Secretly Shopping

Looking down I see the tent made in the soft, ratty quilt by my curly toes. The quilt is fourteen years old. I once wrapped my infant grandson in it. I meditate in its folds; roll up in it on the beach. It is in shreds and will not survive many more washings. If I were the mother of me, I’d start cutting it down in size and giving it back to me smaller each time by half, weaning me from its comfort so as to avoid the grief of losing it when it is no longer patchable. Idly, obliquely, almost surreptitiously from myself, I am shopping for its replacement. I will need time to break in the new one before this one is gone for good. The good mother in me tries to prepare me for change.

My sister weaned herself from solitude into a second marriage. The nuptials were just last week and were thoroughly ratified by the celebrants and the bride and groom are very happy. They waited a long time for this and they were thoroughly prepared. Still the bride finds herself fantasizing the disappearance of an unwanted cat that may be part of the package of coupledom. There are many ways to lose a cat, or a marriage, or a familiar old comfort; so many ways the current moment can feel unacceptably aligned with the unwanted .

My sisters and I are trying to make ‘home’ our sense of gratitude. As often as they appear we are cutting up our sorrows and disappointments and throwing the bits to the wind; remembering, and then indulging, thankfulness for this moment, the particular patch of the quilt we are living, this gossamer now.

Maybe the bride will embrace the groom’s ratty old cat, its trail of hairs, its distinctive smells, its habit of never ever going outside. Surely it has value if only as counter point to the perfection of her home. Then again, she could be secretly shopping for the cat’s ‘next’ home?

How do we stay present when ‘now’ requires so much acceptance of loss and annoyance, such prescient recognition of the value of unwanted gifts. Practice, I guess.

Why mourn in advance the loss of a favorite quilt when at this moment I am thankfully protected by its droopy old folds? It's
not gone yet.

The baby I wrapped in it yesterday, my heart expanding with love, is today a quixotic 13 year old boy, his expression of himself as impossible to hold onto as mercury. Every moment is both the first and last time for the opportunity it presents. Salinger said the only thing in the world of value is a dead cat because no one can put a price on it. Salinger aside, I think a dead cat might have a price to the right person but a live one, unwanted, might be worth more.

Daydreaming Of The Next House

Both my young niece and a middle aged friend were diagnosed with colon cancer a year ago and now they are both out of options, so say their doctors. I want to say something helpful or comforting. I want to help them find joy from where they are to where they are going, though maybe they have that already. I’m speechless and impotent with good intentions. All I have is the truth that unfettered malignant growth terrifies me; that I admire their courage. I want to say you are beautiful and unique and unforgettable. I want to say that being here and then not being here is inconceivable. There is no one like you, I want to say.

I am daydreaming again of my next house; how it will have three rooms and a bath: how it will be simple and small with odd room combinations.

Not my idea of heaven, but throw in friends and family and it’s the closest thing I can imagine to it on this earth. No one is interested in hearing about that, I think.

A fish could swim in today’s air (Friday) and all my intentions of weeding flew into a revised plan of napping in the air-conditioned house.

My sole achievement so far this weekend (Saturday) is to have fabricated a hummingbird feeder from a leaf shaped bottle of maple syrup, a red plastic CD cover and a thin plastic tube. Many of my solitary moments of fun involve a hot glue gun and an idea. Again, I can’t imagine anyone caring about that. Even the Hummingbirds don’t care so far; only the ants.

What we care about is joy in the moment and how to find it and how to find our way back to it because everything changes all the time. The hope of happiness in this life, in spite of suffering, brought me to faith and the practice of faith-from-the-heart. It brings me there again thousands of times a year. So how does that help anybody else? My mind can't even stay on the subject.

It’s been such a lush summer that I can’t keep up with the brush cutting and weeding so I’ve moved my attention from large impossible pursuits to small attainable ones. I decided to work with the growth, focus on the positive and make an edible and entertaining front porch; hence the hummingbird feeder. . .and the cherry tomatoes and summer squash growing out the bottom of hanging pots.

Someone gave me the gourd plant. I thought the gourds would be small red and decorative. Instead they are big watermelon-like gourds, kind of snaky-colored, impending, heavy. Not what I ever imagined or wanted. But I know the path to joy leads from where we are and what we’ve got, through the heart, to a gift. Joy is the gift. So I tie up the gourds and water them faithfully, as if I liked them.

I don’t know, when I confront death, if I will be able to sink into my heart with the pain that it brings, offer that pain up to God, wait expectantly to see it transformed into something better. I hope the experiences of a life time of faith will allow me to see another miracle and receive the gift of a few more moments of joy. But we don't know how we will be in the face death. And I don't know how to be with anyone else facing death.

What will the next house be? Will this nap, this rain, this summer, be my last? Can't I make just one more thing with the hands I am so used to using, to seeing before me.

What I have to give is just my bumbling lostness, my impotence and sometimes, when it is given to me, a joy-filled love flailing around in the circumstance of the day; an irrational, potent hope. The dying remind us of our need for it. That is their exquisite, fragile, virulent gift to us.