The man wanted information kept
from a particular medical special-
ist. The man was to embark on a
new, but well researched procedure
approved by the AMA but given the
specialist’s behavior in the past,
the man didn’t want any potential
disagreements on the matter. The
man told his primary physician all
about it and the primary immediate-
ly consulted the specialist which,
of course, the man had an issue with
as a violation of confidentiality,
but the interesting thing is that
the specialist didn’t remember the
man after five visits. The man could
have had his ego hurt, and certainly
would have in the past, but surprise,
surprise, he didn’t. The good news
in all this? He didn’t care. It was
okay, perfectly okay. He didn’t need
to be remembered by the esteemed
specialist. The man considered that
a spiritual victory of sorts.

He sits and reflects on
forty-five years of
ordination to ministry —
the measuring stick,
the bar for a Christian
minister being how close
he or she followed Jesus
in one’s personal life
and in leading others
(parishioners in particular)
in the way of love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-cont-
rol on a personal level
and working for justice
for the poor, the outcasts,
the downtrodden, the victims
and helping to transform
structures of society to-
ward equality, dignity,
opportunity and possibil-
ity. In light of that
daunting task, he swallows
hard, shakes his head,
thinks about how much
easier it would have been
simply to call people to
believe in Jesus Christ
as their personal lord
and savior as a ticket
to heaven and out of hell,
but he knows he couldn’t
have done such an un-
biblical thing, so he
simply gives thanks for
grace and prays the Kyrie.

The medical doctor daughter had a big hurt, resentment, anger toward her academic doctor father. With great spite and condescension wishing to hurt him in turn, she said, “You’re no doctor. You’re a Ph.D.” He just stood there.

I would have said, “Daughter, you are a physician. I am an academician. We are both doctors,” but I’m not the one with whom she was having the hard time.

On an emotional level, of course, that wouldn’t have helped. Her hurt was deep and really had nothing to do with degrees, but if she is going to fight, she should fight fair, get her facts straight and call things as they are. Perhaps her father said nothing, because he knew no response to that statement would be helpful and so his silence was golden.

Perhaps later, if indeed he was culpable and penitent with a resolve to straighten up and fly right, he might simply offer that he was sorry for the hurt he caused and, by the grace of God, they might begin to talk — adult to adult/person to person and begin the journey to reconciliation — perhaps.

Ah, wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t the adult journey to reconciliation be nice for all of us and our damaged and sometimes broken relationships — as much as it depends on us?

He awakes at two a.m., looks across
the bed and sees his wife’s profile in
the shadow of the nightlight. He hears
her soft breathing. When he returns
from the bathroom, she has turned on
her side facing the wall.

When he awakes at five-thirty a.m., he
glances at this wife. She faces him,
swallows, sighs deeply and turns to
lie on her back.

At seven-fifteen a.m., the dog gets up,
shakes himself awake, rattling his tags.
The man gets up, dresses, calls to the
dog, glances back at his wife’s outline
under the sheet, the curve from her legs
over her hips up to her neck.

He closes the door and takes the dog
out. They come back in, the dog jump-
ing and romping at the thought of his
breakfast. The dog runs up the stairs
and goes to the kitchen cupboard door
behind which is his dog food. The
dog’s tail slaps the wall.

The man puts the dog food in the
dog’s bowl; the dog sits drooling
waiting for the man to say “Okay.”
The man does; the dog eats ravenous-
ly; the man makes a pot of coffee
knowing the wonderful aroma of the
recently ground beans will waft down
the stairs, creep under the door
and float up to his wife’s nose.
He smiles and sits at the computer
to check his e-mail.

Soon she will ascend the stairs and
pour herself a cup of coffee asking
him if he would like a cup. He will
nod affirmatively, smile and tell her
how beautiful she is. She will smile
back, walk over and kiss him on
the cheek.

It isn’t Hollywood; they don’t
gaze lovingly in each other’s
eyes and speak tender words of
love and passion up close and
personal in bed in the morning.
They wait until the coffee is
brewed; they kiss on the cheek
before heading to their bath-
rooms to floss, brush and gargle.
Then they meet again in the kit-
chen, whisper words of love,
giggle and kiss long and loving-
ly on the mouth. It’s called
love in the real world.

Sitting in the breakfast area of a motel
he loves people watching — people with
swollen eyes, sleepers still in the eyes,
unwashed, unruly hair, pajamas, yes,
pajamas — loud floral tops, contrasting,
not matching floral bottoms, flip-flops,
white socks, scuffed, black leather shoes
tee shirts and shorts. Up and down, up
and down they go to the breakfast bar to
get hard-boiled eggs, fruit, toast or sit
and wait for the beep, beep, beep of the
waffle maker — all the while staring at
their hi-tech phones and watching really,
really cheery, well-coiffed, dapperly-
dressed, T.V. personalities being really
cute while discussing issues like “Should
people be allowed to bring babies to the
work place?” and “Leaky Bowel Syndrome.”
While all this is going on, he thinks about
an e-mail he sent which could have been
misunderstood and misinterpreted, but,
fortunately, wasn’t. And so, he breathes
a sigh of relief and watches an obscenely,
grotesquely, rotund man waddle out of the
breakfast area, into the lobby and down
the hall toward his handicapped accessible
room.

In my last post, I thought it would be
amusing to reference Bangladesh at the
end of the post as being a country where
someone knows I’m alive. It fit with the
post.

When I went to check the spelling for
Bangladesh, I read that four secular
bloggers just had been killed in Bangladesh
by militants.

Immediately, I changed Bangladesh to Sri
Lanka.

What a world!!!

Sometimes when I check my e-mail, I
see a note from WordPress. Cautious-
ly, I get excited that someone has
gone to the blog, read a poem and has
a comment. I say cautiously because
sometimes spam sneaks through, like
today. I got one in broken English
telling me my work is of such astound-
ing insight that the writer just could-
n’t help but comment and wondered if
I might be interested in little pink
pills. I click “Mark as Spam,” which
then leads me to signing in in order
to go to the spam folder where I us-
ually see a few notes up to numbers
in the teens but sometimes up to, oh
say, as many as sixty-five spam notes.
I give thanks that WordPress catches
the vast majority. Then I see that
69,000 spam notes have been detected
since September 2011. Would I have
gotten tired reading all 69,000 notes
if they had been compliments about
my poetry? Just kidding. I hit “De-
lete Spam.” I log out, go to Word
document, write another poem, sign
in to post the poem and notice but
another note in the spam folder.
Then I think, hey, somebody in Sri-
Lanka knows I’m alive.

She crawled inside the trunk of
herself and saw high up inside
the branches, faces of so many
who had gone before. Their arms
stretched toward the sky, batting
clouds back and forth in the breeze
like a game of celestial volley-
ball, except the clouds moved so
slowly it was more like badminton;
the game went on for half purga-
tory time. Two games was all it
took; the whistle blew, they all
cheered for themselves and each
other and were promptly ushered
into heaven. She called after them
saying goodbye but they didn’t look
back. She was sad to see them go
but very glad she saw them just in
time one last time. As she crawled
out of herself, she saw the clouds
turning dark. She ran inside the
house before it started to rain.
It had been dry. They needed the
rain.

He was taught to be up there,
that up there is better, always
better than down here. It start-
ed in church. Jesus is up there;
that’s where we want to be. It
continued in school; your brain
is up there; that’s where you
want to be. Church, school,
school, church. There was no
living down here or there, down,
down, down there, below the
waist, never there, never spoken
of down there, down to the dust,
but from dust we came and to
dust we shall return. It can’t
be all bad down there –no, here,
right here, in the dust, in the
sand, in the mud, in the water.
Feels pretty good between his
toes, it’s where it all grows.

He finds himself at the bottom of a well.
How he got there he doesn’t know. It is
circular, made of red brick and is very
damp with water oozing out of each brick,
droplets dropping and splashing in the foot
of water in which he stands. Suddenly, blue-
grey Spanish rocks are being dropped down
into the well narrowly missing his head.
The water splashes onto his pants up to his
tee-shirt. The stones come faster and more
furious. He ducks and dodges. Where is the
iron ladder in and out of the well? He hears
a laugh from above echoing in the well, re-
verberating in the well, bouncing off of
walls. He knows the voice. It’s familiar.
It’s a relative. It’s always a relative. He hears
Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette,
and then the inimitable voice, “Good
evening.” It’s not a relative, not this
time. It’s Alfred Hitchcock. Thank God.
He loves Alfred Hitchcock and that voice,
“Goood Eeevenningggg….” “Good morning,”
his wife calls and he awakes in a sweat.