Sunday, July 20, 2008

Disappointment

It didn't rain enough in June, so the blackberries went from red to rust without swelling up to their mystical blue-black and tempting me to risk chiggers and thorns for a couple of jars of blackberry jam. But this year the pears didn't get their blossoms frosted, so they are in abundance and a friend has offered to share their orchard, so there will be pear preserves this year; maybe even enough to share. Pear preserves are not to be found commercially because the commercial juice manufacturers add pear juice to sweeten everything. They also take forever to cook down into their pale pink pear essence and will scorch in a flash from the slightest inattention or momentary distraction. Chained to the cook-pot for hours, breathing the vapors, watching them collapse and bubble away until a wooden spoon will stand proud and unattended and the chunks of white pear are become translucent pink slivers. Ah, but there is nothing finer on a warm buttermilk biscuit of a cold morning to accompany a hen's egg, a few rashers of bacon and a cup of steaming coffee, sitting on a cold rock, poking a small fire, alone in the mountains, sheltered from the autumn winds.

There was a crabfest at church Saturday night, a farewell party of sorts, thrown by a member during a brief window of opportunity to celebrate having finished his chemotherapy and before he learns whether it succeeded in making him a candidate for surgery or had no effect on his pancreatic tumor and he now faces doing a slow and painful vanishing act, leaving many friends, a wife, and three young children behind.

There were more than 100 people there. Amongst them, two of his co-workers, young women fifteen years beyond college graduation with good jobs and single, yet without a spiritual home or sense of community. One was suffering from severe PBTSD --post-Baptist traumatic stress disorder-- having mis-spent her childhood attending conservative religious schools, where the mantra, the-bible-says-it-I-believe- it-that-settles-it, ruled academic (?) discourse. She said that she broke out in hives if she got anywhere near a church. And she told me that when she got to college she discovered that those folks had practically obliterated her ability to think critically. She listened to the other students and realized that they didn't just accept what they read or heard-- they actually argued with their professors. And so she began to change and ended up feeling completely estranged from her upbringing. Leaving home, though, had meant for the longest time to be without people to play with except for people from work, which is just too much of the same thing. So we talked and I enlisted their help in cleaning up the mess we'd made, whacking the crabs with wooden mallets and leaving splatter evidence everywhere of our execution and subsequent dismemberment of untold numbers of crustaceans. Her friend was the product of a mixed marriage and so didn't really feel comfortable in either a synagogue or a church. The PBTSD one reminded me much of One-if-by-sea; favored her enough in looks and demeanor to have been an older sister or cousin.

I told them my favorite Saint-the-Atheist Tex stories. Naturally, they wanted to meet him. Unfortunately, he's dead. Or maybe fortunately, depending. I didn't tell them about the day his foot slipped and he floored his van through the back of the church, where, by a series of fortunate coincidences, didn't kill anyone, although he knocked down walls and drove through three children's classrooms and the senior high lounge and certainly would have flattened twenty future liberals or more, if everyone had been where they normally would have been. Now that he's gone, I've gotten to know his long-time female companion and have learned that there was another very dark side to my snarling patron saint. The Wayward One may remember looking through a telescope belonging to an old guy with a white beard who looked like Santa Claus and seeing the rings of Saturn one night in the parking lot. Saint Tex. He drank too much and smoked his whole life; died young at the age of 75 or there abouts.

And I gave them an abbreviated version of my 'This I Believe' speech:

Life is a joke:
Sometimes it's on you; sometimes me.
Sometimes it's not funny at all.
And sometimes we don't get it right away.
but it's always a joke.
Get it? Eh?

And we still haven't come up with a symbol to put at the end of a sentence to indicate this is supposed to be funny. And don't even think about suggesting the 'smiley-face', or that :-) crap, or even worse, lol. I would go for a simple triangle, pointing up, if funny, pointing down, if not; sideways, too, is always an option, as, pointing to the left: things that will only be funny to liberals, to the right, of course, for stupid stuff the assholes think is funny.

but I digress.

This I Believe

Just kidding.

I don't.