I am having trouble with the Primordial Goop.  Maybe in the same way I am having trouble with all of my unborn.  But the bracket of Heaven is fluctuating, again, like some sort of Eternal March Madness, with religions and sciences and pure human emotions pitted against each other for the highest stake of Forever Not Burning.  And it doesn’t seem like any amount of buying the right pennant or concocting the right bet is getting anyone any closer to pearly gates– it’s only keeping everyone else out.  And no one seems any better able to explain it than I am able to use sports metaphors.  Which is to say, it ends here.

“I wonder if Josh got what he wanted, or if we did,” I said to my Someone as we drove from Montpelier to Burlington, Vermont, through a sunset vaguely reminiscent of the one I watched three days after Josh’s death.  I had been fighting that sinking feeling that there wasn’t another sunset I hadn’t seen, not another urge to fight for or against any more religion, not a single meal I hadn’t already eaten.  I was beginning to feel the Earth as a bit of a disappointment, and wondering what exit strategy was being manufactured for me.

“I wonder if when people commit suicide, if they really get to move on and feel nothing and be in the Nothing to escape here, or if everyone who loves them gets what they want– to see them again in Heaven or the After,” I continued, “because it seems like the two are mutually exclusive.”

Then, as if in response to my morbid despondency, a tall, free standing rock formation stretched itself into view in the center of the highway.  It was beautiful– like I had never seen before.  Always when I am close to reconciling Josh’s suicide or my own sadness, out grows another fucking reason to live in the middle of the road.

“Which is better?” my Someone asked.

“I guess if it’s between feeling Nothing and feeling Everything, it’s not a fair choice.”

But even if there is a choice, and Josh got to go to the Nothing and I get to go to see my friends, I worry that we will be disappointed, anyway.  Because if the Heaven I was raised on is right, there will be more love and inclusion happening in Hell.  Sure, the blisters would be significantly more, too, but maybe there would be more consolation in the harmony of screams from ourselves and our loved ones echoing down the fiery cavernous halls than sitting on clouds at a feast they weren’t allowed in.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason some Christians hate the idea of Evolution isn’t because it warps with the idea of how God chose to start the Universe, but because it is already so difficult trying to keep 6,000-10,000 years worth of people out of an already crowded Heaven.  If there are more years to tack on– not just a couple hundred, but millions– how can that floating mass of Heaven actually hold everyone up?  And what do we do about Neanderthals?  If we are going to include the uncountable number of aborted babies and miscarriages and all the other sentimental allowances we make for pre-found-Jesus people, accepting Evolution would force us also to consider the Primordial Goop.  And I am so worried about accidentally stepping on the Goop.  And if we count the Goop, maybe there’s more to All Dogs Go to Heaven than we thought, too.

In a parking lot outside of Burlington, my Someone and I checked in with our wiser-by-the-day pal, Ryan.  I told him about the sadness and the Goop and the suicide.  He said maybe Heaven looks more like everyone gets therapy on arrival.  But God is the therapist.  And then no one is sick in their hearts, anymore, which means we can all be there.  Kind of like we are trying to do here.  Which means Josh will learn to love not being in the Nothing.  And I will learn to love everyone I kind of have a hard time with here.

It’s a tremendous amount of work checking every Heavenly Visa, and I doubt St. Peter gets paid hourly.  I wonder if it might just be worth it to let everyone in.  Goop and all.

“No, no, I can’t do cards.  I’ll pay you later, but I can’t do cards,” Cindy said.  I was packing up the last of my instruments, all smiles and goodwill floating through the small cafe in Utica, New York.

“Just hit us back whenever,” I told her, “the CD is yours.”

“Yeah, you see, I just dug myself out of serious credit card debt,” she explained to me.  “It took me three years– I’ve had absolutely no life.”

“Congratulations,” I said, “that sounds hard.”

“Yeah, see, I got myself into this mess.  I got cancer, you know.  Thought I was going to die.  Spent all kinds of money thinking, I don’t know, someone else is going to pay for it.  Maybe him–” she nods over to who I assume is her partner.  “–so I just keep spending.  I wracked up $10,000 on one credit card alone, just spending it on vet bills and things for my hundred dogs.”

“That’s crazy!” I conceded, not sure if I meant the $10,000 or the hundred dogs.

“Yeah, see I went nuts.  You think you’re gonna die and you got nuts.  So I dug myself a hole.”  And then, with the long pause and knowing look of a good punchline delivery, Cindy looked me in the eye–

“…but then, I lived.”

My Someone and I have been lately rattling around in our own brains trying to singularly create the best song ever written.  Even though we’ve built our little band and our little lives over the course of five years together, lately we spend our time nosing around our own journal pages, jotting down secret entries and zipping up our secret thoughts from our mouths so that somehow we can carve out creative independence.  The process has been exhausting.  We come to the dinner table and the stage and the morning walks in Vermont or New York or Pennsylvania frustrated and gaping, but still unwilling to concede to the other’s help.  Not really. We put on the reuse of asking for each other’s opinion, but the process itself has been divided.  And we are suffering for it.

I have this theory that we are in the process of spying on our Alone Selves.  Since we moved into our little 16′ home on wheels more than a year ago, we can easily tally the hours we have spent apart.  It’s less than 20.  Our new strategy is based on the old fear: the fear of losing.  The fear of being lost.  The fear of alone-ness.  Whereas before we fought the fear by togetherness, squeezing out those bits of words and thoughts with trust and vulnerability, now we fight it with projection and speculation.  We fight it with resignation of the inevitable.  One of these days, one of us will lose the other to the Ground or the Nothing or the Eternal.

How do we cope with this sadness?  We live as though we have already lost.  We prove to ourselves that we can successfully write a song alone.  We tear at the fickle curtain between having it all and losing everything by releasing less of ourselves to the other.  Keeping fewer limbs out in the way of getting hurt.  I keep some things just for me.  He keeps some things just for him.  To store away for our Future Selves– markers and spaces that we were always able to live and write and eat alone.  And all the while we are coping with the loss of our future, we are losing, losing, losing our present.

We are wracking up a debt so big, and hoping the other will clean it up when we are gone.  We are fighting how big our love can grow.

“Aaron’s out of town,” Bryan said, “which means that I am baking chocolate chip cookies.”  And then, as if caught in a lie, he corrected himself, “Even if Aaron was here, I would still be baking chocolate chip cookies.  But, you know, it’s different.”

As I slowly unraveled my anxiety to him over the next hour, I pictured Bryan moving around his kitchen, a slow meditation of baking soda and chocolate chips and flour.  It is different, baking still and quiet with a long distance friend on the line and no one coming through the door to smell what you have cooking up.  It is the same movement, the same recipe as when you have an adoring and salivating mouth waiting in the next room to take a bite.  But, you know, it’s different.  Should Aaron suddenly appear home on a surprise flight, those warm gooey meditations would be shared and appreciated and loved.  Bryan is faithful to the ritual.  But Bryan knows how to make room when room is needing to be made.  And Bryan will wipe down the counters and load the dishwasher regardless of Aaron coming home in minutes or days.  Bryan’s Alone Self doesn’t sneak in to change what Bryan’s Loving Self does.  Bryan’s Future Self look just like his Present Self.

Two nights ago before sleep after a long day of fighting writing and embracing rest, I turned to my Someone.

“What if we wrote songs together?” I said, as if it had never occurred to me before.  As if we hadn’t written every note of our lives in a tangled, wonderful weave.

“What a great idea!” he said, as if he, too, had never thought of it.

And in this way, we are chipping away at that image of our Future Selves, paying down its debt.  Sleeping and waking and still unsure of how to fight the fear, other than to leave less room between us for it to settle in.

“Is that poop?” I say.

“Hmmmm.  That’s a tough one,” my Someone responds.

“Better consult Ryan?” I ask, pulling out my phone.

“Yeah.  This seems like a good case for him,” my Someone says thoughtfully.

This is one of our favorite games.  Aside from Walk Around the Table, which consists of walking around a table and having our 88 pound dog plod behind us wagging her tail til we are all dizzy, or My Hand’s a Spider, which is just what it sounds like– complete with the ticklish terror of the creature when it finds its way into the unsuspecting armpit– Is That Poop? is a family favorite.

The rules are pretty straight forward.

1.  Take a walk.  Or just happen to be walking.  Cities, forest– it doesn’t matter.  The game can be all the time.
2. Accidentally happen upon an unidentified glob in the sidewalk/in the grass/on the side of a building.
3. Ask the question, “Is that poop?” to your walking partner.
4. If you are not certain, text a picture to your consenting friends.  If you are incredibly certain, and the audacity of the situation is too much not to share, text a picture to your consenting friends.

Truthfully, once you know about the game, it’s difficult not to see it.  Impossible not to ask the question.

It was a couple months ago when we heard the news of El Caganer.  Our jaws dropped in disbelief.  Translated literally as “the shitter,” El Caganer is a figurine placed in nativity scenes throughout Europe.  Our disbelief was not that it existed, but that somehow, as active shit seekers, we had missed this.  The podcast continued, complete with a long historical rundown of Dutch realist painters including Phantom Poopers (surfacing as dogs or people or even squirrels) in works that hang everywhere from the common household to Buckingham Palace.  Somewhere, propriety ordered that these crass creatures be painted over.  And now, they are scraping back those faux bushes and trees to again reveal the Poopers.  Silence filled the truck.  And then, I turned to my Someone–

“Was that poop?”

Last night we rented a movie that my mom hated as we ate a gluten free version of my favorite childhood pizza.  It dealt with Maggie Smith as a homeless van lady who encroached on a single, not-even-well-meaning writer, wrapped untidily with existential crisis and social responsibility.  And at the pinnacle of the movie, we watched the man scrape Maggie Smith’s shit from his shoe and the side of his trash can.  He concluded that caring means shit.  A lot of it.

I considered how many diapers my mother alone compacted after four children.  I considered how many bags my Someone and I have filled in our responsibility to clean up after our dog.  I considered the two step process we engage in at least once a week as we empty our black water tank into the belly of the earth.  I considered what our futures might look like when we lose control of what other people consider their dignity.  I considered that maybe the presence of shit doesn’t indicate lack of dignity so much as it indicates a fullness of life.  Out and smelly and unavoidably there for us to consider the unpleasant questions: Where did it come from?  Where is it going next?

Those early artists in Europe didn’t just include the unsightly El Caganer as a gag.  Although Poop Jokes are clearly still the funniest.  They were trying to communicate how nothing was off limits.  That Baby Jesus was not above sleeping next to a giant wad of shit along with the rest of us.  Fear not.  And also that everything has an end, that every cycle will run its course, often simultaneously with the beginning of the course.  It’s why we brought our bathrooms indoors as quickly as we figured out running water.  Because for all of our put togetherness, we are always happily among the Pooper.  And, a couple times a day if we eat enough greens, are the Pooper.

Old banana peel, Ryan texted back.

“Dang,” said my Someone.

“Maybe next time,” I said.  Only a minute passed–

“Wait, is that poop?”

I am making myself unlovable, again.  Maybe it’s all this fresh air and freedom.  But I am curling into myself like a snail shell, pulling what’s tender from out of reach.  Except I am also mutating so that my tough exterior is also sprouting metal spikes that are tipped with a lethal poison that can go airborne and suck all of the moisture out of the air until everyone around me is choking.  I look around to see how everyone is faring.  They all seem fine.  Except they seem concerned because I seem to be choking.

My Someone uses what we learned this winter and says that I am telling myself the wrong story.  He says that I need to tell myself the story where the people around me love me.  I balk and tell him to cut the therapy bullshit.  I am becoming unlovable.

I have visions of becoming a lone wolf, wandering around the country with a scowl and an agenda to right the universe by brute force.  There is snow and a few scenes Mary Shelley created.  I anticipate difficulty and get what I expect.  I unravel the scenario until, miraculously at the end, I find true happiness where the world doesn’t braze my neck as I am fevered and aching for love.  The world just becomes a Soft Pillow with no work of my own.  And I will lay down on it and be lovable once again.

My scenario requires that every creature is not also hurting.

My scenario is impossible.

So I play out my God Daydream, where I am a small furry animal caught in a hollowed out gourd.  In it, this God character– usually looking like a combination of Mark Ruffalo and Patti Smith– pokes their pointer finger through the hole in the gourd, peaking their large, aged, squinty eye in effort to catch a glimpse of my pink nose and my baby rodent eyes.  I put out my little clawed paw, which can grasp only a few grained lines of His/Her hand print.  I become less afraid.  I am sought after.  I am coaxed.  I am carried from the gourd.  I can never imagine what happens after the gourd.  Only that someone cared to carry me from it.

“That’s just what she does sometimes,” Matt said to me a few weeks ago.  He and his partner had a fight.  “She makes herself the most unhuggable she possibly can, and then practically dares me to hug her.”

“And what do you do?” I asked.

“Well, I cross the room and hug her.”

I replay my God Daydream with what I have.  I don’t have Mark Ruffalo/Patti Smith God.  I have a Someone who says he likes me and wants to sit across the table from me in my gourd.  I am not a cute fuzzy rodent creature.  I am just my scowling self.  Sometimes my Someone says the wrong thing or gets mad, and it makes my fever aches of unlovableness flare.  Sometimes my friends who love me don’t know what to say and I feel alone and cry into the phone.  And then my gourd is filled with these friends who sometimes get it right.  We all sit at the table.  It’s getting crowded.  It’s harder to be comfortable with all of these gourd people.

Somewhere inside, in this secret compartment, I find them:  Soft Pillows.  I pull them out.  There are more.  Everyone is provided with a Soft Pillow.  We sit on them.  We lay down our heads.  We wrap them around us like armor.  And then, we leave the gourd.  No giant finger to carry us.  It takes a lot of work, with the bulk of the pillows and the number of people.  But we each stand on our own legs, and walk ourselves across the room to where the hugs might be.  And I can picture our exodus this time.  A group of people in a sharp, Picasso lined outside, occasionally howling.  Hobbling along trying to make the world into a Soft Pillow.

“Brontus has to die today,” my nephew stated.  Then, at my silence, he protruded his bottom lip to indicate what my response should be.

“I see,” I said, looking around for help.  “I guess it’s his time.”

“He’s going to get a shot!” my niece intervened, “And then he’s going to fall asleep and then he will be dead.”

My sister and brother-in-law’s dog has been alive one half of the time I have, now.  His slow then rapid deterioration became evident as my Someone and I found shelter in their house for the winter.  And now, this morning, he is one day gone.  Everyone agrees it is for the best, as his little legs couldn’t manage the linoleum in the kitchen, anymore, and every pat to his frail body came as a surprise to him with his lost sight and hearing.  It was time, but time is still ticking, and the ticking makes for uncomfortable what-ifs for the ones left listening.

My father is threatening to kill my mother’s lilac bushes again.

“Don’t you kill my lilac bushes,” she pushes back at him with a purse-lipped scowl.

Truthfully, they have it coming.  The long wall of what used to be illustrious spring blooms is dulling to a tangle of wooden, leafy shards.  I still side with my mother on this one.  Even if the only thing keeping them up is the deteriorating back panel of the fence that used to surround the now filled in swimming pool, there is a deep satisfaction of the lilacs’ declaration of Spring.  Even if that declaration is more of a strangled whisper, now, in the meager, wrangled heads of a few tiny blooms.

It probably isn’t the whole story, anyway.  Since my father slew my mother’s favorite dying Dogwood just outside our bedroom windows when I was in high school, she has been digging her heels in about everything from the pines to the rhododendrons.  This grievance may be what is keeping the lilacs alive.  We have the power to force anything out of existence, but we have no power to force the ones we love to be ready for it.

Last Monday, my Someone and I were part of a launch party and memorial for our songwriting teacher who passed three years ago.  Cancer.  We sang some songs and gathered with people who were familiar, and recognized that this was the closing of a long chapter of grief.  Except it is never the end.  This became even clearer as we consoled one another and chose our words carefully and poured thicker glasses of rye whiskey.  And then, Reva stood on stage and sang a song that she had written with our late friend.  She sang the song as she would have sang it with him, switching between harmony and melody.  She left the missing parts missing, because our friend was now missing.  And that was how the song was heard at this juncture.

“Can I watch Brontus die, Dad?” my nephew asked before he left.  My Someone and I walked the neighborhood, repeating the questions and answers the kids had that morning.  Their directness of it all made my Someone question whether the kids understood what was happening.  And then, their directness of it all made us realize they knew exactly what was happening.  It isn’t the death itself that is hard, but the forgiveness of death itself: forgiving the patch of grass that is growing where the Dogwood’s roots used to be, forgiving the dog dishes in the kitchen still half full, forgiving the silence where the sound used to be.

Last night, my brother-in-law relayed the questions the kids asked the vet.  As they unraveled, I envisioned them getting older and older…

What’s in the shot?

                             How long until he sleeps?

                                                                    Where is he going next?

And after the declaration of hell’s fire beckoning, the pastor turned gently with his Britney Spears headset and got soft in the eyes– the kind of soft that every good Shakespearean actor knows to play.  It comes with the cock of the head and the worry of the stage right eyebrow–

“Salvation is like a plane ride,” he said. “You all have to land on the same Jesus runway to get it.”

(but what if it was actually true that the runway is salvation, and Jesus is the plane, and it doesn’t matter how you get to the plane, or even what you call it, because the plane is actually a spinning globe we all occupy, and we all always land in the right place.

…and how does that extend to the important matter of riding First Class?)

Kristie called me just outside Hunstville, Texas, the prison town that executes more inmates per year than any other in the nation.  We shot the shit as my fingers twitched in that familiar motion, and my body lurched for the end of the day.  I just needed to sing pretty one more night, then my body was my own again to self destruct, a glorious roll of lung cancer and ash seeping in and up to quiet the part of my brain that says I need, then yells at me for giving in when I do.  My gums ached with the smoke as I envisioned tooth decay from the inside out.

“I have an eating disorder,” Kristie said abruptly, “Not like anorexia or bulimia or anything, it’s just that I can’t stop, I am…”

And I finished her sentence with her.  A flood of last Sunday morning’s binge of popcorn with melted cheese and a fork– my secret eating– flashed into my brain.  My hankering for a cigarette turned into a yearning.  My lungs ached, my throat hurt.

“…a compulsive eater.”

What else have I been suppressing with my decade-long love affair with smoking?  A clear voice on the other end of the line–

“Everyone’s struggle with abstinence is the same,” she said.

Weight Watchers and Curves and homemade apple pies and early mornings at the track and fresh baked bread and long sighs of disappointment as she stepped on the scale.  My mother’s struggle with the love of food vs. the way she wanted her body to look was passed to her from her mother, and as much as we fought it, has passed down to her daughters, too.  It’s not my mother’s doing.  It’s not the sole responsibility of our skinny obsessed culture, either.  My fingerprints were not the only ones found in the icing the next morning after everyone was to be sleeping.

Because everyone’s struggle with abstinence looks the same.

We had only stepped out for ten minutes or so, just enough time to see the new house she and her husband had been building next door, and for me to confess to Jessica that I had again fallen in love.  When we stepped back inside, not only had my 97 pound dog managed to pull the Tupperware bin of dog food that was not hers from the bottom shelf of the coffee table, but had also managed– without a tooth mark– to pull back the snap latches, remove the lid, and eat over one half of a 40 pound bag.

We induced vomiting.

We walked it off.

We spent days of her moaning back in Nashville on a soft bed with a fan pointed squarely at her to ward off the discomfort.

“Like mother, like dogger,” I said to Jessica.

Because everyone’s struggle with abstinence feels the same.

It was behind the Church of Christian Science on the tailgate of my yellow truck, accompanied for good measure with my pal, Phill, and justified by the theater.  How was I supposed to know how to direct a couple of Christian College Freshman on how to look “natural” smoking when I, myself, had never partook?  It was art.  It was college.  It was necessary.  And so, ordering the “slimmest, most feminine young person cigarette, please” from the gas station, where my ID was scrutinized over twice, I found myself at the beginning of a decade.  This decade would have me playing out roles of early-morning-thoughtful-coffee-and-cigarette artist, late-night-drinking-bourbon-and-talking-theology 20-something, long-drives-between-states-with-moody-music traveler.  All justified by theater.

I recently attended a reading in which the author described the act of smoking being that after the first cigarette of the day, you spend each consecutive cigarette trying to recapture the feeling of the first.  And now, ten years later, I am still trying to capture the feeling of 19, 20, 21, 22…

I made a promise that I would smoke no longer than a decade, and I’m running right up against the rails.  With 30 less than a week and a half away, my mostly-on-again-sometimes-off-again relationship with smoking is coming to a blazing halt.  And despite the 2AM panic attacks of emphysema and the dull aches in my head and lungs, I persist to smoke more than I have in the past year.

“Pre-binging,” Kristie said, as I confessed to her just a couple days ago. “When you know the diet is coming, so you eat as much as you can to pre-reward yourself.”

I told my Someone that it’s not so much quitting, as agreeing to spend this decade being quit– that we can pick it up again for our 40’s.

Because everyone’s struggle with abstinence goes the same.

And maybe that’s where the sympathy comes in.  Maybe that’s where I find myself a little less angry at my ex-husband’s late night rants and stumbling to bed.  Maybe this instance of vulnerability and fear of parting with my long-time friend, who had kept me company through my ugly divorce and my new spackled marriage, helps me see that his long-time friend– not burnt down, but drunk down– has a hard time leaving, too.  And it may not all look like digging food up from the garbage or testing the limits of lung cancer, but everyone’s struggle with abstinence is the same.

I could only assume that the criteria was the same for God’s as it was the Gideon’s, and I was doing my best to avoid both as I gulped down water, alternating each night between cupping it in my hand and slurping it straight from the faucet.  It wasn’t unwarranted: repetition taught me that even if I wasn’t marching in infantries or riding in Cavalries or shooting artilleries, somehow my draft card was perpetually up for the Lord’s Army– this at a time when my ten-year-old self was secretly discovering my pacifistic tendencies.   And now, due to an alarming amount of overly sodium preserved prepackaged garbage I ingested on a daily basis, I found myself one foot on the bus to boot camp each night at 2AM as I hung over the sink trying to remember if it was the men who drank like dogs, or the ones who brought their face to the water who were chosen by God for Gideon’s Army.  When my memory wasn’t fluctuating, my allegiance was, so this night, I drink from the cup of my hand, tomorrow I drink from the faucet…

…and the Lord said to Gideon, “Everyone who laps from the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, you shall set apart by himself, likewise everyone who gets down on his knees to drink.”  And the number of those who lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, was three hundred men; but all the rest of the people got down on their knees to drink water.  Then the Lord said to Gideon, “By the three hundred men who lapped I will save you, and deliver the Midianites into your hand.  Let all the other people go, every man to his place.” *

This consistent, middle-of-the-night thirst became my gauge into adolescence and teenage.  My brother joins the Air Force: I lap from my hand.  I get shamed in front of my friends by a church leader: I sip from the faucet, letting the water run down my cheeks onto my pajamas.  My spiritual temperature flared and fainted, and the cool water quenched it regardless.  And, then, whether it was the grown up thing to do or my conscience caving or learning from my hangovers, the Gideon Drink, as I started shelving it, was replaced by the question-less, quiet cup of water on my bedside.  This glass never asked me if I was for or against the Devil or God or the Midianites or the President, it just asked if I was thirsty.  And with the addition of bourbon to my potato chip addiction, the answer was always, Yes.

I stood with the dog lappers in most cases.  Or at least with the dogs.  And most of the time, it didn’t carry me overseas to fight an entire nation with 299 of my closest lapping dog friends.  Mostly, my tendency to hang with the dogs kept me furthest from the line of fire, particularly during Deer Season.  My easily wounded heart throbbed unexpectedly each year as both of my parents, my brother, and my sister woke early on those cold 5AM mornings, head-to-toe in blaze orange and camouflage.  When the last door latched behind them, our three bird dogs and I settled in for a long morning of crafting with Popsicle sticks and listening for the gunshots to echo off the side of the Allegheny Mountains to our little cabin in the valley.  I consoled the three, read them Deenie and Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, shared Ramen noodles, and threw the tennis ball as we waited for the first sign of hunter orange to come creeping out of the woods for lunch.  In the afternoon, we started again.  These are the dog days– my favorite days– the quiet, question-less days of locked-in freedom and setting my cup of water next to their bowls just to see what it was like to drink only with my tongue.

It was Bird Season I came to dread, when not just the people, but my animals friends, too, were called out to the front lines.  These are the days I drink right from the faucet.  These are the days that my cup remains on the table, not by the dog bowls on the floor.  These are the days of being sent home alone.

I don’t want to go to war, not against Midianites or demons or ruffed grouse or anybody.  But I didn’t want to be left out of the pack, either.  This brought a considerable amount of confusion in years of hearing preachers regard the dogs with an emanating disdain, withholding food and pearls and things we lapping dogs love from us just because of how we sip our water.  We are good enough for Gideon, but not good enough to eat anything but the crumbs under Jesus’ table.

These days, with what’s been served, I think I prefer to be under the table, anyway.  But I’m not alone.

Last November, when a javelina attacking our dog turned our short visit to a long stead at my Someone’s Aunt and Uncle’s home in Mesa, the three of us– plus a lab named Sam– dog piled in the living room as we waited for Butter’s wounds to dry up.  The waiting brought long visits of short moments as we settled into a pattern together.  Aunt Margaret made no indication that her life had been disjointed by the ragtag troupe in the living room.  Instead, she bought us bread that we could eat.  She boiled the water for coffee.  She asked us questions and said kind words and let us cook her and her family dinner, too.

The day before we left, packed and cleaned and on the mend, we sat present and talking– Uncle, Aunt, Someone, me– when Aunt Margaret walked casually to the kitchen faucet, turned the water on, cupped her hand, and drank quickly like a member of Gideon’s Army.  From there, she didn’t haul off to battle, she just returned to the pack, and resumed her poised, kind presence at the table.

I don’t know what it means to be part of an Army of any kind.  I’m not sure what it means if I drink like the dogs, or even drink with them.  But I do know that if Aunt Margaret is on that march, I am happy to be in the company of my comrades.

 

 

* you know, the Bible.

I have a friend, he has a theory about the things that people carry.  It’s that the poorer you are, the more bags you carry– your extras of cameras and computers and phones and the ways that expensive new technology consolidation is unaffordable.  But those who are rich carry only one sleek appliance to do it all.  Those who are really rich hire someone else to carry the rest.

He’s been right, except in matters of love.

Because in matters of love, when you are full and rich with it, you are carrying more than you have ever carried; all of the person you can’t help but to carry all of, because you are in love.  And the poverty of love is carrying none of the person you love at all.

So heavy with love, I am.  And I am so happy and sad to carry it all.

But I keep carrying, because I am rich with the stuff.

(I am a bag lady of love with him).