The strangest inspiration

Tuesday a week ago was the roughest evening I've had in some time. We'd cancelled our prayer meeting the week before because of weather, and had lost the two previous meetings due to the holidays, so it had been four weeks since I'd been to prayer group. Over almost three decades this has become one of my greatest sources of perspective and growth. No matter how much praying on my own I might be doing, I soon feel out of touch with God if I am not involved in praise and worship. As we gather together to praise God and open our hearts to him, submitting to the Spirit's movement in scripture and prophecy, and then break open the upcoming Sunday's gospel reading, I find insight into my life that I don't get in any other context. My personal prayer time draws nourishment from this weekly time; indeed, my entire walk is strengthened. Even though I receive Jesus himself in Eucharist, weekly Mass doesn't provide all that I need to sustain my journey. On the one hand, Jesus is everything, and there should be no "other hand." On the other hand, God has formed this one part of my spirituality to be filled by a different form of worship. Don't get me wrong, prayer group is no substitute for the Eucharist, which I expect I would similarly feel starved - probably quicker - without. But I never go more than a week without attending Mass. Ideally, each Eucharistic celebration would incorporate praise and worship and reflection and the spiritual gifts in addition to the physical presence of Christ. So while I wouldn't choose charismatic worship over receiving Jesus' sacred Body and Blood, it is nonetheless an important element of my faith walk, and I had very much been missing it. The other regular opportunity that I've had to lead praise and worship, prior to the first Friday evening Mass, had also been cancelled due to weather.

So last Tuesday my tank was running empty, and I was so glad to be getting back where I needed to be. I was on my way into the kitchen to kiss my wife goodbye when she brought up a faux pas I'd made earlier in the day. After a long history we had agreed that I wouldn't correct her online anymore, yet without thinking I'd told a younger friend what she'd meant to say on a birthday post, which contained a Swype-induced error that wouldn't have necessarily been obvious to the recipient. I didn't even consider it a correction of a mistake. My wife, on the other hand, very clearly did, and asked me again as I was leaving to please stop correcting her online. I immediately knew what she was referring to, and it seemed so minor and nit-picky an offense - although clearly a repeat infraction - that I felt attacked, and so I over-reacted terribly. (That may be as much of an understatement as one can have over a mere two words.)

Well, after that I was definitely not in any frame of mind nor state of peace to lead worship. This was clearly a case of if you there recall that your brother has something against you (Mt 5: 23), and I needed to resolve that before I could make an offering of praise. I stuck my head in at prayer group long enough to explain that I couldn't stay, and went back home to try to deal with things with my bride. 

My wife was understandably and unmistakably not ready to reconcile with me over this. I wouldn't have been, either, in her shoes, and to my credit I realized this in the moment, upset with myself and determined to respect her need for time and space. I sat in the living room while she finished what she was working on in the kitchen, and remained there for some time after she retired to the spare room where she has been watching t.v. during the colder weather. Finally I went downstairs, where I laid upon the sofa in the dark, not wanting to distract myself with the television or other entertainment. A few hours later as my wife was preparing to retire to bed, she came partway down the steps to ask me if I intended to sleep where I was. It is very rare for us to go to bed without reconciling, yet her annoyance was still obvious in her tone of voice. I really didn't know how to bridge the gap between us in that moment, so I replied that since she clearly hadn't wanted to be in my company, I'd thought I would stay where I was. Normally she would have made an overture at that point that would serve as an opportunity to talk about things, at least briefly, but she simply wasn't up to it yet. 

By this point I was feeling hurt by her rejection as much as I was upset with myself for causing it. I was on very unfamiliar ground, as I didn't feel at all confident that just waking up in the morning was going to provide some magical or inspired insight into how to bridge the gap between us. I just continued to lie there and try to sleep, without much success.

After a while I began to hear a noise from upstairs. It was clearly not my wife; I'd have heard her footfalls starting from back down the hall in our bedroom. I soon realized that it was our dog, who usually spends the night on the living room sofa. We block his access to the family room when no one is home and at night, as he has a history of accidents down there at these times. The gate we installed at the top of the stairs sufficed for several years, but within the past year he has figured out that he can squeeze through the bars of the railing, which we've started blocking with one of my guitar cases. Usually this does the job, unless something really gets his attention, such as the house being under attack by the Evil Mail Carrier. In such dire circumstances he has learned to nuzzle the guitar case out of the way so that he can squeeze through the railing. I began to suspect that my unprecedented presence downstairs at night in the dark was motivating him to try to join me. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes I felt him jump up onto the sofa with me and curl up behind my knees.

I was struck by his determination. In the moment I probably anthropomorphized a bit - as much as I love our dog, I probably don't understand the canine mind quite enough to get what was really driving him, aside from his desire to be with his pack if that was at all within his ability. It seemed to me that he had been singularly determined to overcome whatever obstacles there might have been to his being with me.

And I felt chagrined. I knew right away that he was a nobler dog than me. Shouldn't I have been more determined to overcome whatever obstacles I needed to, to do whatever was within my power to resolve things with my bride - especially when I had been the one to so exacerbate our disagreement - and be with the woman who has loved me through hell and back for three decades? 

Inspired, I got up from the sofa went upstairs, sat on the edge of the bed for a couple minutes before laying down across my side of it and putting my head on her hip. After a minute the weight of my skull became uncomfortable and she lightly batted at my head, then realized it was me and apologized. We didn't exactly talk things through in that moment, but it was clear that we both wanted us both to be there, to be together, to be our couple-self. That was good enough for the moment. 

It was still not a very good night's sleep thereafter, but I couldn't bring myself to banish our dog back to his place in the living room when he'd been such an example for me.

And seeing as prayer group was "weathered out" again this week, I'm going to be especially careful between now and next Tuesday!

Mikey

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. We were going to travel further west that evening, to get a bit more of a head start on our travel home the next day at the end of a long week of vacation. We'd driven from Dayton to Ocracoke Island on the weekend - well, ferried the last part, of course - for our nephew's wedding, with a visit with Ashley and Garrett tossed in along the way, an overnight in Richmond, VA, a backtrack to retrieve the camera I'd left in the hotel room, and the unnerving discovery that the night clerk had pocketed our cash payment rather than enter us into the computer system. (He actually indicated a cancelled reservation, when we hadn't had a reservation to begin with!)  There had then been a two-hour drive each way on Monday to pick up our daughter and son-in-law who'd gotten a ride halfway down from Norfolk with her childhood cohort in "crime." (I sure hope those quotation marks are called for.)  On Friday we'd driven back to MD, which included an unanticipated couple-hour wait in stopped traffic due to a car fire on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel - which, let's face it, wasn't nearly as bad for us as for the folks whose car caught fire. Still, that long drive had left my back seriously aching, to the point that we'd decided not to go to the Orioles' game as we'd planned. I definitely didn't want to be too rough on it again just two days later.

So we had to think about it when my cousin in Ellicott City invited us to stay with them overnight. I'd planned for us to get about another hour further west after the wedding, making the next day's drive that much shorter. But we didn't have reservations anywhere yet, and we enjoy Matt and Jen's company, so took them up on their offer.  That was when we first met Mikey.

We'd heard him once before, when we'd visited for a pool party, but that day he was kept out of the reach of the company. Mikey was huge, maybe a collie-German shepherd mix, but he was also definitely showing his age. He didn't seem very amiable, and since my wife is nervous around big dogs, Mikey spent most of the evening in the basement after the introductions were done.

I awoke fairly early the next morning, and went downstairs to use the powder room. I noticed the basement door was open, but didn't think anything much of it, until I heard Mikey's distinctive growl through the closed bathroom door. When I was finished my business, I cautiously opened the door, but Mikey wasn't there. I started to make my way back upstairs to grab a few more winks of shut-eye. Except there on the landing, very clearly standing guard, was Mikey. I started to go up past him, and his posture and his growl made clear that I wasn't going to be allowed to go upstairs to where his people were.

I did eventually get past him, but it took a long time for me to convince him that I was maybe not a threat, and he kept a close eye on me even when he did finally suffer me to pass.

Mikey died today. He was a good and faithful guardian and friend. My heart goes out to my cousin and his family.

Garbage not out . . .

Okay.  I understand that I need to respond when told that the trash can is full.  I completely get that. And I realize that taking the trash out is my job, which is really how I want it.

But if I don't get to it, it's kind of important that no one takes the bag out of the trash can and leave it sitting either on the floor or the back porch. In either of those locations, the dog is certain to get into it at the first moment when it is unattended. We have lived through this often enough that we should have learned from experience by now.

Tonight I was unaware that the bag was taken out of the can, and we left for our dinner engagement in a rush. We came home to quite the mess.

Heavy heart

I haven't had much chance to get to know many cats. Mom hated them, thought they were all sneaky. We briefly had a kitten anyway, when I was a kid, until my sister spoiled it by picking it up every time she walked past for the first couple weeks. Then she walked by without picking it up one day, and it scratched her, right under the eye. Goodbye, cat.

We had a couple of them here, shortly after our baby girl graduated high school. She and a friend got them from someone who had them on the side of the road, free to a good home. My wife doesn't hate cats so much as she fears them, so every time one of them jumped, so did she. Since they were kittens, that meant there was a whole lot of jumping going on. It only took about a week of that, after my daughter and her friend abandoned them to us, for us to decide they had to be donated while they were still young enough to be adopted. It was either that or hire a divorce lawyer.

I like cats, but I've never had the good fortune to live in a house of people who share my affinity.

So when I had the chance, Christmas before last, to cat-sit for some friends - whom I wanted to be better friends with anyway - it was definitely a two-birds-with-one-stone situation. I couldn't say yes fast enough! Every day I went over and spent about 20 minutes hanging out with Jackson. He seemed glad for the company, and condescended to allow me to pet him the whole time I was there, after feeding him and filling the bird feeders, of course.  He was quite friendly, and would purr loudly pretty much the entire time I was stroking his fur. My friends added upside to upside: they thought this was worth gifting me for, not realizing what a gift they were already giving me. I still use the guitar tuner I bought with their gift card, all the time.

I think I got to sit him one more time before he moved away with them, and of course got to see him whenever I was over at the house. We were even reunited once at his family's new place, when my company sent me to that area on a business trip early in the year. I'm probably being silly, but it seemed like he was happy to see me, too.

Now I'm not going to see him any more.

I'm going to miss you, Jackson. Not like your family will, I know, but still.