Sunday morning

the church bells in my neighborhood ring, hymns that I recognize as I walk the dog or in summer when I'm sitting on the front porch reading a book. I don't go to church anymore. A million small reasons and some big ones, but church hymns aren't any of those reasons. I have always liked church hymns. 

And the songs from that brief blip of time when I was in middle school at the parish school and to engage the kids at mass, the principal and kindergarten teacher teamed up to play guitar and bongos, encouraging us to sing loud and clap and sway in the pews, 

instead of the normally somber mumble-singing of the old people. Some of those old ladies still wore hats from the time when women were supposed to wear hats, a sign of feminine obedience when entering a church. My mother told me that when she was a little girl, if they forgot their hat, they had to put a piece of tissue on their heads, which I thought was bizarre,

but then I thought a lot of things were bizarre about the church. The guitar and bongos went the way of the principal and kindergarten teacher, who rumor had it, were having an affair. I have no idea if this is true. They were both single women and they were best friends, and these facts alone, coupled with the wacky guitar-bongo thing they'd cooked up, kept the rumor mill busy.

The last time I entered a Catholic church, I got weepy. It was a church somewhere in New Mexico. My husband and I were on a meandery driving tour of the Southwest, heading toward Santa Fe from Taos. The guidebook said the dirt in el Santuario de Chimayo had healing properties and I wanted to see this for myself. A few years before I had been in the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua and had the same compulsion.

What is it about these churches, anyway? The weird mix of touristy gift shops and saint's bones displayed in glass cases, some people wandering around taking pictures and some people falling to their knees and bursting into tears and urgent prayers. In Padua you could write your intentions on a piece of paper, read the prayer to St. Anthony, helpfully included in dozens of languages on the back, and slip the paper into a box beside the crypt where his body is interred. 

While my travel partner was sneaking illicit pictures (you weren't officially allowed), I stood in line for the crypt prayer and intentions. When it was my turn, the people beside me were praying in their different languages so earnestly, I was ashamed of myself. I won't tell you what I prayed for, except that it hasn't happened, yet, and before you can remind me, 

I know this is a child's view of prayer, asking God for something you want and waiting for a response. Even when I was a child, I didn't quite believe it. Still, the New Mexico guidebook says you are allowed to take some of the healing dirt, and believer or no, I like to cover my bases, so I took an empty pill bottle

and waited for my turn into the small room by the altar where the magical dirt was. It was just ordinary looking sand, filling a hole in the ground in the center of the room, the size of a child's sandbox, which now that I think about it, someone would have to continually refill. People were standing around the perimeter looking at it somberly, while I knelt down and filled my bottle. Hands shaky and suddenly with that weepy feeling 

whatever that feeling is called 

that includes bells ringing in your neighborhood, bongos and tissues on little girls' heads, best friends hounded and kicked out of a community they loved, road trips with your husband, saint bones and sand.

 

 

Twenty six years ago today I was cleaning my kitchen

I don't remember if it was particularly dirty. All I remember is I had the uncontrollable urge to clean it. I am talking clean clean, the kind where you fill a bucket with sudsy, hard-core cleaning detergent and get down on your hands and knees and scour the corners. We had a big kitchen back then, bigger than any kitchen we've had since, come to think of it, so there was a lot to scour.

I was channeling my cleaning-obsessed Italian grandmother, scrubbing out the oven and emptying the cabinets so I could rid the dark edges of any dropped crumbs. And then I moved on to the bathrooms. It was a Saturday.

Every once in a while my husband would poke his head into whatever room I was presently scouring and say, hesitantly, So, um, are you finished yet?

At some point he dragged me outside to take a walk. We had a loop we used to do around our neighborhood. It started in our humble subdivision and reached up into a much fancier section that seemed like would be forever out of reach for us. Our habit after we both got home from work was to take this same walk. My husband was big into goal-setting and planning. He would say stuff like, What's our five year plan? What's the ten year? Twenty? Thirty?

I used to laugh at him. As much of an imagination as I had, I couldn't project out that far. We were twenty-six and twenty-five years old and had been married for three years and had just bought a house, things I couldn't have foreseen five years before. Five years before, I was, to put it plainly, a mess. The fall of my senior year in college I was in a dark place.

The truth is, I was suicidal. I mean, I was seriously thinking about how I would do it. The only thing that was saving me was that I was too tired. I remember going to bed one night and feeling like it was the end. I wanted only to stop the pain I was feeling. I wasn't afraid of death anymore and I couldn't imagine anyone would miss me if I were gone. Some part of me knew that this was an all-hands-on-deck situation because I started to pray. I am not a praying person, but that night I did. The prayer was a simple one:

Help. Help me understand why I should want to stay in this world.

The next morning I was exhausted and wrung out. I walked to class, stopping on the way to get the mail, how I always did, even though most days there was no mail. That morning there was a letter from my favorite professor. He was on sabbatical for the year and had never written to me before.

It was a strange out -of-the-blue letter. Basically, he said he'd been thinking about me and wondering if I was doing okay. He said, I hope you realize you have a lot in you that's wonderful.

After I read the letter it was like a veil lifted, and suddenly, I wasn't in a dark place anymore. I was outside looking in on myself, thinking very logically about my future, a future that the night before I could not envision.

I still couldn't envision it--at least not the particulars--but I knew with a weird degree of clarity that I could keep going. I could grow up. I could meet someone, get married, have a job, buy a house, have children...

Instead of dread and sadness and anxiety and fear, I felt curious. I wanted to hang around for the things that were potentially going to happen.

A few weeks later I met the man who would become my husband. Flash forward five years, and we are walking around our neighborhood where we've bought our first house. I've just finished scouring the entire place. "Oh, I understand now," my husband told me, "All of this cleaning. It's like the What to Expect When You're Expecting book says. You're nesting."

It turned out he and the book were right. That night we rushed to the hospital. In the morning we welcomed our first child into the world.

Tomorrow, he will be twenty-six years old.