|
I was driving
wasn’t I? and
letting you talk more
than is my custom or yours or ours
when you told me of how much you
enjoy going to church with family
or said something along that line.
I didn’t listen fully when you mentioned
your several sisters and your mom but
I think you said one sister has—in middle
age—grown somewhat wide. And
I think you said she said she thinks
of what she sits upon as her two soft
“children.” You didn’t say, or did you,
whether she has bestowed upon each a name.
But didn’t you say this sister
in the solemn not-quite-quiet
before last Sunday’s mass
observed a sometime visitor entering
sideways into a pew several rows ahead?
The sight of the woman, not known to you by
name, but distinguished by an especially plump
and prominent pair of twins, prompted your sister
to set in motion an unkind word, a small joke
about those children and what she would do
if they were hers to give away.
Several sisters sat side-by-side-by-side.
The joke moved from the one who is wide
to one not-quite-narrow
and from her to another
I recall you said.
Sister to sister
sinner to sinner
giggles rippled and
rumbled and shook the padded pew.
On Monday I half-listened as I held to
the speed limit on a narrow, curvy, country road.
On the straightaways I let my right hand drop to
hold your left. Farm-roughened, arthritic, warm.
Your mother, you said, tried to hush you
from where she sat, across the aisle. She
glared. Her eyebrows rose so high in
disapproval that they nearly erased her
forehead and disappeared into her hair.
But she knew, from eighty-some years
of church-going, and sixty-some of
raising girls, that every wonder of this
life on earth can be a blessing and a curse
and that shushing giggles in a sanctuary
will likely make them worse.
♦
|
