Things That Happen to Us That We Do Not Ask For

NOTE: None of the disasters mentioned below happened recently, or to anyone I love, but did happen to people I know.

You can be living a righteous life and then - bam - everything changes utterly for the worse.

You can be kind and reverent, and then all the ugliness of some one's dark nightmare can come to rest at your doorstep.

You can be minding your p's and q's, your own business, and the store and then an intrusion of unimaginable dimensions intrudes.

You can be standing on the bridge over the Mississippi bottomlands in the hours before midnight on New Year's Eve, your wife and children in the car behind you, the headlights shining, having gotten out of the car to be a Good Samaritan to the car that just pulled off the road, in distress, and then you can find yourself pitched off the bridge when a car rams your car, the one with your wife and kids in it, and that is the last thing you know, because you are off the bridge, falling to your death. If you had survived, you would know that your family is as fine as they could be seeing you pushed over the guardrail by the front of the car, illuminated by the headlights, that they would all be traumatized and desperately sad, but that they would survive, and in time, thrive.

You can be driving you brand new van, towing a trailer full of your worldly goods, while you wife and baby daughter wait for you at home, and a car whose driving is fleeing police can hit your van and send you cartwheeling and jack-knifing down the highway, slamming into traffic, into concrete medians, into metal guardrails, into unconsciousness, thinking oh no I cannot die, I have a wife and baby daughter.

You can be doing everything, everything exactly right, living as your god, exactly as your god, wants you to live, and then life happens.

Why does it matter what we do? My father once said to me that if you don't believe in heaven and hell, then none of it [life] makes any sense. I have come to believe that what he meant was not that being a good person only made sense if there was a heavenly reward, but that he dearly longs to see his mother again, who died (he was a perfectly ordinary and perfectly good child of 3) from a simple infection following a 1931 brain surgery.

It matters what we do, because of love. Because of that love that takes us by surprise, that washes over us and swells our hearts. That love that wets our eyes when we watch our beloved walking toward us in a perfectly ordinary way, but the breeze catches her hair a little bit, a puff of air, the breath of some god perhaps, reminding us we are dust, she is dust, all we see is dust. So fragile, so vulnerable, so majestic and fine, this world, this eternity constructed of dust.

Because of the love that fills our chests when we see the country's flag illuminated in the night, when we see a mass of diverse humanity gathered in Mecca to pray together in the name of love, when we see an individual fishing food from a dumpster, when we touch the soft, nickle-plated surface of the doorknob that our grandfather touched, he who died before we were born.

It matters what we do because of the love that comes on us from somewhere else, unbidden. Perhaps we cannot know why people suffer, people who are good and kind, because there is no reason, or because our existence is too short for us to see a big enough picture. But what I do know is that when I act out of love I feel clarity, entrainment, serenity.

Love. Devotion. Surrender. Act out of love. Do it devotedly. Surrender to the consequences.

55 Years

1 bottle Mionetto sparkling wine
2 amusee bouche
1 small frisee salad
2 crab appetizers
3 glasses of Oyster Bay New Zealand Wine
1 bowl of chowder
1 lobster tail
1 stuffed sole
1 cup of tea
1 special occasion dessert

My parents recently celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. I found out where they were going for dinner, snuck in and arranged for them to have champagne on their arrival. I also made arrangements to take care of the check, which they learned at the end of the meal when the server handed them the anniversary card I left at the restaurant. Cost - a small car payment. My Mom's delighted, tipsy phone call that evening to say thank you, and my dad calling me naughty at brunch the next morning - priceless.

Luminous

After a couple of months fretting about what this pain in my belly may be, I have an answer, opined by three physicians.

You have pain, they say, of unknown origin.

I'm sorry not to be grateful for the benefit of their collective wisdom, but I really was hoping for something more like "you have a little adhesion from your appendectomy, and here are some helpful ways to help bust it loose."

Or, "those fibroids are messing up your insides something awful, but fortunately now we can remove them and leave you organs intact - outpatient."

Instead, they said that I probably have over-active nerves. I am relieved. I am not ill, I have no disease process causing this. I feel like I've been told I am imagining the pain, or that I am a wee bit hysterical. Neither is true.

Strange how much more tolerable pain becomes when I know it is not the result of a disease process. I have mythic pain tolerance abilities. Walked on a broken ankle for 8 months, endured a perforated, gangrenous appendix for two. OK. Mythic and stupid. That's why I was very thoroughly checked out this time, to save my loved ones the anxiety that can come with caring for me.

What I also learned, is that I have three small, golf-ball sized fibroids. Nothing to worry about. Except that I really don't want to feel like Patty Berg's golf bag. Oh, and my ovaries and uterus are shrunken - perfectly normal for some one at my stage of life. Good thing my self-esteem isn't tied up in the size of my sex organs.

So, now free from the fear of ruptures, implosions, perforations and other possible consequences of exercise, I am back out walking.

Tonight, striding along Wirth Lake, my attention was gripped by the rose-colored moon. The cast was golden, so that it resembled in my imagination the battle-metal of the armor in Beowulf's great hall, made from gold tinged with red iron. The orb in the sky lit my path, and also lit up the dozens and dozens of autumn mushrooms in the woods. My favorites are the puffballs, shining brightly in the moonlight, looking, well, moon-like - both kinds. Or breasty. Or like a bald man and a baby touching foreheads, since in one pair I saw, one puffball was much smaller than the other.

It has been weeks and weeks since I walked in these woods, or in the wildflower garden. Thinking back to the Spring, when the hills' contours were visible, I am overwhelmed by the emergence of all the vegetation - all this biomass, built from sun, water, and nutrients from the soil. From what blueprint, what recipe, what spell or formula? What intention or what indulgence allows them to be? These blooms, these reeds, these fledgling birds eating seed from my feeders - they all appear from nowhere it seems. Yet I know better. They are wrought from strands of my heart, tears of my eyes and lightness of my being. We are, in very real ways, all made of the same stuff.

Same as that moon up there. Same as those mushrooms down there.