PeaceBang

The Fam

When I was a little kid my Mom would often say, “I love you a million, trillion hearts.” That went on for years. When we talk on the phone still today, we always say “I love you” before we hang up (it’s a family thing with all of us). Lately when I tell her I love her before hanging up, Mom has been responding “I love you MORE.” And then I say, “I love YOU more!” and then we go back and forth until she goes, “Okay!” and then we crack up laughing.

Let me just say for all of you who are dreading the family thing this week that I feel for you. I feel for you and I pray for you, because my immediate family and I have gone through some bloody battles indeed and fought for the relative peace and harmony we enjoy today. I remember when Mom was in rehab and immediately thereafter, when a letter from her in my mailbox at college would start my heart to pounding with dread. I’d have to take it unopened to my therapist Jan and read it in her office where I felt safe. And I don’t even want to tell you how much work my sis and I have done trying to better understand each other over the years! But it was worth every screaming fight we had because we had a common goal and we got there.

Family is an intense business, my friends. Nothing hurts like family. Romance gone bad comes close, but not very. Family pain is like nothing else.

So be careful out there as the holidays begin, with all their tremulous expectation, vulnerability, control freakishness on parade, and sarcasm that cuts. Keep your friends on speed dial, take long walks and breathe deep, and remember that there is One who loves you perfectly, as you are, and that you don’t need to perform, to achieve, to conform, to fib, or to make nice-nice to earn that love.

To my family: I am thankful for you every day. I wish we could all be together on Thanksgiving (BrotherBang, Sister-In-LawBang and NephewsBangs, it’s such a joy to have you here that I’ve been getting misty-eyed over it all morning) but it’s wonderful to know that we’re together in spirit. I love you a million, trillion hearts.

Genie In New York

My friend Genie is just one of those touchstone people you’re lucky to have in your life. We’ve been friends since the first days of college when we went on endless rounds of auditions and jokingly referred to each other as “the call-back queens.” We constantly got called back for leading roles and not cast. Not bad for two kids who weren’t even theatre majors in the hyper-competitive Northwestern University theatre scene!
Of course I didn’t see it that way back then; I just saw failure and rejection. Silly kid.
Genie is a beautiful, open-faced corn-fed girl from Libertyville, Illinois. She came to NU with an enormous, authentic smile, the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen, and a great set of singing pipes and dancing pins. She is one of those people of whom I have always thought, “But she’s so truly sweet and good; why would she want to be friends with me?”

My first big trip abroad alone was to see Genie in England right after graduation. I had finished my student teaching in December and couldn’t find a teaching job, so I worked as a nanny and saved my pennies for a pilgrimage trip to the U.K. to honor my degree in English Literature. Genie was living in London and working for the BBC at the time, and I wanted to backpack around (using London as a home base) and visit an elderly distant relative — the sole member of my extended European family who had escaped the Nazi persecution.

Back in those days, we didn’t have e-mail (I can’t believe I just said that!) so Genie and I exchanged letters and I planned to show up at about 11 AM after my trans-Atlantic flight, phone her, and get detailed instructions to town. But when I landed and phoned, jet-lagged and painfully congested in the head, no one answered. What to do? I determined to find my way into the city by public transport (a habit I have maintained to this day — I like the mental challenge of navigating my route when I arrive at a foreign destination, as it keeps me from falling asleep on my feet and saves loads of cab fare). Much to my pride, I was able to find my way to her neighborhood, to change some money at a local pub, and to phone her flat again. Still no answer. You can see where this is going.

As it turns out, I was rescued on the street outside the apartment by Genie’s landlord who took pity on me immediately, let me in for a nap and took my passport by way of collateral. Genie showed up a few days later, having forgotten all about my arrival and taken off for the weekEND (British pronunciation) to Scotland with some friends. I have never forgotten that episode and still like to tease her about it, even though she has been impressively responsible during my subsequent visits to see her in Paris.

But it’s more than that. It was during those European travels that I had my first experiences deeply attending to my own inner voice away from the demands and distractions of my ordinary life. I associate Genie with getting to know myself better, facing my own demons, and wandering in the world a pilgrim and sojourner at the mercy of luck, planning, my own savings account, and the hospitality of strangers. I still have journals from that first trip to England when I chronicled my discovery of my relentlessly cruel Inner Critic. During a subsequent trip (1989) from Denmark to Sweden to Germany to Holland to Belgium to France, I fully acknowledged residual grief and depression from my childhood. Those trips helped me enter more deeply into the truth of my life. I could tolerate and even somehow cherish those feelings on my solo travels because I knew I had Genie to meet up with at some point on the itinerary.

During the 1989 tour of European cities, I was supposed to meet up with Genie in Amsterdam, but she sent me a note via the American Express office and told me she couldn’t make it, I’d have to see her next week in Paris. During my stay in A’dam I was groped in the Sex Museum one day and traumatized the same night by a traveling Amnesty International exhibit of medieval torture instruments. Days later in Brussels, Belgium I was sexually harrassed by an amorous (and married) hotel manager (he let himself into my room with his own key in the morning, bearing breakfast on a tray and the expectation that I would let him join me for breakfast in bed — so naive was I! No wonder he had upgraded me to such a nice room!). I endured all these things with fairly good cheer because I knew that they’d make great stories to tell Genie. When I got to Paris we rode the TGV to spend a few days in Geneva, Switzerland where she was promptly groped on the street.

I haven’t seen my buddy in about four years… or is it five? My god, is it SIX? Lord, I think it is six. She has since gotten married and had the baby she always dreamed of having, and they’re going to be in NYC on a short stopover on Nov. 18-19. Look at her now, all grown up and with her own entry on Wikipedia, which describes her as an “animatrice de radio et de television.” It’s been fun watching her go from radio DJ to television personality (on France’s equivalent to “Entertainment Tonight” to culture reporter on “France 24.”

It’s going to be a real rush to jump on the Greyhound next Sunday afternoon after church and to get to NYC for a very brief visit. But unless something comes up at church, I am going to try. I want to see those Libertyville sky-blue eyes again, hear that wonderful laugh and to meet the man she married (lucky guy — she certainly kissed enough frogs before finding her prince!) and her little Jonah. It’s important to keep in touch with our touchstones.

Bad Moon Rising

Wow, what a week it’s been! On one hand, I’m feeling in great health after almost a month of being in crummy condition. My upswing has given me new appreciation for my generally high energy and I have renewed compassion for people who live in chronic pain, which is exhausting and disheartening. But it just feels cray-zee out there! Wires crossing, I’ve lost my cell phone twice in two days (paging Dr. Freud! paging Dr. Freud!), the cat erased the hard drive, ordinarily staunch folk have been brought to tears by stressful situations, and nerves are fraying all around me. Someone said that mercury is in retrograde and I believe it, man!

In a funny way, I’m at my happiest and most focused when stuff is messy and edgy like it is now. I grew up in an emotionally nutty home with parents who were totally inconsistent so you never knew if you’d come home to “Leave It To Beaver” or “Troilus and Cressida.” I learned to ignore the twisted knots in my stomach and to concentrate on reading the energies in the household, diagnosing the problems, and fixing them. If Mom needed support, she got it, up to and including my burying the empty booze bottles more deeply into the trash bins. If Dad’s volatile ego needed massaging in the form of a delightful conversation with his precocious daughter, he got it. If I needed to triangulate between sister and father, I did it. If I needed to run interference on behalf of my little brother when dad went on a rampage, I tried my best to do it. I was a little clinician in a very small asylum, never realizing that I myself was an inmate. I have a lot of compassion for that kid.

Now when I see nutty systems at work in people’s lives I have a kind of sad fondness for them. It’s like, Oh yeah, I know this nonsense. It’s always all about fear and control, clutching tight to secrets and habits that aren’t even any good, are certainly not worth our protective loyalty, and which need to be exposed, taken out, and shot. Or at least sent over the side of the cliff like those demons Jesus put into the herd of swine. The thing that’s so poignant about human beings is how much tender care we give to our demons. We give them everything we are, and even feed our children to them. It’s just so hard and takes so much support, strength, courage and desperation to name them for what they are and be willing to say goodbye to them.

“Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!”
Anyone who has ever taken their demons out to lunch and broken up with them once and for all knows why that song has such enduring, deep appeal. Half the time we don’t even know how wretched we are until we let one of our demons go for a few weeks (just a trial run, you know) and come to realize that we’d been living choked by it for so long.

I asked Jesus to cast out all my demons about, oh, maybe 15 years ago just to see if he could do it. At the last minute I got chicken and said, “Do you think I could keep just one for a pet?” Jesus said, “Do you think I would or could cast out any demons you’re devoted to keeping around?” And I said, “Do you realize how much you irritate me answering every one of my questions with a question?”

Dr. Smoothenstein

This guy has been on my mind a lot lately.

The photo was taken last April when I got wound up really tight after Easter and took a few days off to visit SisterBang in Connecticut. I am inhaling that dog as pure medicine (it only looks like I’m choking him!).

This elegant old gent is my sister’s canine familiar, Gordon. I wish you could see these two together. For the past 13 years they’ve been like one animal; you know how centaurs have the body of a horse and the head of a man? Well, my sister has the body of a woman with the body of dog attached at the hip. She is the consummate Dog Person. A fierce New England spinster like me, she eschews the company of troublesome men and is loyal to her hound, who in turn worships her. Every time she gets involved with a new romance he gets positively addled. You can read the cartoon bubble over his head: “What did I do wrong? Why she does not love only me any more? But I am so much more cuter and more well-mannered than this guy! Plus also I smell a lot better!”

I remember when I was living down in Maryland and SisterBang came to visit. I walked out of the church building and into the sun to look for her in the parking lot. As is typical of her, she was already surrounded by children and had Gordon by her side. She was wearing a simple toga-like sun dress and flat leather sandals, her long hair down and shining. He sat smooth and burnt caramel colored, unperturbed by the long drive and eminently patient with the adoring children. They looked like a painting of Artemis and her hound.

So it seems that Gordon, Count Dordonski, Dr. Smoothenstein, Mr. Bologna Ears, is ailing. He has cancer in his nasal passages and an enlarged heart. He has had some seizures and bleeding that indicates the cancer may have metastasized. SisterBang is not the kind of person who would expect her animal companion to endure lots of frightening and uncomfortable procedures for her sake. She is willing to let him go. He is getting ready to go over the Rainbow Bridge.

Gee, it’s hard to think about our family without Dords in it. But we all know that the essence of doggie is energy and life, and when they get old and sickly, it’s only fair to let them go. As I said to my sis, “It’s not like he needs more time to work on that great literary legacy he hoped to leave.”

They’re the simplest of creatures but our greatest teachers of complex wisdom.

I’ll get to snoggle with him next Tuesday night on my way down to Pennsylvania, where I have a date to trick-or-treat with Superman and Spiderman.

I Love To Singa

I grew up loving Bugs Bunny, for but my money this is the greatest Merrie Melodies cartoon ever made.

If I ever get a tattoo, Owl Jolson would be at the top of the list of images I would choose to permanently affix to my skin. Boy, I love that little crooner.

Brings tears to my eye every time. Tex Avery was a genius.

Binghamton

My mother’s family is from Binghamton, New York, a city my father used to refer to as the Armpit of the United States, and my mother affectionately refers to as Sinus Valley.

We used to take road trips from New Canaan, Connecticut to Binghamton pretty often when I was a kid and going there always seemed to be a trip back in time. Now I recognize the “special” feeling in Binghamton (and by “special” I mean depressed and vaguely oppressive) as being related to economic and class issues, but I didn’t know that as a kid. I just thought of Binghamton as being dead.

I’m sorry we were so snotty about Binghamton, and about my maternal extended family, when I was growing up. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t good for my sister and brother and me. We became so thoroughly identified with my father’s lineage that we missed a lot of the richness of my mother’s cultural and historical DNA. Her parents both had fascinating and sad stories — many of which I finally eked out of my grandfather when he was near 90 years old — and a simple, steadfast Russian Orthodox faith that I have never appreciated until recent years.

My grandfather, my Dede, ran away from home to New York City at the age of 14 (after one too many savage beatings from his mother, a bitter woman with too many kids, enslaved in an arranged marriage and killing work of running a rooming house) and went to work as a grocery boy, living in the attic of his employer. He delivered groceries to the big stars of the day and remembers escorting a very inebriated John Barrymore home from the corner pub more than once, earning a 50c piece for his efforts, and the heady experience of hearing the great man pronounce his name. “Charles,” Mr. Barrymore would say in his most elegant tones, “Would you see me home?” “Cha” would do so (no one ever called him Charles), and sometimes put Mr. Barrymore to bed as well.

Miss Dorothy and Miss Lillian Gish gave my young grandfather tickets to their theatre performances. Another man whose name he could never remember gifted him with a first edition of a book. I’m sorry that I never wrote down the specifics, but I think it may have been a book on Abraham Lincoln.

It touches me that these luminaries treated my grandfather so kindly. At a time when he was invisible, they made him feel seen and noticed.

My Baba had come from Czechoslovakia at the age of five with her mother and settled in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Her father (another arranged marriage) was a coal miner. My grandparents, Anne and Charlie, met in New York City and wooed at places like Coney Island. They settled on Valley Street in Binghamton (which my great-grandfather pronounced “Welly Street,” and Binghamton as “Bee-Ha-Tone”*) and raised their children, two boys and my mother, Shirley (named after You Know Who With the Curls).

During all the years of my childhood and teen years, my Baba and Dede lived on Front Street across from the Howard Johnson. My mom liked to stop there at the end of the long drive and phone them, pretending to be calling from Connecticut. When they answered and they’d chatted for awhile, she’d say, “What are you doing for dinner?” And then we’d descend upon them, crowding into their house with the magical laundry chutes –you could send Barbie down them!– and the raspberry vines outside. Their house was on a rich, wet meadow that led out to a big pond. There was always birdsong and humidity, honeysuckle and the slight odor of mud underneath it all. Cicadas shrilled all night and we could hear cars going by our windows; something we never heard at home.

I have some cousins from that side of the family and they have some lovely children of their own. Last year, MotherBang suggested that we have a family reunion. And so we are going to. I haven’t been back to Binghamton since my Dede’s funeral in the late 90’s, and I’m looking forward to it. I just wish that Baba and Dede would be there, too, and when I push them to tell me more about their lives, they wouldn’t respond with “Oh Vick, you couldn’t possibly be interested in that.”

Yes, Baba and Dede, I am interested. I always have been.

Charles Lesko and Anne Billo Lesko on their wedding day, January 23, 1933.

*My grandparents used to get notes from Dede Billo addressed to “9 Weli Street, Bihanton” (9 Valley Street, Binghamton). My grandmother never finished elementary school. My mother didn’t go to college (girls don’t need to go to college! They need to get married!). My Baba used to tell me that if I didn’t stop reading so much, I would never get a husband. Baba, you were right!

The Tale Of The Whale: Mary Oliver’s “Humpbacks”

I am nuts about whales. I think whales are the coolest people on Earth. I am the idiot on the whale watch who starts crying whenever a whale shows up and yells, “I LOVE YOU!” at it.

My mom and I had a ridiculous comedy routine going for a year or two with about a 9″ rubber whale I got at the Chicago Aquarium. After I moved out of the house I shared with my boyfriend in Minnesota and moved in with Mom and her hubby in Rochester, I brought with me the whale that David and I called “The Whay-ale” in long, breathy voices. It’s probably no use trying to explain how hilarious it was the time David and I had a fight and I stormed off to my study and after awhile felt that someone was watching me, and looked up to see The Whay-ale regarding me from the doorway, hanging there in space all by itself, and we laughed and laughed and laughed and the fight melted away. I was so fond of that whale.

So anyway, when that relationship ended and I moved to Mom’s, I put the whale in the bathtub. One morning she went in there to shower and, since she wasn’t wearing her glasses, thought it was maybe a big gray rat in there with her and screamed. I ran to the stairs and heard her laughing like crazy, having apparently realized that it was not a rat but a dumb toy whale.

When I came home late a few nights later and went to use the bathroom, the whale was floating on a foil raft in the toilet. I laughed like hell. When my mother sat down to eat dinner at my sister’s wedding later that summer, the whale rolled out of her napkin and onto her lap. She laughed like hell. When I went on the umpteenth day to the end of the driveway to see if my acceptance letter from Harvard Divinity School had arrived, I found an empty mailbox with nothing in it but the whale looking all jaunty wearing a Christmas ribbon. I laughed like hell. When Mom snuck in to watch part of a dress rehearsal of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” I used the whale in lieu of a cordless telephone in the second act. I had alerted my fellow actors about it, and we calmly passed the whale around as the scene required. I heard Mom trying to stifle her laughter from the front row.

We did that for years until the beloved whale got lost in someone’s stolen luggage — I think mine.

I do love whales.

One summer I did a service with the UU Church of Reading, MA that was called “The Moon By Whalelight,” which combined readings from Diane Ackerman’s book of the same name, wonderful improvisational music by a jazz musician, and poetry about whales. The congregation and I went on a whale watch immediately after the service and it was as special a time as I can remember having in the UU community.

That’s just a little background information on why I’m so excited about my date
with my oldest and best childhood buddyroo and her two daughters this coming Sunday.

***

There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.

Off Stellwagan
off the Cape,
the humbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.

They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.

Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.

We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash thorugh the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky —
like nothing you’ve ever imagined —
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then

they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.

I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.

I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living.

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

-Mary Oliver, Humpbacks

Eight Random Things Meme

Mom To the Left done tagged me, so I have to come up with Eight Random Things About Me.

Here goes:

1. I’m a very nervous flier and especially so at landing, so I always sing “If I Only Had a Brain” to myself at that time as a way of calming my nerves. I sing it out loud. Including the part that goes, “buh-DUH-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” The engines are so loud they always drown me out, so I haven’t been taken off the plane and put into a straitjacket yet. I started doing this so many years ago I actually don’t remember, but it has become talismanic for me.

2. I have an extraordinary sense of smell . Therefore, I am never surprised when someone confesses to me that they’re an alcoholic or that they have an eating disorder. I know. I can smell it. My mother calls me a bloodhound.

3. Since 1984, I have lived in seven states and at fifteen different addresses. My most frequent, recurring nightmare is that I’ll have to move/am moving again.

4. Lisa Cardone taught me to smoke in the 8th grade, and I practiced so much the first weekend that I made myself deathly ill. Smoking was a “skill” I then put away until 9th grade, when I was asked to smoke on stage as Marty in “Grease.” In a high school production! Things certainly have changed.

5. When I was a student at Northwestern University from 1984-1988, I used to walk by Garrett-Evangelical Seminary (Seabury-Western Seminary was also on campus) and think to myself that those people must be a bunch of weird Jesus freaks. It made me feel a bit nervous just walking on their grounds! I both disdained them and was in awe of them.

6. I keep visualizing my funny, smart, loyal and loving husband in the belief that someday he might actually show up. I visualize him differently each time so as not to get too fixed a picture in my mind. I think it would be nice to get married around age 50, hopefully to someone with kids so I can be a grandma someday!!

7. The first serious spiritual discipline I ever undertook was to pray to be released from the bondage of jealousy. I was in college, I was desperately in love with a much sought-after hunka-hunka burning love (who cheated on me as often as you would expect a 19-year old hunk of an actor might do), and I felt that jealousy was a totally damaging emotion. I wanted so much to be rid of it forever, and God answered my prayers. It was serious and hard work, but I was healed, and that made a believer of me. I could not have done that alone.
That hunk is now happily married to someone else, I still love him, and I’m still not jealous of that or anything else (although I am occasionally overcome with envy– which is jealousy with a sense of humor and perspective).

8. Three things I would love to achieve before I die:
a. speak some language fluently
b. write a book
c. be a fantastic tap dancer

The Sanctity of the Classroom

The Sanctity of the Classroom
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I remember when Chris, a tall, shy, arrogant, pimply blonde high school junior in my creative writing class, submitted obscenity-filled blood-fests in lieu of assignments.

In each case, I told him his work was garbage and insisted that he re-write the paper.

He came to see me after class one day, red in the face and coldy furious. You can’t make me rewrite this. This is creative writing class. I’m being creative,” he told me, his face seething with adolescent tension and hatred.

I had had a lot of experience at that point with the testosterone poisoning that can come in the teen years, and I knew Chris to be a generally good kid but with some mood swings — probably exacerbated by his geekiness and shyness. He was most definitely not one of the popular kids, but he did have a buddy, Justin, with whom he spent the class snorting and snuffling around over their superior wit and intelligence. Justin was a “fat kid” in a school full of preppy clones, and genuinely funny. He could be disrespectful and disruptive, but had none of Chris’s hostile edge.

I told Chris that he could be creative all he wanted, but within the parameters of the assignment. He was there to learn, I told him, not to just spew his violent fantasies onto the paper and then expect me to take them seriously as academic work. I told him I was disturbed by the content of his paper and that I felt it was a violation of appropriate student-teacher boundaries. Furthermore, he knew it.
I told him to straighten up and fly right or I’d send this paper home and see what his parents had to say about his”creative” writing.

Chris muttered some inarticulate complaint under his breath, grabbed his paper from my hand and left. He resubmitted a new paper the next day. He was, above all, a competitive student and his desire to get into a good college overrode his need to rebel against the tyrannies of Miss W.

If my memory is correct, we went back and forth with this nonsense a few times before he finally decided to behave himself and take the assignments seriously.

This was before Columbine. It never occurred to me that this kid would ever harm anybody; that sort of thing was beyond our teacherly imagination in 1990. I had gone to suburban Minnesota from Proviso East High School in Maywood, Illinois — a school that was truly dangerous and where violence was a daily fact of life. I was concerned for Chris, but I trusted that he’d outgrow whatever demons were plaguing him.

English teachers are privy to some of our student’s deepest wishes and most secret fears. I still treasure some of the confidences shared with me by my students. I remember M., who was in love with her step-brother and who included that plot detail in a marvelous short story she wrote for my class. When I called her in after class to ask her if her story was based in truth, she dissolved in tears. She was a painfully lovely young lady and I loved her. I still think of her.
I remember J., whose parents were so caught up in their careers they almost never saw their daughter, who mourned their neglect terribly and begged for their time. I remember B., who “thought” she might have been raped at a school party one weekend but who refused to report her assailant, also one of my students. I could get her to say no more. She never sought counseling or reported it.
I remember T., who was gay and felt he couldn’t tell anyone. I hope T. has come out by now, and that he’s happy.
I remember J., who had been beaten so badly as a child that his back was a mess of raised scars. After I saw his back and heard the stories of his childhood, I understood why reading and writing — and even speaking — was so hard for him. I think of him often, too.
I remember N. — so sweet, so ambitious, who came to school early to run track and whose breath was so bad from malnutrition that her track coach brought her breakfast every day. It may have been her only meal.

I remember T. and S., handsome twins whose parents so badly wanted them to get out of Bellwood that they hired me to tutor them. They were absolute gentlemen even in their teens. I wish them well.

I remember so many of them.

I remember the classroom as a sacred place. I was blessed to be there with them.

Our classrooms should be sanctuaries. If it takes total gun control to assure that this can be the case, then I’m for total gun control.

Whatever it takes.

When I Heard From The Bride

It had to have been seven or eight years ago, when I was the minister of a UU church in Maryland. I did a lot of weddings back then: our congregation didn’t have a building of its own, so I got a lot of cold calls out of the book from people wanting to get married at home, or at country clubs, or at mansions-for-rent, or at beautiful little inns. I have all their names in my book of records, and sometimes I look over those names and wonder how all those lovely couples are doing.

One couple, I never forgot, because the groom died very shortly after the wedding. Just a freak thing. Went in for a nap after work and never woke up. I remember how flabbergasted I was by the news– I had phoned them for some extraneous reason and his bride told me, in that kind of brittle voice that reveals too many nights up crying. She didn’t live very close to my church and never attended, so we only had that tenuous connection of their wedding.

So now — all these years later and about probably twenty or thirty more weddings in my book — the bride and I are reconnected. As it turns out, she is now an active Episcopalian and was hanging out the other day at Mad Priest’s blog with that group of rowdy, rude, PeaceBang-bashers I wrote about two posts ago. She sees the conversation going on and thinks, wait, I know her! And she drops me a line.
Of course I remember her right away and am thrilled. I am delighted that her spiritual search has led her to a place of serious engagement with a church and a tradition, and deeply gratified to know that she has remarried. Happy ending to a story that had long occupied a tiny, sad corner of my heart.

And then there’s this: Again, evidence that the blogging community is a community. Which is why those insulting goofs at MadPriest so disappointed me, writing about me like the gossip columnist at The Superficial.com writes about Paris Hilton or Jennifer Lopez — treating a clergy sister like so much fodder for trashtalk, forgetting that Christians are supposed to model interwovenness, not revealing — and apparently reveling in — the kind of jejeune dynamics that keeps so many people out of our churches. Yikes. If there has to be conflict, let there be conflict, but let it be about something real and worth caring about, not just doofusy insults for the sake of camaraderie and jackassed guffaws.

My note from Janis was the best thing that happened today, and it was a wonderful day already so hey, say amen somebody!