Unlike most city kids from the 1970’s, I grew up with a garden. My father watched Euell Gibbons one winter and that spring we were clearing the brambles and briars from a vacant lot next to our house in preparation for our first garden. Dad purchased an enormous tiller, and began turning the earth. We planted seeds, indoors and out, each year for our garden. My sister and I tended our own plot: I took the tomatoes and she took the peppers.
What a theological conundrum. Am I supposed to enjoy a symbol of suffering, a device for execution, by dipping it in peanut butter? What part body of Christ on the crucifix do I break off and eat first? The head? The parts with the chocolate nails? Did a priest bless chocolate Jesus so that transubstantiation can occur? Seeking answers, I flipped it over to read the ingredients and discovered that these chocolate crosses and crucifixes were also kosher. That opened up a whole other can of theological worms.
In Richmond, snow is white magic, enchanting us to act in strange and beautiful ways. Democrats and Republicans, stand shoulder to shoulder, smiling as they peer out of 10th floor windows watching white petals turn dirty streets into Currier and Ives lithographs. Strangers strike up conversations as they wait in grocery lines, eight carts deep, creating an instant community of snow-intoxication. Curmudgeons and children alike, stand at doorways, surveying backyards transformed from tired brown grass and dead flower stalks into white linen canvases, touched with pastel blues and pinks, glittering with icy diamonds from a cold sun. And nearly everyone breathes the clean, crisp air of Snow Sabbath.
Last night, at the stroke of twelve, we let go of 2014. For some this “letting go” held regret, for others celebration. I’m not sure where I was on the spectrum between the wistful romanticism of another year gone and the joy of charging full-bore around the bend into the unknown.
Once, long ago in college, I went through the necessary ritual of dating. On Valentine’s Day my junior year, I received a gift from a young man I had been seeing for several months. He sent me a singing telegram of the song “You Light Up My Life.” I think he meant it to be “our song,” because a month earlier at Christmas, he gave me a spinning musical unicorn plinking out the very same “You Light Up My Life” on a metal cylinder. He was clearly very excited about the Christmas gift, he thought it expressed our relationship perfectly: a brass, horned equine, revolving on itself to strands of Debbie Boone. I accepted my Christmas gift with a bewildered smile, not knowing what to say. The poor boy never realized I absolutely hate the song “You Light Up My Life.”
If you aren’t familiar with the billboard, a local group called the Parents and Friends of Ex-gays and Gays (PFOX) purchased ad space from Lamar Advertising for a billboard in the city of Richmond along the very well-traveled I-95 corridor.
As a freshman at James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley, I discovered freedom. I went out when I wanted, came home when I wanted, slept when I wanted, ate when I wanted, ate what I wanted. Growing up in a fairly strict and rather regimented home, my new life at JMU was exhilarating. Of course with more freedom, there were more responsibilities. Thanks to my fairly strict and rather regimented upbringing, I handled most of the responsibilities with ease. Still, I’d been liberated and I felt that I could finally paint this world in great big, broad strokes, with the image of the woman I was becoming.
Milo, the hero in Norman Juster’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth, finds himself on a fantastic journey in a strange land to rescue two princesses. He and his companions must go through extraordinary and sometimes dangerous territories to reach the mountains where the princesses are held captive.
Back when I was in seminary and, like my fellow students, full of indignation at a world teeming with injustice and inequity – way back when the consequences of fighting every battle that crossed my path seemed unimportant in the face of so many urgent causes – a very wise professor said these words to me: “You must choose the hill you die on.”
I’m still angry about it. There are times where I get to thinking about him, what he accomplished, what he had yet to accomplish, and I just want to tear my clothes, punch a wall. Question whatever higher power there is about why take him, what was the point. It feels senseless and cruel.
I tell myself there’s a reason behind it. Some sort of grand plan. But there are those moments where “There is a reason” shifts into “There better be a reason, and a damn good one.”
Overall, I just don’t understand. And maybe I never will…..