That Kind of Day...

Now, where was I?

Was I where I should have been? 

How would I know?

Having gotten that out of the way...  Here I sit, among the heaps of stuff I can't seem to avoid collection around myself, and halfway wrapped in the polar fleece I call our 'magic blankets', with our new cat Coco sleeping beside me, and no writing ideas at all in my head.

Well, of course that's not strictly true.

Today was Black Heritage Sunday at Christ Church New Brunswick, and John had all four (!) of his choirs singing.  Which meant that I had to drive south-ish, three hours earlier than I would have been driving west-ish, on my way to Combat Paper.  My vague plan was to sing the service and then skip away, and spend at least part of the day in Branchburg, up to my elbows in paper pulp.

But before I drove anywhere, I had to clean off the van, which operation took more time, and a good deal more effort, than I originally expected.  And during which procedure, I discovered that, once again, I'd managed to lock the sliding side doors, thus further complicating my efforts to remove about a foot of snow, and a teensy layer of ice, from this vehicular behemoth.  I turned on the ignition and cranked up the heat, grabbed the kitchen broom, and had set to work.  Cursing as I went.  Fantasizing about moving to New Mexico.  Fantasizing about emptying the garage so it could finally be used for its intended purpose.  Fantasizing about whether or not I was having a heart attack, in spite of the little pacemaker zapping me on a regular basis.

It was good enough.  It didn't look as though any vast sheets of snowy ice were going to peel off the van roof as I raced down the Garden State.  I had to cover 25 miles of possibly snow-covered highway, in less than an hour.  And I wanted coffee, at the very least.

Miraculously, the commute was much easier and quicker than I'd expected (flirting with 80 mph always seems to help), and I actually arrived in time, not only to grab a cup of coffee, but to have a grease-laden sausage/egg/cheese sandwich from Starbux.  There was even a little table free, so I could eat like a semi-civilized person.  I was wearing a sport jacket, after all.

At the next table, a man was writing on an unfolded brown paper napkin from the Bux, and I couldn't help exclaiming my regret, that I didn't have one of my notebooks, as I usually to, because brown paper napkins are terribly impermanent surfaces for anything of even the slightest value.  The man laughed and said he was writing a letter to his sister in Connecticut, and that she liked getting letters on napkins.  He began to leaf through his work -- he must have had ten sheets of that spongy paper, covered with writing.  Though it crossed my mind that the guy might be slightly deranged, he seemed lucid enough, and there was something about the drift of the conversation that I was enjoying.  Plus, I was going to have to leave in just a few minutes anyway.

He introduced himself.  He told me about his grandfather, and his Hungarian heritage.  He talked a bit about his military experience -- being an officer in the Army, in Germany, and began a somewhat garbled account of one of his adventures in uniform, which account veered off onto another topic.  I was nearly done with my sandwich, and was checking my watch every few minutes.  He had drifted back to his family history, and how long some of his male forebears had lived, when it was time for me to go.  I wonder if I'll see him there again.  I wonder if he'll remember me.

There was plenty of time to get my choir robe from the van, and get into the sanctuary for a brief rehearsal, before all the choirs had to mass at the back of the church, for the entry procession.  Having just experienced a generic Protestant service yesterday, I found myself appreciating the formal clarity of a more liturgically-centered worship practice.  I thought about the very real continuity of these services -- how, in a literal sense, the day's observance was the newest rendition of the same (or at least similar) liturgy that has been played out, week after week, for centuries.  In my mind's eye, I saw our service as something being woven by all of us, and that it was just the latest row of weaving, the newest edge of an immense tapestry of worship.  I thought about the CSETI project, in the American Southwest, and someplace in Chile too, I think, and their goal of detecting some kind of signal beaming through space, while they also broadcast something that's apparently supposed to alert other intelligent life forms of our existence.  And I wondered whether, by some chance, these repeated activities, pulse-like in their regularity, might just as easily be a kind of detectable signal too.   I also wondered, as we got ready to commune, what our services would be like, if Jesus had blessed some peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, and a strawberry millkshake.  My mind tends to wander a bit in settings like these. 

Even though I know I should feel guilty about these mental peregrinations, I somehow comfort myself with an observation Anthony Trollope made, through his character, Dr. Thorne, in the novel of the same name.  The good doctor has a reprobate of a patient, whose life is a kind of contagion, and Dr Thorne realizes at one point that he wishes the sick man would die.  He at first recoils at his own cold-bloodedness, but then makes this observation: A man is not responsible for his thoughts, but he is completely responsible for his actions.  (The reprobate eventually dies, all on his own)

With or without my random train(s) of thought, the service came to an end, and after helping John move a bunch of chairs from here to there, he and I discussed whether I should go to Combat Paper, or come back home with him, because his cold was clearly getting much worse, and it's just better, if you're not feeling well, to have somebody around, in case you need Vicks Vapo-Rub or something.  Plus, we found out about a new cold remedy, that ameliorates the symptoms, so I decided to stop at the supermarket on the way home, to get soup ingredients, and the new magical over-the-counter elixir.  (I do feel a little guilty about bailing on Combat Paper, especially as we've already decided not to meet next week.  Another instance of too many obligations, and just the one body to meet them with...)

And, as seems unfailingly to happen, and when I least expect to meet with anything of any significance, I saw what I took to be an older married couple, as I was going to the parking garage to get the van.  They moved along with an almost ceremonial slowness.  She carefully lead him, with a gentle touch on one arm, as he shuffled, gradually, up the sidewalk.  She looked fit and trim, just a bit taller than the man I took to be her husband.  He was bent, with legs writhen and twisted, and he wore a great pair of very dark glasses, that must have made him effectively blind, even in the bright sunlit afternoon. 

Suddenly, the busyness of my day seemed trivial, my conflict about where to go and how quickly I needed to get there, held against this laborious mundane progress I was witnessing.  Suddenly, I was ashamed of my rude health and straight bones, my seemingly uncontrollable, impatient need to plunge ahead, to make a little better time in my race with the spinning of the planet beneath my feet.
Rather than speed past these two in their laborious dance, I took another route to my car, and as I walked through the church graveyard, I thought about the contrast between the agenda-laden ceremony in which I'd taken an enthusiastic part, and this unprepossessing, but incontrovertibly real  example of how human life really does, as often as not, uncurl during its allotted span on this side of the grave.  Who could tell, just looking at these two, what their lives had been like, ten years ago, or twenty, or thirty?  Had they danced differently then?  Had he been the one to offer the genteel guiding hand, the reassuring hand at the elbow when there was a bit of ice on the ground?  Had his vision once been keen, and quick to notice oddities they would laugh about together -- had she felt less tethered, less constrained to hold back her own vitality, in service to his lack of same? 

In the church today, we had prayed a lot, for a host of things and for a multitude of people.  There's often a 'healing ceremony', with special prayers and the laying on of hands, for those who feel a particular need for a particular blessing.  And we're blithely assured that these prayers, often offered for the same people for months on end, willl be answered -- that there's some personalized, caring mechanism with the sole goal of assisting each and every one of us..

But when I'm brought face-to-face with people whose lives have been cruelly twisted, through no fault or shortcoming of their own, I have a hard time reconciling the theory with the reality.  And the notion of  caring deity falls to the ground, for me.  I think, instead, of my relationship with my cats.  My cats, with no possible appreciatino of the life I lead in the house, let alone what I do and deal with on a regular basis, once I'm out in the wide world.  Use an aTM machine?  Shift gears in the van?  Shop for food?  Negotiate a left hand turn at a four-way stop sign?  Don't even get started about the phones. 

What wouldn't I do, to keep my cats safe, and healthy, and well-fed and cared-for -- and certainly, if one of them were to develop feline arthritis, I would be willing to do the wrapping in the towel routine, to get the pills in and down those caterwauling throats.  And I know there are a billion reasons that will be trotted out when I've asked my question, but here it is -- how is it that, mere human that I am, I can act, on the whole, with greater compassion and obvious caring, for a couple of ungrateful, useless creatures who only deign to approach me when their food bowls are empty, than an allegedly omnipotent, all-knowing and all-caring Deity can manage to do, even for those most especially loved, or so it would seem? 

All this does, in fact, is to lead me back to what seems to be my prevailing observation -- that, besides the human companionship I'm garnered somehow, there's no real reason to go looking for miracles.  If anything, I might brace myself for the day when it'll be me, in my wheelchair, holding up the checkout line in the supermarket.  I used to believe -- honestly I did, with something approaching ferocity.  But when my most basic prayers went unacknowledged, for decades (or, I've observed, as long as some felons get, as prison terms for involuntary manslaughter -- and hat includes a dead human body!)I began my bitter search for something more mundane, more mechanical, more tangible, in which to invest my spiritual yearnings.  So far, it seems as though I'm still shopping, even at this late date in my life.  What, if anything, I might discover seems still to be opaque to me.

I made potato soup.  John liked it.  There's plenty left for tomorrow.  If, that is, I don't fall down the stairs and break my legs.  It's been that kind of day, I'm afraid...
    
Gung hai fat choi, by the way!


©  2013     Walter Zimmerman