When I came home tonight, I was greeted only by the cat who, characteristically, greeted me at the door, turned her back to me, and went to the other room, throwing herself on the floor as if to say, “oh, it’s only you.” The house was quiet. My wife is at a women’s retreat, so I have the run of it. But it’s no fun to run alone.
I ate dinner alone. . . well, not so alone. Callie, our fulsome feline, lounged languidly on the floor at my feet. The leftover pizza was quite good. . . well, chewy, actually. . . aged, really. . . which makes me eat more slowly, chew more, and eat less. . . well, a little less. . . well, perhaps not less but, you see, it is a thin crust, and nourishing, as they say, as you say when you are really eating something not so great for you but nonetheless not terrible but bad enough to need justification.
So, rather than fill the air with TV voices and bask in the poor fellowship of the LED, I was quiet. I was so quiet I could hear myself chew. It’s not really pleasant to hear people chew. So I took to talking to Callie, remarking that “It looks like rain,” sighing intermittently between bites, asking her if she enjoyed her dinner (no comment), making small talk, all the while knowing that “I’m just the human that will do while Mom is gone,” knowing that I will have to do. And so will she. Because other than her sister Lilly, who is barely here anyway, who I rarely glimpse for more than a second as her backside rounds a corner — there is no one else.
After dinner I read a short devotion, as is our habit. Habit persists even when there is no “our.”I started reading it to myself and then thought, what the heck, I’ll read it to the cat. It was on prayer. It was called “Get Up. . . and Pray.” There is the part in it where Anne Graham Lotz turns to the reader and says — “What about you? How’s your prayer life? Are you rushing through your prayer time? Neglecting it all together?” — and I turn to Callie, as if to ask her, and her eyes are blank, like mirrors, like big question marks looking back at me, saying softly, “What about you?”
Chastened, I resolve that I will pray that night, for my friend who is writing a book to know what book, for my wife, for my children, for the nation, for the entire world. To infinity and beyond! It’s like the declarations you boldly make about dieting or reading more books or writing more real letters or genrally getting your act together. I’ll be at it for a awhile, I know, but it’s so quiet, and there’s time, and I can take all the time I need and. . .
But my 91-year old aunt called. Even though she had the usual complaints, I was glad to hear from her. She self-describes herself sometimes (no, every time) as “not a medicine taker,” as having “a little bit of dementia,” and often tells me the same stories which she laughs at and which I laugh at too, again, and again, and again. She’s lonely. At least I have the cat.
And I have the absences by which I am warmed. Children at college, their rooms still echoing their presence, the left behinds reminding me of all they did in their sojourn here and pointing outward to what will come. “Zoo Story” promises the book on my daughter’s shelf. “Reach for the Skies” says Richard Branson’s book in my son’s room, number two in a stack of ten, right after the one on Mars. There you go. And when your spouse is temporarily absent, halls and walls and sitting places still resonate with dangling conversations, impressions formed by years of talk and movement lit by the slanted rays of sunlight that filter through the pines. (Callie is disgusted at this poetic prattle, and leaves the room.)
Jesus said “the son of man has no place to lay his head,” and yet he exaggerated for effect, didn’t He, employed hyperbole to show that life here is not what meets the eye, that Home is somewhere and somehow Else, that we are aliens and strangers and sojourners in this place, in our homes, even with the people that form our family.
Still, I like it here. Even alone.
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