TO MY WIFE: the lightning behind all this thunder
—the dedication in Robert Farrar Capon’s book, “The Supper of the Lamb”

…

I told you how doing this — what I’m now doing — feels like speaking into a big weightless void. It does, unless I’m speaking to you. But speaking to you, I’ve realized, is something I can do directly; medium of blog deemed unnecessary.

We have had a roller-coaster week (or a few), and taking you to the hospital yesterday morning while our friend Katy stayed at home with our sleeping girls was a gift. It was five in the morning, and you said, “Oh, the nice empty streets,” as we drove from our house on the east side to where the Heart Hospital is — pitch black sky, except for all the city lights that wiped away the glimpse of stars.

I was reminded yesterday of how I am not good at taking in surprises; that even hearing your good news (a heart attack not being imminent) threw me into a kind of limbo in which I needed to recalibrate my being. I cried at your bedside as you looked into my face, and it was not for joy that I cried. But maybe it was fatigue. You, meanwhile, held the look of gladness — of life itself.

The bottom line is this, as you also know with familiar acquaintance: We go along each day with the rotations of the universe, waking and working, eating and sleeping, and it (daily living) has its own challenges in the repetition alone — not to mention money worries or cars that need new brakes or other household concerns that with frequency arise. In truth, I brace myself for the big tragedy and wait for accident or injury as an expectant hostess. I am ready to welcome something big into our common life, something that would cut time — even if it would be bad.

What I realize (what I forget or deny) is that living in the smallness is the crux of our being. It’s human of us. I heard it preached in a sermon recently but don’t recall the context. And now as I begin the Capon book (thanks, Jeanenne) I relish reading words that testify to God as the creator of the common. It’s poetry, really: dirt, onion skins, the rind of an orange…

Carl Sagan wrote that we are made of star-stuff, but what are stars but gas and dust? 

Capon writes of the orange rind: “Nothing is more likely to become garbage … but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.” His words make me think of Liesl’s collection box, which houses dirty bottle caps, feathers from a bird that she picked up from asphalt, bits of broken plastic, things I deem to be “trash” and “junk”: rocks, scraps, detritus. I echo Sagan: this (cosmically) is the stuff of our lives.

And yesterday I wondered: What do we do now that you are not likely to have a heart attack? What do we do, though, with the fact that heart disease is still an issue but one that must be managed throughout the course of your life? How are we going to get in exercise when we feel so maxed and tapped out already? What of your chest pains that still linger but, now, without diagnosis? There was no surgery for you yesterday, no quick-fix, and this, too, is still the stuff of our life.

The lover who doesn’t speak doesn’t know his job, Capon writes, though I paraphrase. I want to know what I can speak to you now: how I can speak and be, listen in awe of your thunder these next how many years, behold the nearly discarded peel of an orange, take up life, proclaim (in the spirit of God), It is good.