THE SUITCASE OF MY MIND

 Like many folks my age, old memories keep floating up at inopportune moments. It is as if my mind were a suitcase, and I am taking out items at odd and weird times. This suitcase is filled with bits and bobs,stuffed to the gills, unorganized, overflowing, but fun to explore.

When I take my first, brisk 15-minute walk on our big deck I remember events of the past, such as the end of summer at Camp Windigo (I know...), putting a candle on a tongue depressor they gave us, lighting it, and sending it off onto the pond's surface as we sang a farewell. Or, I think back to the first time I really found food to be f..king delicious and amazing, on a date with a Russian Jew at Bates with his parents where I had Cocquilles Saint Jacques. "What have I been missing?" I almost shouted, like Toady when he saw his first motor car.

 

   Today I unfold the memory of how Dad used to put us to bed when we were kids in our wonderful, old (1756), historic Williamsburg house. After being read to on the rug downstairs, we would troop to our rooms and slide into bed. Dad would visit each of us as we lay on our stomachs, anticipating, as he bounced us on our backs saying, "Cozy, cozy, cozy!" Sometimes we all were carried away and got hysterical,with Mom calling up, "Dick, don't get them so excited!"

  I call to mind snorkeling off one of the Greek islands in the Cyclades, swimming along happily and thinking, "This is great! I have no fears at all!" 

Then I saw through my mask the bottom of the ocean dropping away precipitously (maybe from a prior earthquake?), and thinking, "Man, get thee back to shore, woman!" I also got stung by a jellyfish on the same beach, limping to the cafe nearby while Rick searched our phrasebook for the word, "Jellyfish." (However, I did know how to say, "I have diarrhea," in Greek but never found this useful.) The woman knew just what to do, soaked a pad in ammonia, and put it on the rapidly swelling knee. Those babies hurt!

 I take out of the suitcase the time Rick and I (unmarried then, age 20) went to hear Bach's famous "St. John's Passion" at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford.

 I have probably written of this before, but it is one of the central events in my life which changed me forever. I walked in an unbeliever and walked out a believer, as I watched the tears coursing down the cellist's face; as I read the words on the program; and as the utter conviction seized me--"This is all true. This happened. Jesus lived, died, and now lives again in us." Rick and I staggered out of the cathedral to sit on a near bench, sobbing, unable to move or even think. He might have lost a contact lens then.

 Another memory floats up, especially on my first son's birthday: driving down our bumpy dirt road while in labor, hurrying to Cooley Dickinson Hospital where they put me in a wheelchair and took me to the birthing room.

 It had a Picasso on the wall! And bean bags to put my head in during the pains, while I listened to Vivaldi on headphones to help. Then the birth, after some time; pushing hard, harder,when Ben slipped out into the waiting doctor's hands, slipping like a stream of hot water relieving the pains. And there he was! A new human being. What a wonder, what a milagro!

 I could go on, mostly events concerning life and death: a female humingbird resting on my black shirt for 9 min. after the male had bumped her to the deck and stood on her in macho victory; seeing my Dad after he died and being astonished at the yellow cast of his skin (he had jaundice from his cancer), wondering how he could be here one minute and gone the next; digging new potatoes from the garden, brushing off the fresh dirt to reveal the healthy red skins; and so much more in a life that contained so much joy, many hard and dark times, but always, always knowing that God walked with me. Sometimes I limped, leaning heavily on him, but moving forward even when I could not see the way.

 In the Hebrew Bible YHWH is translated as, "I am who am." But another translation reads, "I am the one who is there." 

So trust me, I know this deep in my bones: God is the one who walks beside you, who is there in the darkest of times and in the most joyful of days. Can somebody say amen?