Fencing Bear at Prayer

It's a rainy old day outside. Not storming, just dripping gently, just enough to tantalize the puppy when we go out for her to do her business, but not enough to drive us back in without giving her some time to play. My husband is off to work and my son is at school. So now I'm here at home alone with the pets--and the memories. Today is the fifth anniversary of my father's death . It doesn't hurt as much to say that as I thought it would. Perhaps there has simply been enough time. Perhaps I am no longer feeling guilty for having spent the last week of his life finishing that article now that it is finally published and, even better, being well-received. Indeed, it may turn out to be one of the most important things I have ever written.* More to the point, in so many ways, I wrote it for him. I wish.... I was going to write, "I wish that he had been able to read it." But he didn't need to. I had been arguing over its argument with him for years....

Is there such a thing as a spiritual landscape? It seems wrong somehow to suppose that God manifests Himself more fully in one place than another. The whole earth is His creation, after all. Why should one place feel more sacred, more suffused with spiritual energy than another? And yet, there is something that you can feel here in New Mexico as soon as the airplane lands. Is it the quality of the light? The low relative humidity of the air? The vision of mountains in the distance, encircling the land like the arms of a god? My parents and I moved to Albuquerque when I was only a few months old. My sister and brother were both born here and we lived in Albuquerque until I was five, returning for a year when I was seven. I spent third grade* at the foot of Sandia Mountain looking for castles along its top ridge. Even today, so many decades later, I can't look at a landscape without mountains and not feel that it is missing something essential. Coming back to New Mexico ...

Robert L. Fulton, M.D. (April 11, 1938-March 10, 2005) My father was not yet 67 years old when he died. He was in the hospital, recovering from surgery from a stroke that he had had the week before. The plan was for us to go visit him the following week, once school was out. I still have on my voice mail the last message that he left: "Hi, Rachel, this is your Dad [as if I wouldn't know!]. I'm doing okay. The surgery went very well. I've still got a terrible cold [cough], but other than that it's progressing nicely. Thanks for calling." The next day, he was dead, from an embolism in his lungs. I remember my husband coming to find me and my son at fencing practice, saying, "The hospital is on the phone, they need to talk to you. Your dad has collapsed and they're not sure how much longer he will live." By the time I got to the phone, he was gone. How many things are wrong with this picture? I wasn't there with him when he died, but...

I really wish my father were here. Then I wouldn't have to depend upon my friends (that's you, M.B.) and anonymous readers (that's you, Sean) to pat me on the head and tell me how naive I am. "Taxes are bad because they take money from the people who have earned it and make it impossible for them to start new businesses, hire workers, and generally benefit the economy all around." My father loved this argument when he was talking about trying to get his auto shop to make some (any) money, but for the last fifteen years of his life, he worked for the surgery department in a public university and spent the greater part of his time at the V.A. hospital, being paid by, um, the government. He was also, in his younger days, adamantly opposed to any government-supported health care system; by the time he died, he had revised his thinking on this somewhat. The bureaucracy, waste and corruption of the insurance system had convinced him that the poor--whom he spent the...

This is not the time for posting. I'm at work and should be thinking about books of Hours, but I haven't been able to sleep properly for days now, and I don't know what else to do but write. If I seem incoherent with fear, I am. What is going to happen to our country? I've been turning various post titles around in my mind--"My Fellow Americans", "Bread & Circuses", "Apocalypse", "WWJD"--and none of them seems to have an answer. I am afraid of how my country is going to vote. I am afraid of what I see in the comments that viewers have left on the video of the Alfred E. Smith roast on YouTube . Such anger, such lack of decency. Are these really the people whom I pass on the road every day? My fellow Americans? It's hard being a Christian and believing two impossible things at once. On the one hand, these creatures, these animals who snarl at each other and hurl insults like "Racist" and "Terrorist...

I feel old. Okay, so I spent yesterday fencing against women at a minimum 20 years younger than myself, but it really isn't that. Or only that. It's that three years ago, when I was 40, I was in the best shape I had ever been in my life, thirty pounds lighter than I am now (albeit probably fifteen pounds underweight, to judge from the way my body reacted), able for the first time in decades to run with pleasure, able to keep up with even the college-age fencers in footwork, able to fence a fifteen-touch bout and stay with it hard throughout. And then my father died and I grieved for a year. I stopped coloring my hair, in part because it was falling out, in part because everyone kept telling me how beautiful the white was with my face. My yoga center closed and I could not find a class elsewhere that fit with my schedule, so I fell back on books to keep my home practice alive. And now, three and a half years later, for reasons I really do not fully understand, I feel old....