I ended up going to Pittsburgh today. Carly said in the car later that it was bittersweet. I thought a lot of sweet on my end. My problem is I want to be a fixer. I want to fix all the wrong things in Sara's life. About four years ago, she and her mom were having a garage sale before moving from Fayetteville to Hot Springs. A woman bought their tv cabinet and of course, she is trying to figure out how to load it at the end of the driveway in a little stick shift rice burner. Her son is in the car, he's maybe 11, and he accidentally puts the car in gear and promptly knocks Sara's mother down, breaking her knee and giving her two years' worth of surgeries and physical therapy, and knocking Sara down under the car and dragging her for about 80 feet.
Imagine being a mother with a broken knee and you can't go 80 feet to your child. The EMTS, when they arrived, thought Sara was dead, until she finally groaned. She had a broken hip, looked scalped by Indians, road burned skin everywhere, and more bruises and concussions and sprains than I can recount. The garage sale customer had no insurance, and neither did Sara or her mother. The convalescent center checked her out early, against the doctor's wishes, because she could not pay to remain.
I could sit here all night telling you the things wrong with Sara. And me and my kids and some of you and I am still thinking about that little boy running across the road to get to Sheetz with his dimes in his old aspirin bottle and wishing I could fix him too. I don't like living sometimes. I don't mean I wish to discontinue living, merely that it is overwhelming at times to consider all the ways we are suffering. I am ordinarily a glass half full kind of girl, but this is what I thought of today when Carly said Sara's parting was bittersweet. I was so relieved for me and so sad for Sara.
When the faithful & discreet slave says to set realistic goals, I take their admonition to heart. I have figured out I cannot fix myself, and really the only true help I can give anyone else is to tell them how God's kingdom is the only real "fix." Thinking about what it means to be made in God's image makes me believe that while Jehovah is not overwhelmed ever, he is sad over the condition of his children and wants to fix them. I love the new song about the resurrection and how Jehovah has a longing to do the work of his own hand. I think if I had been an apostle and could heal people, I'd have done it right and left, but the focus was on the future, not the present. Jesus would have counseled me for setting up a clinic and dispensing cures. But I long to see us all fixed.
All this makes me tired in a way that sleep does not restore. And right now I'm going on six hours. We moved last year, and Lana's parents helped us. Frankly, I was jealous of Dana, her mother's, ability to work like a mule. We went off for a load at the old house and came home and everything dumped in the garage had been moved to the rooms where it belonged AND she and Amy had completely unpacked my kitchen. With one exception, all the cabinets remain arranged exactly and perfectly the way they did it. (Carly bought more Rubbermaid, so we had to switch that with casserole dishes and pie plates.) She's only a dozen or so years younger than me, and I remember when I was that age being able to go like a racehorse and do it several nights in a row, and now one night of less than eight wears me out. I want to be perfect of course, but tonight, I would settle for being 39 again instead of 49.
There's a column in the new issue of Reader's Digest this month (I can never sit still without writing or reading, so in the checkout line or at the dentist's office, I am reading) called "Advice I Would Like to Give Myself Twenty Years Ago."
Who wouldn't want that opportunity? The funniest one (to me) said: Buy Apple Stock.
I guess I would tell myself to stop trying to fix everyone else (it mostly annoys people, unless you are Sara and someone is buying you shoes) and use that energy to fix me. Stop baking pies for brothers and start doing pilates for you.
Twenty years ago there weren't blogs. But I should have told myself to start one. It is helping me to spend part of each day anticipating this writing, and it is good for me to write each day. I go into withdrawal if I go too long without writing. It's a strange and thunderous feeling, like I am bottled shut and about to blow my lid from fizz. Under pressure. It helps me to have the rule that this writing has to incorporate something spiritual everyday. In studying women's literature, there are not as many examples from certain historic periods as there are of men's writing. Women weren't allowed, often had no time, and frequently had no education or ability to write. So what we know of women's lives from those eras comes from their diaries, their household records, and their personal correspondence. They weren't producing journalism or plays or publishing poems.
And I was thinking about the word blog, which is coined from "web log." A log you keep on the world wide web. Like William Shatner's character Captain Kirk says in the opening sequences of old Star Trek episodes: Captain's log, stardate yada yada. And he gives an account of the journey the Starship Enterprise is embarking on.
I'm trying to track my journey through these last days when Satan is trying everything to add me to that list of names to taunt Jehovah my God with. And he has a lot of names of people who have never embraced true worship, but I am sure he reserves the best of the list for those he has enticed away. Crazily, sadly, sometimes I glimpse some true value in myself by how hard Satan has tried to sidetrack me. He must want me pretty badly because he's done some wickedly impressive feats.
I don't want to make Satan's "A" list. And I don't want to have to quit blogging either. So it's a win/win for me.
Carly and I had lunch at Ikea. They have ribs on Wednesdays for $4.99 and that chocolate wave cake is impressive too. We bought three replacement bowls to our set and just looked around. I held her hands at the table and told her we had to start being kinder to each other.
It's been a very peaceful and kind and even a little bittersweet day. I owe some emails and I can't do it. I miss you if you are reading this, but I am going to bed. I'll get back to you tomorrow, and I look forward to having infinite tomorrows of perfection to be with you someday.
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