View From the Edge of the Bed

Well my Tuesday posting about the Skinny Guy in a Diaper sure did offend one person, who wasted no time letting me know as much, and in a public forum. She said if all I knew to do with the Bible was make fun of it, mocking the son of God in whom a whole lot of people believe then it was a sad state of affairs and why didn’t I get out my Bible and go right to the Book of John now, to see if I couldn’t wise up my sorry blaspheming self.

I wrote right back of course to say that I never make fun of anyone else, either human OR divine, but only mock myself and that’s the sure-enough truth. In fact the one time I did make fun of somebody else was when I said of Elizabeth Taylor that at least one of her chins was still pointy. Boy did I get a lecture that time!” Who do you think you are?” this woman from Bridgewater MA thundered in an angrily scrawled hand. “Where do you get off making fun of others when I can see by your picture that your eyes are beady, your teeth look false and your hair is out of style!” Ouch!

But instead of dwelling on the insults that have come my way over the years I have comforted myself today by going into the bedroom to really look at the wall where little Eddie saw this crucifix that once hung inside my mother’s casket; and I’m wondering now what kinds of things other people put near their beds, what cherished tokens to serve as the last thing(s) they will see at night and the first they will see in the morning. Maybe someone will click on 'comments' and offer answer.

Anyway here are “labels” for what you see in this photo:

1) that crucifix, which also hung inside the casket-lid of my mother’s father, a man born in the 1870s but one who lived long enough for me to have sat beside him at every supper, every single day until he died when he died in '58.

2) Two watercolors that this same man bought in Montreal in the winter of '23 when he brought his whole family there for a trip, just months a before a death came that permanently darkened all their lives.

3.) And those gorgeous orange lilies? Those lilies were done by David’s great-uncle, we think, an amateur botanist and man of letters born in the early 1890s . He and Robert Frost were friends for a time in their early manhood, exchanging letters and jokey poem, and one of Frost’s recent biographers speculates that the two lovers for a time before awkwardness or circumstance made a breach in the friendship. (Maybe David’s elder brother Toby will weigh in here with the details on that. Toby?)

It’s this last picture that really has my attention right now because it just seems to tie me to my husband and to all his people, making his side of the family my side of the family too, in the miraculous-yet-everyday sense that through the three babies we made and the ten zillion germs we have swapped this man of mine and I really are now related.

4) Oh! and that little teeny picture tucked in beside the birch chest is a snapshot of my mom, taken in 1927 when she was a humorous but secretly shy girl just on the brink of flunking out of college.

Every morning I hang my head off the edge of the bed, chiropractor’s orders, and look and look at these objects - until they shimmer and grow so nearly transparent that I seem to pass right through them, exiting the present moment altogether and joining these here remembered in whatever place it is that they now dwell, where no offense is intended and none is ever taken. is ever taken.