EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

I’m away from her now, home again in Boston, and my big sister Nan is still in Florida; still in that Boy-in-a-Bubble world that this MRSA infection has put her in, where she can’t even take shower on account of the crucial porthole the hospital opened up in her arm. Since her week-long stay there in mid-June she’s only been allowed to have little kitty-baths  – and this in a household where the real cat showers daily.

Nan and Chuck designed their bathroom in such a way that instead of a curtain the shower has two walls made of chunky glass tiles, which the cat scaled one day to oversee Chuck in his ablutions. Now Chuck is crazy about this animal and so “asked” him if wanted a little spray to the face and what do you think, the cat loved it. He now BEGS for out-and-out shampoos, complete with an Irish Spring lather-up to the head and ears. It must be like getting massage for us humans, or even massage with the special dessert thrown in for the folks who go in for that sort of thing because this cat just adores Chuck now, and follows him all over the house thanking him and licking him and sleeping in his truck when he can’t get at his lap.

Nan named the cat when he first wandered into their yard as a homeless kitten. Duke she dubbed him, like they called John Wayne because little as he was he had that certain leadin’-with-ma-big-wide-shoulders-style swagger – or anyway he had it before a kitty stroke a couple of springs ago rearranged his posture some. Now he wears his head in this permanent cocked angle so now Nan calls him Two O’Clock. “Hey, Two O’Clock!” she’ll call out when he slinks by. The cat pays her no mind though; he’s too busy following Chuck, hoping for more shampoo and lap-dancing.

If you read the post underneath this you know that I went down to Florida to help Nan and Chuck as they weather this summer of Nan’s sickness. This past Monday she let me go with her to the clinic that houses the Hyperbaric Chamber she must lie in for two hours every day because its oxygen-rich environment promotes healing in her foot, the site of this grievous infection. The thing looks like a big Tylenol capsule and she eases into it after the handsome tech Brian takes her vitals. On Monday he closed the cover and there she stayed, for a little over two hours before the doctor undid the dressing and looked at her poor foot, which even inside the bone is infected with this highly resistant staph infection capable of claiming your toes, your feet, your limbs and even your life.

I meanwhile sat stunned in the waiting room. I looked at the big live oak tree outside the window, wearing its Spanish moss like the torn lingerie the young Elizabeth Taylor wore in all those movies where she was for sure SEXUALLY AVAILABLE but strictly in that violet eyed upper-class British accent way.

I looked at the other clients waiting their turn, the woman who gave birth ten days ago and is one big open wound in the C-section area and so has to come have that seen to, poor dear, falling asleep in her chair.

And I brooded over the thought of what it costs to come here: a whopping $4500 per session and even with Nan’s insurance she still has to pay $150 per. That will have been five days a week times ten weeks and well, you do the math.

And yet still she smiles and makes her funny remarks. She introduced Brian to me as “the Crypt Keeper” for example. He didn’t mind. He gets her. He just smiled his nice smile and undid the blood pressure cuff around her little arm. “Wave to your sister,” he said and she did that and he closed the lid and the session began.

THIS IS NAN ON THE LEFT, WITH COUSIN ELEANOR

I’m in Florida, the land of scooting lizards and drinking water that smells like a swamp – only here at my sister Nan’s house Nature is banished. Her husband Chuck saw to that: he built this place five years ago and all night long the ceiling fans turn in rhythm with the comforting rumbles of the seeming dozen of systems all working to keep thing cool, dry and varmint-free.

The two of them were five years into their marriage when they came here. Chuck’s beautiful wife Betty had died of cancer and Nan’s high-energy husband Tom had died of a heart attack. Tom was one of the only two men I have ever known who would smoke while downhill skiing off the trail. He also would eat six raw hot dogs, chased by six-hard-boiled eggs, chased by a pint of ice cream. Nan and their 15-year-old daughter Gracie suffered so much when he died, as did the four wonderful kids from his first marriage all in their 20s, that tender and precarious decade.

Now Nan is suffering again: For the third time in four years she has a MRSA infection and this one is bad. She wants me to do a kind of ‘public service’ column about MRSA and I can try to do that as soon as I get home to Boston, but right now it’s 8am and I’m sitting in this lovely tree house of a home on the bayou and the fans are turning and Nan is quietly infusing herself with the killer antibiotic Vancomycin, the only drug at all shown to be effective against this methycillin-resistant staph infection.

She has an opening in her arm where the PICC line enters, then heads north, then south again and straight to her heart. (The abbreviation stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter.) It’s very important that that site remain clean and a wound care specialist comes every day to look both at it and at her foot, where the infection began. It’s in the bone still, even these seven weeks into treatment, and everyone is praying she can keep her toes. At one point they thought the foot was even a goner. At its worst Nan says it looked like a shark had bitten her. It was raw and open, pulsing and red.

She wouldn’t let me come until now. “I’m fine. Ihave Gracie,“ she emailed me the one time. “I have Chuck.” But every single day she has to go for what could end up being nine or even ten weeks to lie for two hours each time in the Hyperbaric Chamber which is said to speed healing. And then there are the doctor’s appointments. And Gracie couldn’t work from this house forever. And on the phone once Chuck said in a very small voice, “I’m just having a little trouble with the meals.”

So I got on the plane the second Nan gave me the green light. I here came Thursday at 4:00 and I will leave tomorrow morning at 10:00 and in that time I have made a Chicken Cassoulet meal and a heart Meaty Loaf meal; an old-fashioned Roast with Pan Gravy, and a Baked Ziti that would feed a dozen; a hot Pear, Pork and Arugula Dish with Walnuts and Bleu Cheese and a Chopped Broccoli Salad with Bacon Bits Cheddar and Red Onion. Yesterday I went to the Winn-Dixie and bought ten Tupperware containers and today I will start freezing it all, because they have barely made a dent in it, natch.

It’s funny though: I’m just looking at this list to see that that while the Pork and Arugula Salad is a new favorite of ours everything else has meaning: The Roast with Gravy and the Zesty Meat Loaf were our Mom’s specialty. My girl Annie-the-chef told me to make the Baked Ziti and sent me down here with the recipe that bears her quirky stamp (“Mix the whole mess up in a bowl…”) The Chicken Cassoulet is our cousin’s Carolyn’s specialty and the Cheesy Broccoli Salad is Cousin Eleanor’s. I’m pretty sure Eleanor herself is coming at the end of August. I know Cousin Sheila arrives in just two weeks. My girl Carrie is sending a CD and a book down. And faithful-hearted Cousin Mary Lou calls and calls, expressing love and compassion though Nan is too weak yet to tackle a phone call.

Dodson is a beloved honorary son of David and me and he might as well be son to Nan and Chuck too for how they love him and his new bride Veronica – just as much as we do. They came here to Tarpon Springs from Sarasota just for the day Saturday and just sat with us on our couch. We are all on the couch it feels like. We are together in spirit, and hoping for our miracle.

“Pull Me Up,” which is what I called this week’s column, is about vigilance; about who looks out for the one who’s looking out for the rest of us.

I am married to Mr. Vigilance. Personified. When we travel I’m all the time talkin’ to little kids in the food line or jokin’ around with the smokers in that walled-off leper colony of a cement room they’re forced to use.

Not David. David is practically testing the instrument panel on the plane. He lies awake the whole night before a trip and worries. Boards the plane and worries. Lands and worries.

It’s not because he’s a seasoned traveler and I’m some neophyte. For the last 23 years I’ve been flying all over the map, comin’ in to Tampa when it’s 93 degrees and soaking with humidity to be on some dumb magazine show for 90 seconds; screeching in to Tucson and taking a wrong turn in the desert at midnight; climbing into some little rental car just as dusk is settling over some godforsaken rustbelt city whose newspaper I’ve made arrangements to call on…. Wherever I am, I just look at my little map and set right out, full of delight and happy expectation, assuming some stranger will take care of me, get out of his car to draw me a better map than the one I have; offer to lead me to my destination even because this has been my experience. I expect cheery good will on the part of the universe if not big affectionate pats to the head.

David must just expect something else, though we don’t talk about it at all – maybe because he’s so busy looking after me. I say this because I….. lose things; I drop things; I walk out of the kitchen thinkin’ I’m done in there for the next five hours, totally not noticing the six-inch flame still doing the Hula on an empty burner. And there’s more: Once I put a five pounds of flour down the garbage dispose-all, causing it to become instantly constipated. Once, while easing the baby into her carseat I put my purse on top of the car, off of which it instantly slid the second I accelerated, to be  picked up by a Bonnie-and Clyde style couple who the cops then gave lights-and-sirens chase to through three towns in central New Hampshire…

The other day was a real low point though: the other day I came trotting down stairs with my Innisbrook tote bag just as David was getting ready to leave for work. “Oh nooooo!” I shouted with dismay because inside this nice leather shoulder bag that he had won at his latest golf tournament everything was suddenly soaked.

Patiently he set down his own pile of stuff and took it from me. Out came the diary and the daybook, the three New Yorkers and the Time magazine, the nectarine and the cell phone,  all of which I clucked and mourned over and tried to dry off.

“WHAT have you GOT in this bag?” he was just exclaiming – until he came upon the full cup of coffee that had tipped over inside it.

“You put COFFEE in a tote bag?”

“Oh hmmmm… well I thought I had sealed it.”

Then he turned the whole thing over to shake out the pencils, the gum and the pacifier, the toothbrush, the carrots and the lip gloss – and found something that embarrassed even me: a half-eaten ice cream cone, the cone part anyway, now a soggy blob of waffley goodness still wrapped in its protective paper napkin.

He cleaned it all up anyway and handed it back to me after like ten whole minutes, and I couldn’t understand why he was smiling.

“Wait, I made you late for work – AND your hands smell like coffee and rotten Maple Walnut,” I said. “Aren’t you mad at me?”

“Nah” he said.

“Really? Why not?”

“Because the kids and I are gonna have a REAL laugh over this one!”

How grateful am I for the one who watches over me while in my manic way I attempt to watch over the whole known world? Really grateful – of course.

And hey: getting laughed at behind my back is a mighty small price to pay.

So thanks for all the vigilance, Davey Dave… NOW WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE!

Smith College the 1930s:Fire Drill/Escape the Burning Dormitory Trick

These gadgets were still in use when I got to Smith, just moments before college kids everywhere exploded into the flesh-baring, headband-wearing joy of the youth movement.

The girls in the picture are just 18, whether they look it or not. That’s when you had to do: take the Escape from Your Burning Dorm Room test as a freshman just a few weeks in. They look like they’re trying to hang themselves eh? Some of them look like they’re even OK with the idea.

I used this title just to be fresh of course but when I first typed it I wrote “angel” instead of “angle” which made me wonder if I should call this ‘Angels in Danger’, or maybe ‘Angels Descending’ and there’s my problem right there: I never know who’s going to be talking when I open my mouth, either that nice girl with the white gloves who started at Smith in 1966 or this crazy person who in talking about life with small children says the word ‘penis’ twice in front of an audience of kindly women in beautiful sundresses.

That’s what I did yesterday when I was the speaker at a luncheon put on for the members of the Winchester Boat Club. I guess there were 125 of 150 of them there, all in lovely sundresses and little shawls. Out of respect I wanted to dress beautifully too and at first put on a few killer outfits only to think Who are you, the bride? What is this, a short story by William Faulkner? I stopped then and called darling Ryan Dunn to wake him up, Ryan who helps me with much of my business life- only being just 19, Ryan was of course still sound asleep with his cell phone off. I thought “Be calm Terry.” Also “DON’T be a show-off with these fancy outfits” and so wore black slacks and a blazer and looked instead like a matron in a women’s prison but that was ok; we are meant to set self-consciousness aside are we not?

I really was getting a little panicked now about who would help me lug in the all my books which I had been graciously invited to offer for sale after the talk. I called Ryan four more times, then dialed up his dad at work who called their famous neighbor Bob Bigelow who walked straight into the house, straight into Ryan’s very room adn yelled TERRY MAROTTA NEEDS YOU AT THE BOAT CLUB GET UP I’LL GIVE YOU A RIDE and if you don’t think getting yanked into wakefulness by a six-foot-seven former Boston Celtic isn’t scary, well talk to Ryan.

The day went great anyway and the women laughed as I talked about all the fun we can have in life and also how we might die any day, all of it mixed in together as is usual with me. It’s just my standard mode of expression I think, Funny With Death in it, Deathy With Fun in it. And right at the end one of the men that works there came shyly up for some small talk.

He told me his wife is about to have their fourth child who was pretty sure coming early. He also said that his dad had just died and his mom was feeling a little rocky and when he said that his own voice caught just a little. He ended up choosing the book with all the comical stories about small children in it and also the collection whose central message is that that OK sure maybe everything does die but then it all comes back again if you look at it the right way. Then he and his men helped Ryan and me get all our stuff back into my little red minivan and we drove away and the skies opened and the rained drummed like crazy on the hot asphalt and I felt about as happy as a person can feel, with angels descending all around her.

(and this is Ryan, who finally woke up and was wonderful)

When you sweat you feel virtuous; it’s how you know you’re a good person and I’ve been doing some serious sweating this afternoon, or anyway my right armpit has been. Which must mean either that I’m only half the saint I like to think I am or that my mind wandered and I only rolled the Arrid Extra Dry onto the skin of my left armpit which happens all the time, of course it does think about it you’re using your right hand and it’s a nice easy reach across the body to get to the left armpit but a much more constricted curl to get to the right one. Kind of like when you sing the I’m a Little Teapot song and act it out at the same time which David does for us all sometimes and is frankly why I married him in the first place.

Well now here we are on the weekend which means it’s time for me to put up the new column which happens to just BE about what happens when you get to thinkin’ you’re deserving of canonization like a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa . All kinds of papers used it this week so as well as sticking it up at the top here under This Week’s Column why don’t I touch the magic wand to the words Citizen.com and let you click through and see how it looked in in New Hampshire.

Pride really does go before a fall, just as the story says. I thought I was so great one time, because Smith College where I went to school invited me to give as talk at the big reunion, calling me the Distinguished Alumna Speaker. I bought a silk dress just the bright–blue color of a peacock’s wing as well as a small scarf of that same hue with swirls of burnt orange and coral thrown in. I looked like the kind of lurid cocktail an 18-year old girl with a fake ID would order her first night at the Tikki Bar.

So there I was in the big the lecture hall where I once sweated earnestly over midterms and finals. Now I was up on the stage! With a microphone and a screen behind me! And everyone had to listen to ME, with my carousel full of funny and poignant slides that I just knew would make those 400 women laugh til their bras popped open, then cry a little, then near the end finish up with a last gentle chuckle and off to the class cocktail parties. I looked out at that sea of faces, went to take a tiny sip of water before I began…. and poured the thing right down my front and ended up giving the whole talk with a dark stain resembling the map of Argentina reaching from just under my chin clear down to my bellybutton.

It happens anytime you compare yourself to the great. In fact here’s a photo from the summer of ‘93 when I actually  ‘met’ Gandhi at Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London and Zounds! By gosh if I’m not wearing the same ugly dress I refer to in this week’s column! I see that I’m also trying to look like he and I are twins both inside AND out but anyone can see: his hair looks WAY better than mine

(But Yay for the 80s and early 90s huh? Look at me and my sister Nan up top here! We sure did have the poofy coifs!)

I have to say, this new baby in the family is one tough kid. He falls down just all the time. He steps across a threshold and falls; walks and falls; just plain stands there and falls. He walks all crazy too, come to think of it. Kind of like Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage” with that little arms-up waddle. Kind of like the way kids in the old Peanuts comic strip walked – like  Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally seen here on the right.

Soooo he gets banged up, gets scabs on his giant head, then rubs the scabs off in his sleep by rooting around the way babies do and so has to start healing all over again

And the thing is each time he falls I’ve noticed two things: (a) a ball is involved and (b) he doesn’t mind a bit. It’s worth it to him to fall because he just loves balls, any kind you got going. He’ll try throwing ‘em, kicking ‘em, coming at ‘em with a stuffed animal or a slotted spoon and whatever and just sort of whang away at them so maybe he’s a natural athlete I don’t know. Maybe he takes after his grandpa, my cute old Mate For Life Dave, that MVP all through high school, that darn guy who never even tried tennis ’til he was 20, never tried golf ’til he was 30 AND IS REALLY GOOD AT BOTH the son of a gun.

Well it’s this really gorgeous 72-degree day here with the so clear and sharp it looks like an ad for Kodak so let’s make this a short one and say that my newest little grandbaby has two mottoes, the first:

You Should See the Other Guy

And the second …. Are you ready? Scroll down….

and down

and down

and down

and down a LITTLE bit more for a variation on the famous quote about being the change…

…

…

…

…

…

BE The Ball You Wish to See in the World.

“Trust In God; Everyone Else Pays Cash”

Every Friday I post a copy of the column that is just then appearing in papers all over. I do this in case anyone here would like to see how the blog-writing lens and the newspaper-writing lens come together in a columnist’s life. This week I’m a day late in doing it though on account of how I was very busy yesterday tending a 14-month-old who was himself very busy staggering around sucking on his little sucky thing while making wispy marks on index cards with his big brother’s pointy new crayons.

The column describes what it’s like to be a really trusting and open person and how far that whole way of living can work for you before it starts working against you. The Somerville Journal has titled it  “Dummy Up Or Just Let It Go And Be Friendly?” and if you go here you can read about the most open and trusting family in all of America – and about how, lucky for them, the person they were so open WITH was the most open and trusting individual in the country and yes I am that person.

I just trust people. I can’t help it. When I was 19 a slimy old rich guy asked me to come to a conference with him and for $500 be his ‘assistant’ for the weekend. I actually believed that’s what I would be – and I almost went, innocent lamb that I was.

Way later in my late 30s, I walked through a night-time alley in Times Square, back in the days when the place was filled with pimps and prostitutes and skinnied-out AIDS sufferers and I had my 11-year-old child with me God help us. Annie and I were also attended by Roberto, a South Bronx boy and ABC scholar of 17 who was like a son in our family in those days. Rob feared no one and seemed to trust everyone. Together with Chris, his best pal and fellow ABC scholar, we had all just looked on as Annie had her portrait done by a street artist. Now, along toward midnight, Chris had gone along and Rob was leading Annie and me on his shortcut, the canvas in my hands. Sure enough, as we walked deeper into the alley here were two men and a woman, lounging on the hood of a busted-looking car.

Roberto smiled at them so I did too. “Look!” I said. “Annie has had her portrait painted!” And they slid off the hood of the car and sauntered over to examine it.  “A beautiful portrait for a beautiful girl!” they said kindly. Then Rob led us back to our hotel and went home to his mama on Beekman Ave.

So Trust and Openness won the day, that day anyway. It’s a day I’ve thought about many times since.

I haven’t seen Rob in a good long while now but I think of him often. He has children himself these days and I wonder if he and their mother are raising them too to begin with people in an open friendly way and just kind of take things from there…..Anyway here we are in that long-ago time, when my hair was blacker than black and Rob, with his big smile and his wrestling trophies, was one day out of high school, and college-bound, with everything before him.

The other day a reader took exception to the writing style of two of the columnists he sees in his Sunday paper and since one of them is me the paper’s Executive Editor to whom he sent his email sent it on to me. Here’s what it said:

“I HAVE NOTICED YOUR FEMALE COLUMNISTS CAN ONLY WRITE ABOUT THEMSELVES, THEIR FAMILIES OR CUTESY THINGS THEIR CHILDREN OR RELATIVES SAY OR DO OR A ‘WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER’ ESSAY. THEIR WRITINGS ARE FILLED WITH ‘I , ME, MY, WE, ETC.’, IN OTHER WORDS A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE COLUMN WITH AN EXCESSIVE USE OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS.”

(In other words people and their darn families! Who cares about that?)

“IT IS VERY EASY TO TALK OR WRITE ABOUT YOURSELF” he went on. “ARE NOT COLUMNS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT THINGS? IDEAS? EVENTS?  FAR-AWAY-PLACES? OPINIONS OR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM? THESE REQUIRE THOUGHT!”

(And, well, he may be right there and the idea realm is a good place to start so how about Intelligent Design for today, kids? Or perhaps Should Form Follow Function? Or, Benevolent Despotism: an Oxymoron or Our Future?)

“LET THIS BE A CHALLENGE,” this reader wound up. “CAN MS. X (as I will call her) OR MS. MAROTTA WRITE A COLUMN WITH MAYBE JUST ONE OR TWO PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND NOT ABOUT THEMSELVES?”

Can we? I have no doubt. Will I? Today anyway? Not likely.  On my writing agenda today I seem to have (a) an account of the bird the flew in our house and lived here undetected until the cat Abraham found him this morning; (b)something so sad I heard at the wake I went to yesterday that stayed with me all night and kept me from sleeping; and (c) a description of me falling face first, all dressed up, into the cargo bin of my minivan.

As to the ‘Should I?’ part, a Seventh Grade girl named Danielle wrote to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists last March, asking about what it’s like to have as your job the pouring of talk into a tall skinny word-funnel for the newspaper. I said I’d love to be the one to answer her and what I wrote I used as my column that week. It’s is still on the NSNC website if you’d like to read it. It’s serious and I stand by it. But if I were the kind of person who enjoyed sassing back I might to “Two words for you Mr. Z who thinks people aren’t interested in reading about other people: Reality TV.”

(that’s me on the left)

The hands go first, that’s Aunt Grace always said when I was a kid living with her. She used to make me do my Latin homework for her every morning at breakfast and then forbid me to write down what I’d puzzled out. It worked though: I got to where I could read just about whatever scrap of Caesar/ Cicero/Virgil you set down in front of me like it was writin’ on the ol’ cereal box. She was a Latin teacher herself and she knew her stuff. She always spoke of the poor kid reading aloud his own earnest translation of a passage in which he had somebody or other arriving at the palace not ‘with one bare foot’ but rather with a naked foot soldier. (Uno pede nudo: you can see it. Plus hey, it got lonely way out there in Western Gaul!)

But to get back to hands, the story she liked best to tell was about the day her Latin One class was working on a passage about some magical vat whose waters could make youthful even the most decrepit old soul when a shy boy in the first row peeked up at her where she stood beside his desk. “They wouldn’t have to do that for YOU, Mrs. S!” he whispered admiringly – until his eyes fell again toward the book she was holding: “Well maybe just for your hands.”

Ah your hands: once we girls could practically earn our living modeling them; then the day comes when we look down and they look like the hands of Ma Joad from The Grapes of Wrath. I look at my photo at the top of my piece two blogs down  and all I see are my hands. Where are those hands with their tapered fingers and their long oval-shaped nails?

When I took up massage in the year 2000 I had to cut my nails clear down to the quick and even below but I didn’t look back. Let me do good with my hands now I thought because this is what they are for: work and not display.

Then I saw this close-up just the other day: (of my right hand, on the baby’s tummy.)

and so for the first time in my life hurried to my neighbor’s nail salon. “Make my hands look like Mary’s hands!” I said, Mary seen here below holding part of our cherry tree which when it died in the summer of ’06 we ritually took down and saved parts of (part of a part of which she is holding in those gorgeous paws of hers.)

I wanted paws like that too I decided and so after 70 minutes emerged from her nail salon with…. absolute talons, plumped up in some ungodly way to render them thicker and rounded, with that white rim that makes them French-style.

I felt great, if a little fraudulent – until Saturday night when I tried to go to sleep, which I couldn’t seem to do with my new appendages: They smelled too freshly of their chemical components when I brought my hands close to my face. Plus they’re so weirdly thick, they feel like the claws of an eagle when I try scratching my nose or scalp or ankle.So there have I lain, and for two nights now, sleeping only fitfully and waking to think WHO IS THIS PERSON IN THE BED WITH ME? WHO THE HELL’S HANDS ARE THESE?

The fact that they’re mine I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to.

I’m kind of a Woodstock girl is the thing so I don’t know… It’ll go one of two ways I expect. Either I’ll break all ten nails in the next 48 hours or grown too annoyed with how funny and foreign they feel, get out the mini-guillotine we use for the cats’ claws, lop ‘em all off and go back to being Ma Joad with the scary work-worn hands.

This is My Independence Day Story: To Full equality, in marriage and everywhere else !

How would it be for you as a parent, if you gradually came to understand that your just-emerging-from-college daughter had fallen in love with another young woman, and six years passed and she loved her still?

How would you feel if you belonged to a church that around this time chose to examine the possibility of going on record as a place welcoming to any woman who loved a woman, to any man who loved a man, the same as it is to any person who entered there to worship?

And if one day during this 18-month-long period of study, prayer and reflection designed to let people really examine this possibility, a woman stood and expressed her concern about how “these people” might fit in, I wonder if it would surprise you to hear the man in the neighboring pew whisper to his wife, “She doesn’t realize: she’s talking about our son.” Or if it would surprise you to learn that a half-dozen other parents present that morning were likely thinking the same: “You speak of our children, onetime singers in the Junior Choir and assistants in the Sunday School; our children, whom you have known since their infancy.”

I wonder how you might then feel if, after that lengthy consideration, your church voted “Yes. Let the word go forth that we in this 150-year old community of the United Church of Christ unanimously choose to be known as an Open and Affirming congregation.”

And if you were yourself one of these parents and if your above-mentioned daughter and her beloved sought to undergo a Liturgy of Commitment here, I wonder how you would feel to have the Deacons say “Yes. By all means yes, and we are delighted. For you are our own daughter, and this one that you love is our daughter now too.”

I wonder how you might feel if, during this ceremony, your husband of 33 years with his hair now white but his manner still so gentle stood to recite a fatherly poem to the two; if he prefaced it by saying he knew he spoke too for the much-missed dad of your daughter’s beloved, gone now into death’s quiet corridor; if he then paused and looked over at this young woman where she sat beside your girl and said aloud to the very large assembly there gathered that he couldn’t be happier that his daughter had chosen her for a life partner.

I wonder: Would it not lift your heart to hear the verses he then read by poet Gail Mazur?“What you want for it you’d want for a child, “it goes. “That she take hold; that her roots find home in stony winter soil; that she take seasons in stride… “That she know, in her branchings, to seek balance. That change not frighten her, rather that change meet her embrace… that she find her place in an orchard.”

And if, in the year following, a baby should come to their house, would you not rejoice and be glad? As we rejoiced last month when we first saw this newborn with his grave and curious look, with his chest no wider than a lady’s hand, held so tenderly in their slender young arms?

I think you might, if it became personal for you in this way.

I think the realization might dawn within you that this is what is chiefly asked of us here: That we make a family. That over the long years we spend ourselves in many deeds of care and kindness, and make a place where such children as we are sent can shelter. And take root. And one day find their own place in the orchard.