in the Bricktown of OKC.  Or an abandoned motel off of Route 66 in Midway, Texas.  Or a bathroom in southern California.  I want something genuine from myself.  What did I do before I found these perfect situations for my perfect self to be captured?

This is how it went: too elusive for film.  I let the Universe vibrate and let the feeling of all the feelings rumble my gut and fall out my eyes.  I was still and seeing.  I was captured not for the future, but by the present.  The goddamn Snow White of imaginary field mice, but then with that poison apple lingering under my trigger finger.  Click.

The details are as important as they are unimportant– it’s a familiar story, aligned with human nature and mistrust and volatility making way for more volatility.  It’s the story favored my fables and parables and allegories.  And it begins when Sacha owes Yoga Lady money.

We were gathered in the Carter’s new living room, full on build-your-own spaghetti squash bowls with acorn squash and apples baking for dessert.  It was the last day of the big rain, a holding pattern the most recent hurricane kept in our corner of North Carolina, leaving everything we owned damp.  We meandered through usual topics of missing cigarettes and interpreting dreams, when another story unraveled from small town past.  Sacha owed Yoga Lady money.

Sacha told Yoga Lady, “I owe you money.”

Yoga Lady says, “Please, don’t worry about it.”

Sacha says, “I will pay you.”

Yoga Lady says, “Please, stop bothering me with this, don’t worry about it.”

Sacha says, “I will pay you, anyway.  I will pay you $60.”

These are the interactions of 3 months time.  Sacha agrees that three months is a long time.  I assert that in living and working in Black Mountain, an area comprised half of tourists, three months is a difficult time to conjure $60.  Right out of college, this was my home, sharing rent with three to five other girls in a two bedroom house, working as many jobs as offered.  When winter came, we had to let the oil run out, and dangerously made due with a lit, open oven to keep our teeth from chattering.  We each began separately collecting small items– toilet paper, garbage bags, pieces of bread– from our work place.  We weren’t lying to ourselves: we called it stealing.  We also called it surviving.  It was the recession, and our student loans hit us all faster than we could get jobs to pay them, and thus began the desperate and typical beginning of our generation.  Five dollars toward a pack of cigarettes went further than five dollars of food, and curbed the appetite longer.  We were poor, but we weren’t alone.

The inevitable conflict of the fable occurred when Yoga Lady lost her zen unexpectedly and reamed out Sacha in her place of work.  Then again in the street.  Then again in the grocery store.  All snake eyes and venomous words.  All no-going-backs and tables-have-turned.  All Sacha hurt and wondering what happened between the words, It’s okay and Deadbeat.

The next morning, the marvel of  a golden globe fell across the slowly changing October leaves around the grocery store parking lot we parked our camper in after dinner at the Carter’s.  I squinted at the long gone light and grabbed my yoga mat.  I would downward dog my way out of the Great Sadness that had fallen over the past week.  That’s when I started thinking of the crucifixion.  Classic.

It goes like this: what if the story is more simple than believing?  What if this death we have built thousands of years of argument over isn’t about who gets in and who doesn’t, but a hyperbolic example of not being angry, anymore.  What if Jesus wasn’t coming here to do us a favor by forgiving our sins, but doing us a different kind of favor– the favor of a good example.  Even if none of this business of death and sin is true, even if Hell and Heaven do or don’t exist, the fact still stands that within this Christian narrative, Jesus died so that angry people wouldn’t be angry, anymore.  Jesus paid this debt, real or imaginary, so that we could quit yammering on about holiness and owing.  Less, Now you are free to live eternally and more like Listen, idiots, if I can die for your imaginary standards, you can manage to forgive a few dollars between humans.  

But here is the ending of a fable: the choice.  The moral.  This is how I know this story is real life and not written in a book.  If I were to find Yoga Lady and pay her those $60, would it be enough to stop her being angry?  If I paid her Sacha’s debt double, could Yoga Lady be able to see Sacha without snarling?  This is how I know that I am not the valiant hero in even my own life story: I’m not willing to part with my $60 to find out.  And it seems, as stories of paying up go, for this 7 year debt, if Yoga Lady is not participating in the year of Jubilee, she may be requiring blood.

“So what you’re saying is, you want to cast yourself an idol and worship it,” he said.

That’s my smart, funny, Pastor-Friend-Bryan who was sitting across from me, as I laid out to him two winters ago what it could mean for me to grapple again with the mystery of a god or a universe or a Great Pumpkin.  I was in the habit of using Bryan’s full name, Pastor-Friend-Bryan, to my other not-pastor-friends and my mother so as to feel safe speaking about general heretical epiphanies as they trailed across my otherwise desolate spiritual wasteland.  It assuaged my guilt, maybe to my now just Friend Bryan’s chagrin.

This day, I was confessing a simple plan I had to build a doll or a teddy bear and dress it up and set it in the corner of my room and talk to it.  I insisted it would help me practice praying, coax me back into the habit of speaking into the abyss, except with a little doll shaped antennae with a cute face to funnel these prayers to where they needed to go.  The strenuous, prostrate agony of prayer left me empty and nauseous, even when it was a daily occurrence in high school.

“So what you’re saying is…”

And I was.  And I am.  When I was approached in college by the Greek Orthodox church to convert, I was either too above or too below the acceptance of their ritual of kissing figurines to commence worship.  I knew better.  I was smarter than wooden faces.  I was stronger than the crutch of carved saints.

But maybe not too smart or strong for fluffy stuffed cats and plastic pink elephants.

In hindsight, the desire for a rocking-chair-or-pocket-sized god is not just sprinkled in my history, but flooded.  The trouble is, I am in a habit of giving my god away.  The plastic lizards of my childhood, carried along and talked to through school and solitary playing, stashed in my right hand during Sunday School and squished between the Old and New Testament in grown-up church, all given away to the children I babysat as I got too old to carry miniature iguanas and life-sized geckos everywhere.  Lizards, hear my prayer.  My adolescent god was a smiling blue doll named Brandon, equipped with a giggle box that activated when I squeezed it.  He held the prayers of my scared self as I huddled for a few weeks in the psych ward as the self-inflicted cuts on my arms healed, and then was given away to Goodwill.  Brandon, hear my prayer.

When the early cracks of marital severance emerged, while cleaning my bosses’ house, a small, pink, palm-sized plastic elephant emerged from the bottom of a donation pile.  The little piece found its way onto my desk, then my purse, then came close as Nashville winter swept it right into my winter jacket.  The following winter, when shove came to divorce papers, I found the little elephant ready and waiting in my jacket pocket.  Pink Elephant, hear my prayer.  Then, on a brisk December day, I handed the little god vessel to another in an act of friendship and in a feat of personal strength.  Even my dog, who I suspected as god incarnate and who has listened to an abundance of prayers, is now shared with my Someone.  Butter, hear my prayer.  I can’t seem to hold on to idols.

Maybe it’s my embarrassment– who wants a god who knew me from the beginning?  Who wants a god who is holding my dark things?  Who needs a constant reminder of my failures?  Great Pumpkin, hear my prayer.

These days, I might hold g(G)od to the sunsets and the trees, to the perfect dinner and to a fine glass a whiskey– same places I hold myself.  I haven’t figured out anything more or new on the subject, I haven’t designated a new vessel.  I’m still trying to figure out what sort of g(G?)od prefers to occupy what spaces.  It wouldn’t matter if I did find the perfect idol, I would likely give it away, anyway.  I’m a regular evangelist, a sharer of the good news.  Or at least of some news.

Anybody, hear my prayer.

“We are eating like thieves,” I told him as we polished off the stuffed squash blossoms and began on a spaghetti dinner that smelled like Western Pennsylvania church basement potlucks.  Earlier, we had been given our pick from a Rochester, New York’s church community garden after sleeping in their lot and playing their cool, dimly lit sanctuary the night before.  A bundle of kale and Swiss chard, a warty orange squash, and five delicate yellowy zucchini flowers found their way into our camper.  We made way for them after two rainy days that left everything we owned damp, the thin tapping on our metal walls lifting halfway through the night for a Monday morning cleaning.  The kale made its way to a marinade and has already gone through our systems.  The warty squash rests among the endless supply of cherry tomatoes my mother gave us– which rest among the endless supply of pastas and sauces and oils and vinegars and candies and other foods she gave us that we didn’t know til now that we couldn’t live without.  The chard is slowly wilting itself on our counter, but will be breakfast before noon today.

But something about the squash blossoms, stuffed with the last fresh herbs of summer, fried in corn meal for a glistening golden finish, dipped in a velvet red sauce we didn’t pay for– we are eating like thieves.  We are eating like people who don’t know when delicacy will come again, or even how to define it.  We are eating like people who appreciate it, but appreciate it quickly, because who is to say that a loud bang on the door and a uniformed gentleman won’t take it away before we reach our last critical bite.  We are a queen and a king of alleyways and parking lots, hunched with our smorgasbord of collected crumbles, hissing at the shuffle of footsteps around us– we stole this fair and square.  

This was Monday night in the romantic buzz of the Syracuse Camping World parking lot lights.

Tuesday morning, I woke to find an article in my inbox and a reminder to never check my inbox first thing in the morning.  That little science-fact-spitting-know-it-all-but-everything-could-be-his-if-he-wanted-it-smart-kindly boy I used to baby sit is going to prison.  He is a thief.  The 9-year-old that taught this former 18-year-old robbed himself a bank.

The article sounds just like him, even though I haven’t seen him in years.  He was the son of my former pastor– the pastor who asked me to leave the church after he insisted I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing because the 30-year-old worship pastor took advantage of my 15-year-old body for four formative and long years.  I have been clawing at the accusation since then, wandering into wolf’s den after wolf’s den trying to find my kind and ending up pawed over and partially devoured.  It has taken years to get the wool from my eyes, repeated shearing, and even now, I am more comfortable bleating and grazing in the garden just outside the doors of the sanctuary than among the other sheep inside.

When I re-read the article, I realize that it sounds just like me, too.  I didn’t want to hurt anybody, I said.  The gun wasn’t loaded, he said.  He made off with over $20,000 in an effort to make something of himself– get an apartment, move on– after his father came into his room that morning and yelled at him to make a life for himself.  I picture his scrunched up brow and soap opera-esque stroking of his chin as he works out the problem on his chessboard.  I watch his apologetic conclusion as he moves and looks to me, checkmate.  

I’m giving up looking for wolves, even if they are ex-husbands or ex-pastors.  I think maybe we can assume the others are sheep, even.  Some as they are.  Some in wolves clothing.  Some in bank robbing masks.

Jenny said the pain in my foot might be my man trouble.

To note, Jenny was the first to say she wasn’t sure how much she believed in that sort of thing.  The physical and the emotional, the mental and the spiritual– how they overlap and where they cross over– a mystery and whatnot.  And Jenny is not the type who wants her clients walking away feeling like they’ve just been dowsed in verbal patchouli oil.  But evidently somewhere in the line of human history, someone made the connection that pain on the right side is related to men, and pain on the left to women.  And I have been having the most rigid pain in the bottom of my right foot.

I got confused somewhere this year between Oregon and Kansas.  Maybe it was the heat that warbled visibly like poisonous gas over the black asphalt.  Maybe it was weeks of seeing strangers and friends of strangers.  Maybe it was the four, five, six hours stretches we drove between little civilizations.  But after a long swim in a flooded reservoir in the Black Hills of South Dakota, pretending I was Wonder Woman and moving logs bigger than our camper around the water’s surface, I surfaced myself with a crick in my heel and a series of flashbacks.  I was fifteen again.  Then nineteen.  Then twenty-one.  And these men turned monsters turned men were back into monsters, and more vivid than I remember.

Jenny told me I didn’t have to tell her anything.  She said that sometimes we hold on to things we thought we forgave, and then that thing that isn’t really forgiven manifests itself in our bodies, until we are laying face down on a massage table with a good friend trying to help us work out the two month old pain in our right foot.

I woke up several mornings confused as to who was next to me.  I drank too much whiskey one night and forgot who I was fighting with.  I siphoned the venom from a few angry men in my history to my present.  I apologized frequently.  I got confused again.  My Someone was patient.

It has recently come to my attention that my Someone doesn’t know the mean parts to schoolhouse rhymes.  Being the son of two teachers may explain the oversight of “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.”  But being uneducated of the latter half of “I see London, I see France…” in which you declare someone’s underpants to stink (rhymes with “pink” previously) tipped me off.  This creature, this perfect creature who’s first memory is passing a ball between himself and his father, this thoughtful stringbean who cries harder than I do at the end of Steel Magnolias, this present and saintly cowboy who gets his feelings hurt when Junior High punks make a snarky comment about his tie– he drops everything hurtful like a hot pan on the fire.  And while everything in me wants to recount to him the dirty jokes written on paper folded like footballs and passed around the classroom, the loud sing-songy ridicules that echoed off locker room walls, and the ferocious and pointed threats that were whispered in the backs of schools buses, there’s something about encountering someone on a daily basis who doesn’t know that girls drink pepsi to get more sexy and boys drink rum and get more dumb that delights me.  Me, who currently carries all those cutting things in the arch of my right foot.

Jenny says its time to let it all go.  Whether that means talking it through endlessly or dropping it like the mean parts of a schoolhouse rhyme, I think she’s right.  Mostly, because the limp of the emotionally damaged isn’t covered by insurance even if I had insurance.  And because it’s a damn shame to be in Appalachia trails with a bum foot.

My human-guts-trigger-indicator-of-everyone-is-innately-good has been misfiring again.  Or maybe it’s my human-guts-trigger-indicator-of-everyone-is-innately-bad.  It would make more sense if it was the latter.  Triggers generally go off when something bad is about to happen.  But maybe this implies that everyone is mostly good.

Regardless of my general theology or lack thereof, something is misfiring.  It’s the thing that keeps me checking one, two, three times to make sure we locked the door of our little home.  It’s the thing that makes me hold my breath when we are at the corner where we thought we last left our truck and don’t start breathing again until we see it.  It’s the thing that, though we clearly did not park directly on the train tracks the night before, the rush of the whistle and the bang of the track has me grabbing the end of the mattress at 3AM and 5AM and 7AM preparing for the white light and the explosion of my insides on the front of my last nightmare ride.  It’s the thing that, while my pacifist Someone and I own no firearms, my daydreams of break-ins always involve me on the right– or wrong?– side of a long rifle, Annie Oakley style, spitting threats like a mysterious gun-wielding venomous spider who has been expecting this moment in her wicked web all along, the masked creature in front of me, usually wearing a black and white striped shirt and having a strange resemblance to Peg-Leg Pete from the Goof Troop, shivering and groveling at this unexpected twist.

Five years ago, my burglary fantasy consisted of me calmly asking the two gentlemen to take a seat while I baked a batch of cookies, handing over each item of value to them to place in their giant knapsack on our way to the kitchen.  There, I would ask them about their day jobs, their children, and their Freudian tendencies before sending them with full bellies and a little more guilt than when they first entered.  I kept a spare bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard just in case.  When I discovered my gluten allergy, the effort was too involved, and I dismissed the fantasy fearing my burglar friends may not like the consistency of my new baking style.  Life’s a bitch, man, and I traded in my bag of chocolate chips for a baseball bat beside my bed.

In Western Pennsylvania, near the overpopulated hills of Pittsburgh, you will find a series of giant adorable Caterpillar yellow monsters roaming the hills of the soon-to-be suburbs, pushing around the dirt from one end to another, buckets of runoff collecting at the bottom of long, perfected grades.  After a PA drizzle (which means “rain” to the rest of the world), pools of silk smooth mud– the delicate bubbling lard of dirt– will collect.  That’s when the naked people come.

I was 18 and working for my father’s excavation company, equipped with work boots and farmer’s tan and jeans with holes and tank tops covered in grease– the cool-as-hell approach, which often served as my cover for the don’t-know-what-the-hell-I’m-doing reality.  It had been a rainy summer week, and the second consecutive dry day had landed me on the lower end of a job site, equipped with a bucket and a cup to lower myself into a freshly dug manhole and haul out the pebbles and mud that had collected.  Letting down my tools to the bottom of the eight foot drop, I began my descent when, while peering just over the lip of the opening, I saw a lanky, blonde white man sitting in the luxurious copper colored silt.  Naked.  I glanced around– he was alone.  And, seeming to take no notice of me, I hopped back up and ran to the top of the hill, pig tails flying.

In a few heaves and a stern resistance to tears, I explained to my father and my foreman the thing I had seen, back peddling a little in case I had imagined it this time.  The two of them looked to each other, slightly concerned, then united their front and explained the whole thing.  It seems a lot of folks in the area seek out excavation sites with freshly turned dirt.  The creamy silt that lays at the base of these mounds of topsoil are believed to have a healing effect for all sorts of ailments– skin sores, cancer, insanity.  This wasn’t a crazy naked man acting alone.  Though it was potentially a crazy man.  My father laughed it off and told me to get back to work.  In one of those rare teenage moments, I did what I was told, mostly relieved that if my father didn’t see the need to address the situation, there was likely no situation.  Then I heard my name and turned to see my dad holding a shovel.

“But take this,” he said.

“For what?” I asked.

“Well, to hit him in case he tries something, of course,” he responded.

I looked for a trace of a joke on his face, but it was impossible to detect since there is always a trace of a joke hidden on his face.  So I turned and braved the naked, potentially cancer-ridden man equipped with a shovel and a mass amount of confusion about the state of humanity.  The naked man was gone by the time I finished my work at the bottom of the manhole.

I picked out the knife I carry in my boot at an antique store in Knoxville, about three years ago.  It was around the time that I was starting to feel unsafe in my own home, let alone touring in dark cities on long nights around the country.  It is a perfectly small switchblade, the color of caramel silt found at the foothills of job sites in Western PA and lined with a gold trim that has since rubbed off from spending so much time pushing between my ankle and my boot.  It’s not the sort of blade you would want to bring to a gun fight, but it’s a suitable bulge that keeps my sock feeling safe and cuts apples like a badass.  The embarrassing truth of my little companion, however, is that the first switch I made with it in that cluttered store, it sliced right through my thumbprint, bringing forth more blood than could be embarrassingly contained in the palm of my hand, or the thick rumple of toilet paper I obtained when politely excusing myself to the restroom at the checkout counter.  I stood in the bathroom deliberating signs of the universe and begging my cut to stop bleeding until I came to a decision.

I purchased the knife with the suspicious and concerned look of the old man at the register, the old man who took my money, anyway.  The old man who warned me it was very sharp.  And while I have held it only a few times in my hand when confronted with a dangerous situation culminating, I also held on the same hand a thumb scar I obtained by trying to protect myself from a world that I suspected was innately bad.   But in the front seat of a truck constantly rolling from one city to another, there is no better apple cutting switchblade in the country.