The After Party

A few days before my grandmother died, way back when, I had a strange and unraveling dream. I dreamt that I was driving a car along a road carved out of a mountain, narrow, precarious, with a serene blue ocean below the steep cliffs. Of course, in the dream, the car turned against my will and plunged slowly and agonizingly into the sea and I found myself floating along, under the water, holding a basket. And of course, in the dream, everything kept floating out of the basket–my keys, my wallet, my knitting. I tried very hard to gather everything back into the basket as I swam along, but everything was just out of reach. My basket was empty. I woke up startled and undone and anxious. But when Gramma (that's what we called her, Gramma) died a few days later I found the dream to have been a gift. She had been like a small irritating spiritual rock. No matter the tempest and trouble I brought to beat against her, she would sit, solid in her chair, crocheting terribly weird dresses and blankets and pot holders and nod her grey head and deliver back a calm and rational dose of Jesus. When suddenly she was gone it seemed that my whole spiritual world would unravel. That everything would come out of my basket–my future, my faith, my knowledge of Jesus. It was as if my necessary rock had shattered and I had been left floating along with nothing.

Except that there wasn't nothing. Gramma's great brilliance, sitting chrocheting in her chair, was that she always brought you to Jesus, both by mentioning him all. the. time. blast it all, and by praying for all of us. What, like twenty grandchildren or something insane like that. As I carried on with life I realized that Jesus surprisingly remained and she had done a good work and that the rock wasn't her but that she had done a blessedly good job of resembling him.

But every now and then I feel unraveled. Moving to New York and being far away from all the people who basically know and understand who you are–well, it's like being far away in Africa, it is a foreign land. Except that Africa is home and New York is the place of my sojourn, where I am an alien in a foreign land. I make it sound lonely and terrible, like I am always sad or something. Which isn't true. The Lord puts the family-less into families and he has given me an enormous rock like church family here that is closer, believe me, than any brother, or sister for that matter, or cousin who I reckon up by dozens, or aunts.

So as I drove home from Indiana, first of all wondering if I was really driving through a Wyeth landscape, and then wondering if I really had the energy to do the whole drive, I realized that I had been manoevered by God into going at all. All the circumstances had gathered themselves together against my cautionary rational self to put me in a room with all these people.