I’ve received a lot of kind words in email leading up to the valve job. Two are especially pertinent.
Bert is one of my longest-time friends—we’ve known each other since undergraduate school and haven’t seen each other since 1976 or so. He was quick to tell me that the enema kit would come in handy by relaying a story when his family was camping with a crowd of other folks.
In a federally maintained campground, complete with cement cinder covered tent, bench, and grill areas for good drainage, Leonard grilled chicken breasts for everyone:
“The grease from 24 chicken breast soaks into the cinder below the government issue fixed grill. Molly, a very friendly Golden Retriever, later eats a bunch of greasy cinder chips before we notice and drag her away. The next day is the obligatory nature hike. Some of the kids are whining because the path is steep and difficult. They are organizing and threatening a full strike when low and behold we all turn at an amazing sound of a combination fart and whimper. Molly, the Golden Retriever, is dropping the first of many loads of steaming concrete! I jumped on the situation; ‘If she can stand to do that surely you kids can walk a few more miles, and anyway you’ll get to watch her!’ None of us really believed one of God’s creatures could survive such a repetitive and obviously painful experience.”
Bert closed the story by telling me to not eat any cinder chips.
My good friend Bernard, a Catholic Priest in Dublin, emailed a passage from A Showing of Divine Love by the English mystic, Julian of Norwich:
“And all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well! ... He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.’ ... If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to
me. But this was shown: That in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”
I don’t know why, but of everything everyone has sent me this one really hit me the hardest (in the sense of Bob Marley’s “Trenchtown Rock:” “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.”
Bernard goes on to write that he’ll “assault heaven” with a celebration of mass. And then, being an Irishman, he goes on to complain about his broken knees, “cracked from carrying my heavy body mass while praying on my knees, and flattened from my Thursday assault on heaven.”
I wrote back that I’d send some knee pads for his affliction and that they work pretty well in the garden, too.
Bernard responded with appreciation and insightful goodwill: “These will be days of grace—the times of deepness always are.”
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