Yesterday, I was uninspired.
I sat in front of two eggs I’d fried along with two links of allegedly-healthier turkey sausage and an all-important banana. I thought I should write. Did not know how to start.
I have not managed to write thirty essays in the thirty days before Lent. I’ll be lucky if I manage ten. Life conspired against me. Or I didn’t have my priorities straight. Or the clouds, shifting across the sky as they were yesterday, had other things for me to do.
I can’t tell you all the stories that happened when I wasn’t writing. They’ve blurred now, as stories have a mind to when people forget to tell them.
Time carries us on, day into week; weekends we wait for are here, then gone, until that day that sparked so brightly is ten years ago, edges fraying. Try to catch it up in the net of a story and it breaks apart — was it Carl there catching the football, outlined in the sun? Or Scott? And who was it who said that funny thing? We laughed and laughed, smoke from the campfire in our eyes; what was it? We don’t remember now, only that it happened that we were together by a campfire and laughed so hard we cried. Though maybe the tears were from the smoke.
In the end it all goes up in smoke, or drifts away, like clouds, shifting.
What story should I tell you this morning in the words and time remaining? What bit of smoke should I cup my hands around and lift to you, like a child presenting a lightning bug or butterfly?
Where was the feast, and how did it shift and move across the days?
In Toledo, visiting Don. We went to a Lutheran church on Sunday morning. The sermon was on a troublesome passage, but my eyes were drawn to the reading from Paul about being “ready” for “solid food.” There was my word again. And there the idea of feasting. I folded the bulletin carefully and placed it on the passenger seat of my car. Thinking: I will think about this later.
Later we went to lunch at the house of a Polish man Don had met at the post office.
Don does these kinds of things. I’m learning not to ask so many questions.
There was supposed to be pingpong, but in fact there was pierogi and the borscht Don made and a delightful dog named Chili Pepper. A wall of windows looking out over Lake Erie.
The coincidences, frankly, were eerie. The Polish man (retired physician) had a girlfriend from western Kentucky where I’d lived for a while. She and I knew all the same places. His son was in Pittsburgh, where I’m from. He was looking for a specialty carpentry shop; Don’s friend had just opened one; turned out the girlfriend knew her too, but didn’t know it.
Don prayed over the food. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. These people did not seem like pray-ers. But I’m trying to be ready; learning not to ask so many questions.
The man said he was looking for something to do in his retirement.
Don invited him to serve food to the poor on Saturday morning. To my surprise, the man said, “Yes.”
Don remembered a doctor he knew who did free clinics on Monday night, in a parking lot by a soup truck. “Would you like to meet him?” he asked.
The man said, “Yes.”
Out the window, over the lake, the clouds shifted.
Later I asked how Monday went. It turned out the two doctors had bonded, diagnosed patients, exchanged phone numbers, begun talking of larger projects. Free Toledo clinic for the uninsured. It seemed that the time had been right. The feast had been laid on the table, and everyone was ready.
Had I been ready?
Yesterday I went to see my spiritual director. Blue sky, false spring, clouds shifting.
I told her I was giving a talk at my church about the Garden of Gethsemane. She said, “Oh!” and sprang to her feet. She led me to the sanctuary where a mural was. Christ praying in the garden. Door in the middle, metaphor, perhaps, for what those praying there would walk through. We gazed at it, and after a while, she told me a story. Cupped her hands around it and held it up to me. I breathed it in like the smoke of olive wood — stinging and also sweet.
I let my mind rest. Clouds ceased shifting. I watched a spark flying up, or possibly a firefly; watched the Monarch’s wings resting there on a blade of grass in a field that even in winter is greening.
Every day a feast and me, at last — or at least, in this moment — ready.
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