(Click photo to enlarge.)
Monday, January 20, 2020
Miracle
On the day this photo was taken (from my kitchen window), namely September 10, 2017, it had rained or been overcast for so many days in a row that the sight of blue sky brought a burst of joy.
(Click photo to enlarge.)
(Click photo to enlarge.)
You’ll See What You Do
In mid-September I flew to NYC and spent one night at Leo House. The next day, I had about four hours free between when I had to leave Leo House and when the retreat began, so I walked over to the Hudson River and made my way slowly, slowly south and then inland again.
Here is the paper I wrote about my retreat for school. I could have written fifty times this amount.
What I Thought Was Going to Happen
Several months before the retreat began—as one of the co-leaders observed, the retreat starts the moment you sign up—I listed my worries:
• Having to pee outdoors. (I was not worried about having to poop outdoors, because I was planning to suffer a ruptured colon rather than do this.)
• Having a rat walk on me during the night.
• Having my suitcase not be wherever I had ended up leaving it when I returned to retrieve it.
I was also kind of worried about going four days without brushing my teeth or flossing, I expected to be in intractable physical pain after skipping my daily exercises, and I assumed that all items of clothing would be so filthy as to have to be thrown out, along with the blanket acquired for the retreat.
I had secretly planned to cheat and to bring plenty of handkerchiefs tucked here and there, and also the lip balm I use ten times a day, but in the end, I did not bring either. (Having received a diagnosis of arthritis in both knees a week earlier, I did bring a lacrosse ball, and that was invaluable for loosening up corporeal tight spots.)
The first night we slept on the sidewalk, I was at one end of a row of retreatants. It occurred to me that I was a bit vulnerable in this position: what if someone were to come along and kick me in the face? I wished I were one of the interior people, but it seemed that it would not be very gentlemanly to ask R. to take the outside position so that I would be less likely to be kicked in the face.
What Did Happen
None of the things I worried about happened. I was never kicked in the face. Thanks to the lawsuit against Starbucks, and thanks to the ubiquity of Starbucks and Whole Foods, I never had to pee outside. A rat did not walk on me during the night; I never saw a rat. (When I asked co-leader J. what I would do if this happened, he thought for a moment and said, “You’ll see what you do.”) One of the retreatants let us put our valuables, along with my suitcase, in her apartment overlooking Washington Square Park, where we met on the first day (six women and six men), and it was still there after the retreat!
I even got to brush my teeth, usually without toothpaste and never with flossing. Our first evening, we had dinner at the Bowery Mission, and when I asked the fellow at the front desk if he had a toothbrush, he gave me one. I would have gone right into the restroom to use it, but someone said that the restroom had been smeared with feces.
I had scheduled, for immediately after the retreat, a visit to my dentist, a massage, a visit to my chiropractor, and a facial. None of these was needed. I was not in pain, my pores were not cemented shut, my teeth were not coated with rock-hard scum, nothing was so filthy that it had to be thrown out (though I did give away the fleece blanket, because if I ever do this again, it will be in a sleeping bag).
Retreat Humor
Before one afternoon council, co-leader J. asked how long we should sit.
Bugwalk: 45 minutes.
R: 50!
J: Until the sun goes down.
Bugwalk: Until the sun comes up.
R: Full sesshin!
What I Learned / Associated Insights
When it comes to sleeping outside, the more cardboard, the better, and it’s best to overlap the pieces than simply to place them alongside each other, but be careful about where the overlaps are; that little ridge can produce a surprising amount of discomfort. Our first night outside, it seemed as if I changed position every three minutes, as any configuration immediately produced pain in one area or another.
A fleece blanket does nothing to keep out wind. On top of experiencing pain in one part of my body or another all night long, I was freezing cold and envied those who had thought to bring a sleeping bag, though I could also see that others were also feeling miserable; one yogi kept giving up on lying down at all and just sat up, with a barricade of cardboard arranged around her. The faint blue light signaling morning seemed years away, yet came surprisingly soon, and was very gratefully received. (“Thank God!”)
I did not ever notice the lack of lip balm, and the need for something to blow my nose on was easily met by taking some extra toilet paper each time I visited a bathroom; thus the pocket of my backpack ended up stuffed with wads of toilet paper, more than I needed.
The Bowery Mission forces you either to sit through a religious service before you eat, or to go to the back of the line. Either way, the whole thing takes the better part of two hours, so that by the time you’ve had breakfast, it’s time to start finding lunch, and by the time you’ve had lunch, it’s time to start finding dinner, and then it’s time to look for cardboard and a safe place to sleep. Given that it takes nearly the entire day just to eat and drink and eliminate what one has eaten and drunk, the gulf between getting the most basic needs met and, say, showing up clean and neatly attired for a job interview or training program interview seems dauntingly, heartbreakingly vast. (Also, where would you leave your stuff while you were doing this?)
People are incredibly kind. As we slept on the front steps of a church at 51st and Park Avenue one night—I actually got a pretty good night’s sleep there, under the glaring lights and amid the unbelievable racket, including protesters with megaphones assuring all within earshot that they love Sisi and love the Egyptian Army; the hotel for the United Nations General Assembly dignitaries was just a block away—three or four African American men appeared with large bags stuffed with all kinds of goodies. I’m crying as I recall them saying, as they left these dazzling gifts, “Be safe. Please be safe.” The reusable bags contained clean socks, deodorant, toothbrushes, toothpaste, a piece of paper listing places offering free meals, lots of food, tissues, fragrance-free wipes, hand sanitizer.
I stayed on for several nights after the retreat, at Leo House, where I observed, on the one hand, the incredible luxury of having a clean bathroom and bed and upholstered chair indoors and all to myself. And I also noticed that in each moment, there was simply what was seen, what was smelled, what was physically felt, what was thought, etc. It was safer, cleaner and more comfortable. It was great, but it wasn’t sudden and permanent bliss; it was just what it was. It was also a little lonely, after several days of doing nearly everything in a group of 12. Suddenly I only had to count to one to account for the whole group.
B.
I think B. deserves a section of his own. A person with 35 years of experience being homeless in Manhattan and elsewhere, he joined us during our opening circle and stayed for the whole retreat, crying out a loud “ooh-OOH!” to get our attention when needed. (A couple of others in the group took up the same practice.) He was an invaluable source of information about many things, including where and when to find cardboard and what to do with it the next day. His feet were visibly misshapen, and he told us that walking was painful for him. It was touching to me that he was desirous enough of our company that he was willing to walk miles and miles on those twisted-up feet, not without periodic complaints that we were walking too fast, and also, that we were not very good at choosing efficient routes. He also threatened / promised to leave us a time or two, but allowed himself to be dissuaded. (Co-leader J., kindly: “What do you need from us?”)
I perceived that B. was often in need of a listener. At almost every moment of making our way around Manhattan, B. was far in the rear with one other person, a kindly and patient listener; co-leader P. did this for hours. B.’s conversation did not end when silence began each evening, after the dedication of merit, either. Our first night outside, on top of being physically uncomfortable and also freezing, I was kept awake by B.’s 90-minute conversation with a friend of his who had happened along. I was furious the next morning, and had a word with him about it, which he received very gracefully. (However, a night or two later, he kept me up again, this time chatting with a person he later told us was Trump’s cousin’s chauffeur / bodyguard.)
Co-leader J., not having the luxury of an hour for a nightly dharma talk, did a fine job of guiding us via short bits of instruction here and there. On the morning of our second full day of retreat, he said the sense of not knowing might be wearing off a little bit and that we might need to make a conscious effort to cultivate this, for instance by not getting into long conversations with our fellow yogis about our non-retreat lives. He also said, “There’s no right and wrong decisions. It’s just coming and going. We learn from everything.” He described an exchange between a student and Bernie Glassman, who originated the Zen Peacemaker Order street retreats, about panhandling, where the student said something like, “I don’t want to panhandle! I’m not homeless. I feel weird taking money from people who think I’m homeless when I’m not.” To this, Bernie said something like, “Where is your home right now? Is it here? Are you one hundred percent positive you’ll see it again?”
The end of the retreat was extraordinarily emotional for me. At our final council, I cried as I shared that I was born wanting to know what was going to happen next: Where are we going? When are we going to come back? Who is going to be there? When I was a child, I believed that knowing meant I was loved and seen, but now I see that maybe it is just the opposite: maybe having to have a tight grasp on—what’s the word?—everything cuts off energy, love, relationships.
As several of us headed off to retrieve our stuff, I watched B. walk off into the park and began to cry again. I sobbed, in fact, and tears arose several more times in the course of the next hour or so and even in the coming days. B. was a huge presence in our group, vivid and real, at moments very helpful and at other moments definitely irritating. By the end of the retreat, he also had a pretty strong urine smell per a mishap outside the scope of this account. As he limped into the park, I realized that, in a way, I was watching him turn from somebody into nobody: to those now seeing him, he was just another old, evidently homeless black guy who smelled like pee. It was incredibly painful. (And it was also rather romantic and condescending on my part, as I realized later. In fact, the genuine toxicity of racism aside, B. and I are equally somebody and nobody—loved by some, disliked by others, not noticed one way or the other by most.)
Applications to Chaplaincy
Things are no less or more certain now that the retreat is over. It’s just that on retreat, I was more aware that I didn’t know what was going to happen, which made even rather ordinary things seem miraculous and surprising: I’m sitting right near a children’s playground! I didn’t know that was going to happen! It is a substantial gift to realize that I still don’t know what’s going to happen, now that I am back home, and never did, including with each patient I visit.
Epilogue
Exactly two weeks after our final night on the sidewalk, a homeless man just a 25-minute walk away was bludgeoned to death as he slept, along with three others in other locations in Chinatown; a fifth victim went to the hospital with critical injuries. Having slept so near that spot made this horrible act of cruelty even most disturbing. Possibly the victims were at the Bowery Mission for a meal when we were there for the same reason. Possibly we might even have recognized their faces.
Here is the paper I wrote about my retreat for school. I could have written fifty times this amount.
What I Thought Was Going to Happen
Several months before the retreat began—as one of the co-leaders observed, the retreat starts the moment you sign up—I listed my worries:
• Having to pee outdoors. (I was not worried about having to poop outdoors, because I was planning to suffer a ruptured colon rather than do this.)
• Having a rat walk on me during the night.
• Having my suitcase not be wherever I had ended up leaving it when I returned to retrieve it.
I was also kind of worried about going four days without brushing my teeth or flossing, I expected to be in intractable physical pain after skipping my daily exercises, and I assumed that all items of clothing would be so filthy as to have to be thrown out, along with the blanket acquired for the retreat.
I had secretly planned to cheat and to bring plenty of handkerchiefs tucked here and there, and also the lip balm I use ten times a day, but in the end, I did not bring either. (Having received a diagnosis of arthritis in both knees a week earlier, I did bring a lacrosse ball, and that was invaluable for loosening up corporeal tight spots.)
The first night we slept on the sidewalk, I was at one end of a row of retreatants. It occurred to me that I was a bit vulnerable in this position: what if someone were to come along and kick me in the face? I wished I were one of the interior people, but it seemed that it would not be very gentlemanly to ask R. to take the outside position so that I would be less likely to be kicked in the face.
What Did Happen
None of the things I worried about happened. I was never kicked in the face. Thanks to the lawsuit against Starbucks, and thanks to the ubiquity of Starbucks and Whole Foods, I never had to pee outside. A rat did not walk on me during the night; I never saw a rat. (When I asked co-leader J. what I would do if this happened, he thought for a moment and said, “You’ll see what you do.”) One of the retreatants let us put our valuables, along with my suitcase, in her apartment overlooking Washington Square Park, where we met on the first day (six women and six men), and it was still there after the retreat!
I even got to brush my teeth, usually without toothpaste and never with flossing. Our first evening, we had dinner at the Bowery Mission, and when I asked the fellow at the front desk if he had a toothbrush, he gave me one. I would have gone right into the restroom to use it, but someone said that the restroom had been smeared with feces.
I had scheduled, for immediately after the retreat, a visit to my dentist, a massage, a visit to my chiropractor, and a facial. None of these was needed. I was not in pain, my pores were not cemented shut, my teeth were not coated with rock-hard scum, nothing was so filthy that it had to be thrown out (though I did give away the fleece blanket, because if I ever do this again, it will be in a sleeping bag).
Retreat Humor
Before one afternoon council, co-leader J. asked how long we should sit.
Bugwalk: 45 minutes.
R: 50!
J: Until the sun goes down.
Bugwalk: Until the sun comes up.
R: Full sesshin!
What I Learned / Associated Insights
When it comes to sleeping outside, the more cardboard, the better, and it’s best to overlap the pieces than simply to place them alongside each other, but be careful about where the overlaps are; that little ridge can produce a surprising amount of discomfort. Our first night outside, it seemed as if I changed position every three minutes, as any configuration immediately produced pain in one area or another.
A fleece blanket does nothing to keep out wind. On top of experiencing pain in one part of my body or another all night long, I was freezing cold and envied those who had thought to bring a sleeping bag, though I could also see that others were also feeling miserable; one yogi kept giving up on lying down at all and just sat up, with a barricade of cardboard arranged around her. The faint blue light signaling morning seemed years away, yet came surprisingly soon, and was very gratefully received. (“Thank God!”)
I did not ever notice the lack of lip balm, and the need for something to blow my nose on was easily met by taking some extra toilet paper each time I visited a bathroom; thus the pocket of my backpack ended up stuffed with wads of toilet paper, more than I needed.
The Bowery Mission forces you either to sit through a religious service before you eat, or to go to the back of the line. Either way, the whole thing takes the better part of two hours, so that by the time you’ve had breakfast, it’s time to start finding lunch, and by the time you’ve had lunch, it’s time to start finding dinner, and then it’s time to look for cardboard and a safe place to sleep. Given that it takes nearly the entire day just to eat and drink and eliminate what one has eaten and drunk, the gulf between getting the most basic needs met and, say, showing up clean and neatly attired for a job interview or training program interview seems dauntingly, heartbreakingly vast. (Also, where would you leave your stuff while you were doing this?)
People are incredibly kind. As we slept on the front steps of a church at 51st and Park Avenue one night—I actually got a pretty good night’s sleep there, under the glaring lights and amid the unbelievable racket, including protesters with megaphones assuring all within earshot that they love Sisi and love the Egyptian Army; the hotel for the United Nations General Assembly dignitaries was just a block away—three or four African American men appeared with large bags stuffed with all kinds of goodies. I’m crying as I recall them saying, as they left these dazzling gifts, “Be safe. Please be safe.” The reusable bags contained clean socks, deodorant, toothbrushes, toothpaste, a piece of paper listing places offering free meals, lots of food, tissues, fragrance-free wipes, hand sanitizer.
I stayed on for several nights after the retreat, at Leo House, where I observed, on the one hand, the incredible luxury of having a clean bathroom and bed and upholstered chair indoors and all to myself. And I also noticed that in each moment, there was simply what was seen, what was smelled, what was physically felt, what was thought, etc. It was safer, cleaner and more comfortable. It was great, but it wasn’t sudden and permanent bliss; it was just what it was. It was also a little lonely, after several days of doing nearly everything in a group of 12. Suddenly I only had to count to one to account for the whole group.
B.
I think B. deserves a section of his own. A person with 35 years of experience being homeless in Manhattan and elsewhere, he joined us during our opening circle and stayed for the whole retreat, crying out a loud “ooh-OOH!” to get our attention when needed. (A couple of others in the group took up the same practice.) He was an invaluable source of information about many things, including where and when to find cardboard and what to do with it the next day. His feet were visibly misshapen, and he told us that walking was painful for him. It was touching to me that he was desirous enough of our company that he was willing to walk miles and miles on those twisted-up feet, not without periodic complaints that we were walking too fast, and also, that we were not very good at choosing efficient routes. He also threatened / promised to leave us a time or two, but allowed himself to be dissuaded. (Co-leader J., kindly: “What do you need from us?”)
I perceived that B. was often in need of a listener. At almost every moment of making our way around Manhattan, B. was far in the rear with one other person, a kindly and patient listener; co-leader P. did this for hours. B.’s conversation did not end when silence began each evening, after the dedication of merit, either. Our first night outside, on top of being physically uncomfortable and also freezing, I was kept awake by B.’s 90-minute conversation with a friend of his who had happened along. I was furious the next morning, and had a word with him about it, which he received very gracefully. (However, a night or two later, he kept me up again, this time chatting with a person he later told us was Trump’s cousin’s chauffeur / bodyguard.)
Co-leader J., not having the luxury of an hour for a nightly dharma talk, did a fine job of guiding us via short bits of instruction here and there. On the morning of our second full day of retreat, he said the sense of not knowing might be wearing off a little bit and that we might need to make a conscious effort to cultivate this, for instance by not getting into long conversations with our fellow yogis about our non-retreat lives. He also said, “There’s no right and wrong decisions. It’s just coming and going. We learn from everything.” He described an exchange between a student and Bernie Glassman, who originated the Zen Peacemaker Order street retreats, about panhandling, where the student said something like, “I don’t want to panhandle! I’m not homeless. I feel weird taking money from people who think I’m homeless when I’m not.” To this, Bernie said something like, “Where is your home right now? Is it here? Are you one hundred percent positive you’ll see it again?”
The end of the retreat was extraordinarily emotional for me. At our final council, I cried as I shared that I was born wanting to know what was going to happen next: Where are we going? When are we going to come back? Who is going to be there? When I was a child, I believed that knowing meant I was loved and seen, but now I see that maybe it is just the opposite: maybe having to have a tight grasp on—what’s the word?—everything cuts off energy, love, relationships.
As several of us headed off to retrieve our stuff, I watched B. walk off into the park and began to cry again. I sobbed, in fact, and tears arose several more times in the course of the next hour or so and even in the coming days. B. was a huge presence in our group, vivid and real, at moments very helpful and at other moments definitely irritating. By the end of the retreat, he also had a pretty strong urine smell per a mishap outside the scope of this account. As he limped into the park, I realized that, in a way, I was watching him turn from somebody into nobody: to those now seeing him, he was just another old, evidently homeless black guy who smelled like pee. It was incredibly painful. (And it was also rather romantic and condescending on my part, as I realized later. In fact, the genuine toxicity of racism aside, B. and I are equally somebody and nobody—loved by some, disliked by others, not noticed one way or the other by most.)
Applications to Chaplaincy
Things are no less or more certain now that the retreat is over. It’s just that on retreat, I was more aware that I didn’t know what was going to happen, which made even rather ordinary things seem miraculous and surprising: I’m sitting right near a children’s playground! I didn’t know that was going to happen! It is a substantial gift to realize that I still don’t know what’s going to happen, now that I am back home, and never did, including with each patient I visit.
Epilogue
Exactly two weeks after our final night on the sidewalk, a homeless man just a 25-minute walk away was bludgeoned to death as he slept, along with three others in other locations in Chinatown; a fifth victim went to the hospital with critical injuries. Having slept so near that spot made this horrible act of cruelty even most disturbing. Possibly the victims were at the Bowery Mission for a meal when we were there for the same reason. Possibly we might even have recognized their faces.
Exfoliation Countdown
One of the street retreat’s co-leaders—I’m talking here about the street retreat in New York City that I did in fact attend last September—said the retreat begins the moment we sign up for it (and someone else or other said it never ends, in that it reverberates forever). At the time I made these notes, I was thinking that at least the former was true, based on the fact that as soon as I decided to do the retreat, six months beforehand, I began worrying about where to leave my suitcase. (I now think the latter is probably true, as well, though it hasn’t quite been forever yet.)
At first I thought I would just fly to NYC overnight and then embark, exhausted, on the retreat, but then I decided that was stupid and that the best thing one can have prior to four lousy nights of sleep is a good night of sleep, so I booked a room at Leo House for the night before the retreat, plus the four nights after.
The obvious place to leave my suitcase between stays at Leo House was at Leo House, but they firmly declined this opportunity. I considered mailing the entire thing to myself at UPS, or sending myself a box with just the essentials, or just doing without. Some people do not have fresh clothes to change into. Some people do not have a toothbrush or floss. I could pretend to be one of them. (Even the most unfortunate indigent, of course, has several clean, folded handkerchiefs placed strategically about her person, as I planned to have.) But then Lucy, my NYC associate, said she had no intention of going to a Broadway show (after the retreat) with someone who appeared to be homeless, so then I considered leaving my suitcase at a place called Schwartz Travel in NYC.
In the end, it was not settled until a week or so before the retreat began. One of the co-leaders said she knew someone in Manhattan who could keep our stuff. Right around then is when I was diagnosed with mild arthritis in both knees, on the same day that Hammett was diagnosed with a heart murmur. However, I had been faithfully doing the exercises prescribed by my chiropractor, and my knees were detectably starting to feel better. (The key exercises are to stretch the IT bands and quads, using a lacrosse ball and a foam roller. This was excruciatingly painful at first, but after a couple of weeks or so, was less so, and in some spots it even began to feel painful in a pleasant sort of way.)
Right after my final shower before the retreat—five days prior—I had to force myself not to start counting the minutes until I could exfoliate again. The next day was my final shift at work. The morning after that, I was lying in bed semi-awake when the pager went off. Fortunately, I had been in bed for 12 hours and it was a bit less than an hour before the next chaplain was due to start. Since we have a one-hour response time outside of normal work hours, whatever it was was technically the next chaplain’s thing to respond to, but it turned out it was a dying baby, so I leaped out of bed and made it to the hospital 21 minutes after the pager had gone off.
This was my first time doing an emergency baptism since the miracle baby, and this time I went ahead and unabashedly prayed for a miracle. I don’t have to align with what seems biologically possible. The room was full of doctors and nurses who were working as hard as they could in that realm. I am the chaplain. I am in charge of invoking the sacred and the mysterious, and so I did. (Or if that is a bit too pompous, let’s say that the chaplain has the luxury of referring to these things.) The baby’s mother was weeping, and so was I, at the sight of the baby with her eyes closed, with a bit of blood around her mouth. She just looked so little and so vulnerable.
I went on to say, to God, that sometimes we get the exact opposite of what we want, and that if we get what we think we cannot stand, what we think will break us, we need God to remind us that this is not so. Our hearts are large enough to contain whatever we are given to bear. If the unthinkable happens, we can still feel, and we can still love. (I stole those last two phrases directly from one of my fellow students in my chaplaincy program in Santa Fe.) I finished with the Lord’s Prayer.
At first I thought I would just fly to NYC overnight and then embark, exhausted, on the retreat, but then I decided that was stupid and that the best thing one can have prior to four lousy nights of sleep is a good night of sleep, so I booked a room at Leo House for the night before the retreat, plus the four nights after.
The obvious place to leave my suitcase between stays at Leo House was at Leo House, but they firmly declined this opportunity. I considered mailing the entire thing to myself at UPS, or sending myself a box with just the essentials, or just doing without. Some people do not have fresh clothes to change into. Some people do not have a toothbrush or floss. I could pretend to be one of them. (Even the most unfortunate indigent, of course, has several clean, folded handkerchiefs placed strategically about her person, as I planned to have.) But then Lucy, my NYC associate, said she had no intention of going to a Broadway show (after the retreat) with someone who appeared to be homeless, so then I considered leaving my suitcase at a place called Schwartz Travel in NYC.
In the end, it was not settled until a week or so before the retreat began. One of the co-leaders said she knew someone in Manhattan who could keep our stuff. Right around then is when I was diagnosed with mild arthritis in both knees, on the same day that Hammett was diagnosed with a heart murmur. However, I had been faithfully doing the exercises prescribed by my chiropractor, and my knees were detectably starting to feel better. (The key exercises are to stretch the IT bands and quads, using a lacrosse ball and a foam roller. This was excruciatingly painful at first, but after a couple of weeks or so, was less so, and in some spots it even began to feel painful in a pleasant sort of way.)
Right after my final shower before the retreat—five days prior—I had to force myself not to start counting the minutes until I could exfoliate again. The next day was my final shift at work. The morning after that, I was lying in bed semi-awake when the pager went off. Fortunately, I had been in bed for 12 hours and it was a bit less than an hour before the next chaplain was due to start. Since we have a one-hour response time outside of normal work hours, whatever it was was technically the next chaplain’s thing to respond to, but it turned out it was a dying baby, so I leaped out of bed and made it to the hospital 21 minutes after the pager had gone off.
This was my first time doing an emergency baptism since the miracle baby, and this time I went ahead and unabashedly prayed for a miracle. I don’t have to align with what seems biologically possible. The room was full of doctors and nurses who were working as hard as they could in that realm. I am the chaplain. I am in charge of invoking the sacred and the mysterious, and so I did. (Or if that is a bit too pompous, let’s say that the chaplain has the luxury of referring to these things.) The baby’s mother was weeping, and so was I, at the sight of the baby with her eyes closed, with a bit of blood around her mouth. She just looked so little and so vulnerable.
I went on to say, to God, that sometimes we get the exact opposite of what we want, and that if we get what we think we cannot stand, what we think will break us, we need God to remind us that this is not so. Our hearts are large enough to contain whatever we are given to bear. If the unthinkable happens, we can still feel, and we can still love. (I stole those last two phrases directly from one of my fellow students in my chaplaincy program in Santa Fe.) I finished with the Lord’s Prayer.
Visiting Scheherazade
One day at my paying job last August (yep), I had an unusual number of very long visits, including one early in the day that was 95 minutes long, and one at the end of the day that was 100 minutes long, which took me well past my normal stopping time. In both cases, I couldn’t figure out in the moment how to get out of the room; there was no obvious pausing point. I felt like I’d had two visits with Scheherazade. However, getting out of a room is something I can actually do, as long as I remember and am determined: “I’m sorry—I will have to go in about five minutes. Is there any last thing particularly on your mind?”
As I wrote my chart note for the last visit, I realized that my ex-boss would scold that it looked more like the note of a social worker, and I wondered if that had anything to do with how utterly exhausted I felt when I got home, plus that whole evening, and the whole next day.
I wondered if I should be trying to make my visits true pastoral conversations, or is it inevitable that many conversations will have nothing to do with the patient’s religion or spiritual practice? I believe the answer is yes: I should be mindful that I am a spiritual care clinician, and people are going to talk about whatever they need to talk about. It is also very clear to me by now that if I’m going to find out what’s really going on with someone, patience is required. It can take an hour to find out what is really on someone’s mind on a given day.
Late in August, the group of people who are in the chaplaincy program in Santa Fe and who live in the Bay Area met for tea. Afterward, I attended a small and congenial vipassana meditation group in the Castro for the first time. I decided that I would attend regularly, but have not been back since.
My knees had been killing me since June, unprecedented both in duration and the intensity of the pain. About that dance party after the talent show at school: One knee was giving me particular trouble at that point. While dancing, I did not notice any pain, but the next day, I very nearly could not walk at all.
I saw the wonderful chiropractor again after I got home from Santa Fe, and continued to do what he said to do, and at this point, my knees are basically 99 percent fine, as long as I do my exercises every day. My mother, who has had two knee replacements, worried that it might be time to see an orthopedic surgeon, so I did. He said that my basic problem is that I’m aging. He also said that the amount of degeneration does not correlate with the experience of pain. Some people have horrible degeneration and little pain, while others have the opposite. As for my particular knees, he said he could do surgery, or inject steroids, or I could find a set of exercises that keep pain at bay and do them faithfully. Basically, he validated the approach of my chiropractor, and he agreed that when there is pain, it’s something to do with the kneecaps.
At my paying job, I was thrilled to see that a doctor had pasted a few sentences from one of my chart notes verbatim into her chart note. I ran and told my boss.
Once upon a time, if we called a priest to come during the night, we were required to be present to act as the priest’s host and chart what he did. This was under my former boss. Late in her tenure, she changed her mind and said we could just call the nurse to confirm that the priest had visited and make a note of it in the patient’s record. Our new boss has instructed us to go back to the original procedure, and I was getting ready to feel disgruntled about it when I remembered that it is absolutely moot. We used to be attached to a church that actually would send priests over at 3 a.m. to provide Anointing of the Sick (formerly known as Last Rites). Now that we have moved to the new hospital, we are attached to a church that won’t even answer the phone after 5 p.m.
Early in September, Tom and I went to see his mother, Ann, in Sacramento. It was a gorgeous day, and it was nice to be with Ann, as always. The following day, I went to see Carol-Joy in Novato, for lots of eating and card playing.
As I wrote my chart note for the last visit, I realized that my ex-boss would scold that it looked more like the note of a social worker, and I wondered if that had anything to do with how utterly exhausted I felt when I got home, plus that whole evening, and the whole next day.
I wondered if I should be trying to make my visits true pastoral conversations, or is it inevitable that many conversations will have nothing to do with the patient’s religion or spiritual practice? I believe the answer is yes: I should be mindful that I am a spiritual care clinician, and people are going to talk about whatever they need to talk about. It is also very clear to me by now that if I’m going to find out what’s really going on with someone, patience is required. It can take an hour to find out what is really on someone’s mind on a given day.
Late in August, the group of people who are in the chaplaincy program in Santa Fe and who live in the Bay Area met for tea. Afterward, I attended a small and congenial vipassana meditation group in the Castro for the first time. I decided that I would attend regularly, but have not been back since.
My knees had been killing me since June, unprecedented both in duration and the intensity of the pain. About that dance party after the talent show at school: One knee was giving me particular trouble at that point. While dancing, I did not notice any pain, but the next day, I very nearly could not walk at all.
I saw the wonderful chiropractor again after I got home from Santa Fe, and continued to do what he said to do, and at this point, my knees are basically 99 percent fine, as long as I do my exercises every day. My mother, who has had two knee replacements, worried that it might be time to see an orthopedic surgeon, so I did. He said that my basic problem is that I’m aging. He also said that the amount of degeneration does not correlate with the experience of pain. Some people have horrible degeneration and little pain, while others have the opposite. As for my particular knees, he said he could do surgery, or inject steroids, or I could find a set of exercises that keep pain at bay and do them faithfully. Basically, he validated the approach of my chiropractor, and he agreed that when there is pain, it’s something to do with the kneecaps.
At my paying job, I was thrilled to see that a doctor had pasted a few sentences from one of my chart notes verbatim into her chart note. I ran and told my boss.
Once upon a time, if we called a priest to come during the night, we were required to be present to act as the priest’s host and chart what he did. This was under my former boss. Late in her tenure, she changed her mind and said we could just call the nurse to confirm that the priest had visited and make a note of it in the patient’s record. Our new boss has instructed us to go back to the original procedure, and I was getting ready to feel disgruntled about it when I remembered that it is absolutely moot. We used to be attached to a church that actually would send priests over at 3 a.m. to provide Anointing of the Sick (formerly known as Last Rites). Now that we have moved to the new hospital, we are attached to a church that won’t even answer the phone after 5 p.m.
Early in September, Tom and I went to see his mother, Ann, in Sacramento. It was a gorgeous day, and it was nice to be with Ann, as always. The following day, I went to see Carol-Joy in Novato, for lots of eating and card playing.
Friday, November 22, 2019
Shiki Shiki
In August, I went to Santa Fe for a chaplaincy intensive at school, one of two required each year, and the final one of the two-year program. I went a couple of days early so I could see friends. I spent a day with my Episcopalian priest friend and his mother and nephew. We had lunch at a diner, went to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, and had sushi for dinner. The next day, my friend M. and I had breakfast at the Counter Culture Café and then went next door to the rock shop, where she bought me a lovely larimar pendant, to remind me of school and of Santa Fe. It will also remind me of M., a tremendously kind and gentle soul.
The chaplaincy intensive, besides being wonderful because it was a reunion of my splendid cohort, was the most powerful yet, with mini-courses on power and privilege, and eco chaplaincy. A Native American man led a prayer circle on a very hot, sunny day; we stood outdoors for about an hour at high noon. No one keeled over, though a person or two had to kneel. Then we did an exercise where we broke into small groups, and had to put cards labeled with various events into what we thought (often incorrectly) was the proper chronological order. Several of the events were ghastly, like Native Americans being invited to a celebration and deliberately fed strychnine.
The final evening, we had “cultural sharing”: a talent show, with many dazzling skills on display. There were several very accomplished musicians in the room. My cohort is huge on group projects, so we had prepared extensively for this. We were the final act, which began with one of us going up front to invite the audience to participate in the gentle movement exercises she claimed we had been doing together each evening. She invited the rest of our cohort to join her up front, to help demonstrate.
Her movements became slightly more animated and then all of a sudden Chaka Khan’s “Like Sugar” came over the PA—pre-arranged with the sound guy—and it became a wild dance party; everyone in the audience stood up to dance, too. (The official video for this song is delightful.) I saw Roshi dancing in the back.
But wait, there was more! One of us who happened to have the entire Heart Sutra memorized in Japanese rapped it while one of us beatboxed and the rest of us did our best to impersonate hip hop-style dancers, with intermittent synchronized movements we had rehearsed; we all waved our hands in the same way along with “shiki shiki.”
I believe I can accurately say we brought down the house. Afterward, a bit of icing on the cake, a student in the cohort after mine said I was her favorite dancer. Someone said there was going to be an after-party at one of the dorms. My peer the rap artist and I went over there and danced for an hour with maybe 15 other people.
It was a memorable evening, and I think the burst of joy at end of the talent show was welcome, because it had been a very heavy week, due to the curriculum and there was also a suicide, the spouse of a beloved staff member. Roshi led us in an impromptu memorial service, which was very somber and also comforting, doing this ritual together.
Back at home, the participants of the street retreat I had signed up for had a Zoom meeting to go over logistics. We were reminded that we were not to shower for five days before the retreat began. I asked if that included not brushing our teeth, and one of the leaders said it was up to me. He said he has done it both ways. (I did comply with the requirement not to bathe for five days prior, but decided that, since I’m paying a small fortune to a team of tooth-related professionals to keep them in my head, it didn’t make sense to take a break from dental hygiene.)
At County Hospital, I visited a young woman patient who had attempted suicide by drinking Drano—it is just never a good idea to drink Drano; it will not kill you, but there will not be one single day in the rest of your life when you will be able to forget that you did this—and also an older woman, diagnosed with mental health issues 60 years ago, who was worried about her SRO housing disappearing while she was in the hospital. This I only found out after about 20 minutes of conversation. After I left her room, I went to the nursing station and spoke with a social worker who advised me to call the patient’s case manager, because she did not have a social worker assigned. As I went off to do this, the social worker said, “Good luck.” Uh oh.
I did leave a detailed message for the case manager, whose outgoing message advised that he was actually a utilization manager, which sounded even less promising, and I asked the patient’s nurse to ask her doctor to request a social work consult. This is a new thing. It used to be that a given social worker was responsible for the patients in a certain area, but now a patient evidently only gets a social worker if a doctor requests it. But when does a doctor ever have 20 minutes to sit around chatting with a patient until her fears emerge?
Finally, I went back to the patient’s room and coached her: “If it were me, every time the nurse came in to check on me, I would say, ‘I’m worried about this, and I’m worried about that.’ I would express my worries, concisely, over and over, until I got the feeling someone was going to do something. Does that make sense?” The patient said it did, and that was all I could do.
I went back to the chaplain office and literally wept over these two patients, remembering the older woman’s incredibly sweet smile.
I was very surprised and relieved later that day to get a voice mail from the utilization manager saying he had gotten my message about such-and-such patient having such-and-such concerns, which he accurately stated, and he said he had passed all of this on to the social worker.
The chaplaincy intensive, besides being wonderful because it was a reunion of my splendid cohort, was the most powerful yet, with mini-courses on power and privilege, and eco chaplaincy. A Native American man led a prayer circle on a very hot, sunny day; we stood outdoors for about an hour at high noon. No one keeled over, though a person or two had to kneel. Then we did an exercise where we broke into small groups, and had to put cards labeled with various events into what we thought (often incorrectly) was the proper chronological order. Several of the events were ghastly, like Native Americans being invited to a celebration and deliberately fed strychnine.
The final evening, we had “cultural sharing”: a talent show, with many dazzling skills on display. There were several very accomplished musicians in the room. My cohort is huge on group projects, so we had prepared extensively for this. We were the final act, which began with one of us going up front to invite the audience to participate in the gentle movement exercises she claimed we had been doing together each evening. She invited the rest of our cohort to join her up front, to help demonstrate.
Her movements became slightly more animated and then all of a sudden Chaka Khan’s “Like Sugar” came over the PA—pre-arranged with the sound guy—and it became a wild dance party; everyone in the audience stood up to dance, too. (The official video for this song is delightful.) I saw Roshi dancing in the back.
But wait, there was more! One of us who happened to have the entire Heart Sutra memorized in Japanese rapped it while one of us beatboxed and the rest of us did our best to impersonate hip hop-style dancers, with intermittent synchronized movements we had rehearsed; we all waved our hands in the same way along with “shiki shiki.”
I believe I can accurately say we brought down the house. Afterward, a bit of icing on the cake, a student in the cohort after mine said I was her favorite dancer. Someone said there was going to be an after-party at one of the dorms. My peer the rap artist and I went over there and danced for an hour with maybe 15 other people.
It was a memorable evening, and I think the burst of joy at end of the talent show was welcome, because it had been a very heavy week, due to the curriculum and there was also a suicide, the spouse of a beloved staff member. Roshi led us in an impromptu memorial service, which was very somber and also comforting, doing this ritual together.
Back at home, the participants of the street retreat I had signed up for had a Zoom meeting to go over logistics. We were reminded that we were not to shower for five days before the retreat began. I asked if that included not brushing our teeth, and one of the leaders said it was up to me. He said he has done it both ways. (I did comply with the requirement not to bathe for five days prior, but decided that, since I’m paying a small fortune to a team of tooth-related professionals to keep them in my head, it didn’t make sense to take a break from dental hygiene.)
At County Hospital, I visited a young woman patient who had attempted suicide by drinking Drano—it is just never a good idea to drink Drano; it will not kill you, but there will not be one single day in the rest of your life when you will be able to forget that you did this—and also an older woman, diagnosed with mental health issues 60 years ago, who was worried about her SRO housing disappearing while she was in the hospital. This I only found out after about 20 minutes of conversation. After I left her room, I went to the nursing station and spoke with a social worker who advised me to call the patient’s case manager, because she did not have a social worker assigned. As I went off to do this, the social worker said, “Good luck.” Uh oh.
I did leave a detailed message for the case manager, whose outgoing message advised that he was actually a utilization manager, which sounded even less promising, and I asked the patient’s nurse to ask her doctor to request a social work consult. This is a new thing. It used to be that a given social worker was responsible for the patients in a certain area, but now a patient evidently only gets a social worker if a doctor requests it. But when does a doctor ever have 20 minutes to sit around chatting with a patient until her fears emerge?
Finally, I went back to the patient’s room and coached her: “If it were me, every time the nurse came in to check on me, I would say, ‘I’m worried about this, and I’m worried about that.’ I would express my worries, concisely, over and over, until I got the feeling someone was going to do something. Does that make sense?” The patient said it did, and that was all I could do.
I went back to the chaplain office and literally wept over these two patients, remembering the older woman’s incredibly sweet smile.
I was very surprised and relieved later that day to get a voice mail from the utilization manager saying he had gotten my message about such-and-such patient having such-and-such concerns, which he accurately stated, and he said he had passed all of this on to the social worker.
Monday, November 11, 2019
New Boss
When I was at school in Santa Fe in March, I submitted a proposal for a thesis based on my final project—learning about palliative care chaplaincy via volunteering at County Hospital—which was immediately approved: “Start writing,” said our congenial thesis mentor. Somehow, four months passed during which I could find only two days suitable for this activity, though good headway was made on both of those days. Finally, in mid-July, I spent a whole day rereading what I had written to date and sifting through the remainder of my raw material. By the time I figured I’d done enough work that I could responsibly return to goofing off, I had 44 pages of 60 drafted.
In October, I temporarily canceled the weekly sabbath and took a few days off from County Hospital so I could try to wrap up this project, which is a description of what I have experienced and learned at County Hospital, a review of academic literature on palliative care and spiritual care, and an examination of what from my Buddhist practice seems to be most helpful in this work, including things I have learned in the chaplaincy program in Santa Fe.
A couple of weeks before our mid-November deadline, my small group of students had its monthly meeting and I mentioned that I had written about various academic papers, but was worried that some of them were kind of old, and wondered if I should go find more, and more recent, papers. The mentor for my small group (different from our thesis mentor) advised just sending in what I had and letting the committee tell me what else is needed. That excellent advice turned six or eight planned work days into six or eight vacation days. Feedback will be coming in December, and then we have several weeks to make revisions.
Back in July (sorry for the zigzagging), I did a sleep study to see if sleep apnea was the cause of needing so much sleep. Evidently not, because I have only mild sleep apnea, and don’t need to use a CPAP machine.
Also in July, the new boss at my paying job started, taking over from the interim director. I was pleased to find that I really liked her (and still like her, nearly four months later). Normally, I automatically dislike anyone whose name is “New Boss,” and have been laid off in the past by at least one such person, so I was relieved. My new boss was formerly a physician, and also taught bioethics at a very prestigious university. She is smart, friendly, organized, warm, and obviously grounded in her own spiritual practices.
At the end of July, I went to Seattle for a lovely and relaxing weekend with my cousin and her family. Lisa, David and I went on a boat tour of Seattle’s locks system, which was fun, and that evening we all had dinner at my cousin’s.
Early in August, I walked over to Publico for a fish and chips burrito with my friend who has been diagnosed with dementia. Each time I said something about directions, he immediately asked a question about it:
“We’re turning right here.”
“We’re turning right?”
“We’re going to go straight after we cross the street.”
“We’re going straight?”
I’m sorry to say that I began to feel annoyed, but after I got home, I realized that my friend genuinely had no idea where we were going and that his questions likely masked an anxiety that is creeping up as he feels less and less oriented. We’d been going to Publico monthly for a few months, but that was not sufficient for him to remember anything about it.
I decided not to invite him to Publico again, and instead to ask if he’d like to have tea at a café near his house where he has been going for decades, and that when it got to the point that he couldn’t find that place, I would invite myself over to have a cup of tea in his living room. The following month, I suggested meeting at the café, and he said that sounded good, and we met there.
The very next month, I made the same offer, and he said, “Where’s that?” This café is on the very street where he lives, so I guess it is time to move on to just inviting myself over to sit in his living room.
In October, I temporarily canceled the weekly sabbath and took a few days off from County Hospital so I could try to wrap up this project, which is a description of what I have experienced and learned at County Hospital, a review of academic literature on palliative care and spiritual care, and an examination of what from my Buddhist practice seems to be most helpful in this work, including things I have learned in the chaplaincy program in Santa Fe.
A couple of weeks before our mid-November deadline, my small group of students had its monthly meeting and I mentioned that I had written about various academic papers, but was worried that some of them were kind of old, and wondered if I should go find more, and more recent, papers. The mentor for my small group (different from our thesis mentor) advised just sending in what I had and letting the committee tell me what else is needed. That excellent advice turned six or eight planned work days into six or eight vacation days. Feedback will be coming in December, and then we have several weeks to make revisions.
Back in July (sorry for the zigzagging), I did a sleep study to see if sleep apnea was the cause of needing so much sleep. Evidently not, because I have only mild sleep apnea, and don’t need to use a CPAP machine.
Also in July, the new boss at my paying job started, taking over from the interim director. I was pleased to find that I really liked her (and still like her, nearly four months later). Normally, I automatically dislike anyone whose name is “New Boss,” and have been laid off in the past by at least one such person, so I was relieved. My new boss was formerly a physician, and also taught bioethics at a very prestigious university. She is smart, friendly, organized, warm, and obviously grounded in her own spiritual practices.
At the end of July, I went to Seattle for a lovely and relaxing weekend with my cousin and her family. Lisa, David and I went on a boat tour of Seattle’s locks system, which was fun, and that evening we all had dinner at my cousin’s.
Early in August, I walked over to Publico for a fish and chips burrito with my friend who has been diagnosed with dementia. Each time I said something about directions, he immediately asked a question about it:
“We’re turning right here.”
“We’re turning right?”
“We’re going to go straight after we cross the street.”
“We’re going straight?”
I’m sorry to say that I began to feel annoyed, but after I got home, I realized that my friend genuinely had no idea where we were going and that his questions likely masked an anxiety that is creeping up as he feels less and less oriented. We’d been going to Publico monthly for a few months, but that was not sufficient for him to remember anything about it.
I decided not to invite him to Publico again, and instead to ask if he’d like to have tea at a café near his house where he has been going for decades, and that when it got to the point that he couldn’t find that place, I would invite myself over to have a cup of tea in his living room. The following month, I suggested meeting at the café, and he said that sounded good, and we met there.
The very next month, I made the same offer, and he said, “Where’s that?” This café is on the very street where he lives, so I guess it is time to move on to just inviting myself over to sit in his living room.
Friday, November 08, 2019
I Didn’t Freak
As I was leaving work early in July—after I was already on my bike and rolling down the street—I got a page requesting a visit for a patient right away, plus one later that evening, after she delivered her baby. I felt a little disgruntled at this order and pre-order of services: two after-hours visits for the same patient? How did she know she needed two? I turned back toward the hospital and went to see the patient. The nurse thanked me for coming, and said, “We’ll be paging the on-call chaplain later on.”
I said, “That will be me, because I’m on call all night. We are available during the night for emergencies.” I was hinting that being paged to offer prayers welcoming a well baby into the world would not be a good enough reason for me to be awoken from a hopefully sound sleep and to have to get dressed and return to the hospital.
The nurse said, “OK. We’ll page the on-call chaplain, then.”
I said, “That will be me, because I’m on call all night.”
After another loop or two of the same exchange, I asked the nurse if I could speak to her privately, and learned that the patient was going to be delivering a pre-term baby who was not expected to live. The two requests now made sense. The patient herself was quite young, and told me she was worried she would “bleed out” and die during delivery. I pulled the nurse aside again to ask if this worry was well founded. It was.
The patient told me that she did not want to see her baby, but did want him baptized if he was born alive. I agreed to baptize the baby if he was born alive, and I offered prayers for the well-being of the patient. I was now eager to be of service to this frightened young woman and told the nurse to be sure to page me later.
That happened after midnight. Back at the hospital, I found the patient in a relaxed mood. She had delivered the baby, already dead, and had asked for him to be brought to her; she had changed her mind about not seeing him. Per her worry that she would die during delivery, I expressed joy at seeing her, and she said, “I didn’t freak, because of your prayer.” That was a hugely gratifying chaplain moment.
I was not worried about seeing the pre-term child, because I have seen many pre-term children. However, when this one was brought back into the room, I realized this was something I had never seen before. The baby was perfectly formed, maybe 12 inches from head to toe, and black-red in color, which I learned is just the color babies are at that pre-birth age. The sight was disturbing. I felt a little weak in the knees and had to sit down for a moment.
I explained the Catholic church’s view of baptism, and offered the ritual as a naming ceremony rather than a sacrament. The baby’s weeping grandmother held the baby. By the time I was asked if I would like to hold the baby, I was happy to do that.
A few days later, I saw Kiss My Aztec at Berkeley Rep, which I had expected to be full of cheesy humor and/or annoyingly educational, but it was really wonderful—very funny, and with a refreshingly abrasive female lead.
When I visited my family in the summer, I shared the exciting news that I had bought a pressure cooker, and was dismayed when skilled questioning elicited the fact that I had bought a “jiggle top.” I know (now) that even a modern jiggle top has more safety features than the jiggle tops of yore, but decided that I would return this embarrassing item and get a second-generation pressure cooker.
One day during my visit I looked through my mother’s cookbooks to see if she had a pressure cooker cookbook, and indeed she did, by a woman who has written several of them. In early July, I went to Novato to see Carol-Joy. We had breakfast at Toast and dinner at a Thai restaurant. In between, we saw The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Carol-Joy mentioned that the community where she lives has begun hosting regular evenings where people can share for 15 or 20 minutes about themselves, a fun way for neighbors to get to know each other better. She mentioned a recent speaker, a well-educated food writer with a PhD. I screamed the name of the author whose book Mom has, and sure enough, it was her. She lives three doors from Carol-Joy! Carol-Joy told her about this coincidence, and she told Carol-Joy, “Next time Bugwalk visits, come on over!”
I said, “That will be me, because I’m on call all night. We are available during the night for emergencies.” I was hinting that being paged to offer prayers welcoming a well baby into the world would not be a good enough reason for me to be awoken from a hopefully sound sleep and to have to get dressed and return to the hospital.
The nurse said, “OK. We’ll page the on-call chaplain, then.”
I said, “That will be me, because I’m on call all night.”
After another loop or two of the same exchange, I asked the nurse if I could speak to her privately, and learned that the patient was going to be delivering a pre-term baby who was not expected to live. The two requests now made sense. The patient herself was quite young, and told me she was worried she would “bleed out” and die during delivery. I pulled the nurse aside again to ask if this worry was well founded. It was.
The patient told me that she did not want to see her baby, but did want him baptized if he was born alive. I agreed to baptize the baby if he was born alive, and I offered prayers for the well-being of the patient. I was now eager to be of service to this frightened young woman and told the nurse to be sure to page me later.
That happened after midnight. Back at the hospital, I found the patient in a relaxed mood. She had delivered the baby, already dead, and had asked for him to be brought to her; she had changed her mind about not seeing him. Per her worry that she would die during delivery, I expressed joy at seeing her, and she said, “I didn’t freak, because of your prayer.” That was a hugely gratifying chaplain moment.
I was not worried about seeing the pre-term child, because I have seen many pre-term children. However, when this one was brought back into the room, I realized this was something I had never seen before. The baby was perfectly formed, maybe 12 inches from head to toe, and black-red in color, which I learned is just the color babies are at that pre-birth age. The sight was disturbing. I felt a little weak in the knees and had to sit down for a moment.
I explained the Catholic church’s view of baptism, and offered the ritual as a naming ceremony rather than a sacrament. The baby’s weeping grandmother held the baby. By the time I was asked if I would like to hold the baby, I was happy to do that.
A few days later, I saw Kiss My Aztec at Berkeley Rep, which I had expected to be full of cheesy humor and/or annoyingly educational, but it was really wonderful—very funny, and with a refreshingly abrasive female lead.
When I visited my family in the summer, I shared the exciting news that I had bought a pressure cooker, and was dismayed when skilled questioning elicited the fact that I had bought a “jiggle top.” I know (now) that even a modern jiggle top has more safety features than the jiggle tops of yore, but decided that I would return this embarrassing item and get a second-generation pressure cooker.
One day during my visit I looked through my mother’s cookbooks to see if she had a pressure cooker cookbook, and indeed she did, by a woman who has written several of them. In early July, I went to Novato to see Carol-Joy. We had breakfast at Toast and dinner at a Thai restaurant. In between, we saw The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Carol-Joy mentioned that the community where she lives has begun hosting regular evenings where people can share for 15 or 20 minutes about themselves, a fun way for neighbors to get to know each other better. She mentioned a recent speaker, a well-educated food writer with a PhD. I screamed the name of the author whose book Mom has, and sure enough, it was her. She lives three doors from Carol-Joy! Carol-Joy told her about this coincidence, and she told Carol-Joy, “Next time Bugwalk visits, come on over!”
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