It’s being winter out there.
In here, though, it’s still seasonless me at 8 or 9, looking through a spyglass (from a mis-delivered boy’s box of used Toys for Tots) at a pigeon mama and baby across the street in the 90-degree section of City Hall’s front eaves — “open cornice” jumps to mind.
(It was possibly a real Lionel electric train set also in that Toys box with which I had such fun. I hope the boy who got the wrong box enjoyed the doll babies and such!)
That I know all the pigeon dances seems less important these days — didn’t even put it on the resume — but there’s a time from a few years before then that still seems important, albeit also not resume-able!
My mom’s mother lived across the street, then, and we apparently bunked with her and my uncle and cousin when drangry (like hangry, but drink-spawned) nocturnal father-visits to our apartment got too hairy for us.
All I know for particulars is that after breakfast, my cousin and I were to kneel beside Me-mere’s Boston rocker in that warm sunny kitchen full of her special touches of color, and say our morning prayers for her.
I can’t imagine what I thought about God in those days, but I believed in Him, respected Him, and our angelic pray-ing started the day off well: For a few minutes, my grandmother could believe we might remain little pre-Beata for at least a half hour.
That sweet time comes back to me the past few days, here in the midst of faith-rattling worldwide and local chaos of so many kinds. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking; it’s unavoidable when a despot wars, when tent cities get deconstructed, when dangerous trains derail, when planes injure passengers and near-miss others, when families and neighborhoods thin; when the earth quakes, when it snows in southern California, when 50-somethings are being diagnosed or dying —
and when, in this one weekend, there’ve been two sudden friend deaths, and a loved one’s (public!) eschewing of today’s Christianity. (She clarified, after much gasping and ill-will and shunning from some and careful concern from others, that the problem is with Christians–not Christ.)
Yes, they have always been His biggest problem.
His was a rhetorical question, and I find it to be more sad than frightening, “When the Son of Man returns, will He find any faith on Earth?”
I’ll answer that, in my way, tomorrow.
❤️❤️❤️
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Under the mask.. 