All the ring tones

Photograph of Alexandra Stepanoff
playing the theremin on NBC Radio

On Friday I spent 7 hours in a tiny waiting room on the 7th floor of a hospital in Philly with what felt like 70 other people . Math Man was having surgery. There were understandably lots of anxious people, and so phones were dinging and ringing in every corner as families got and provided updates. (That’s how I learned Math Man was in recovery, and when I could see him.)

There were at least 3 other Star Trek fans in there, including one who had a theremin ring tone. Theremins sound like anxiety to me, presaging the arrival of an alien with designs on all the salt in your body.

April is the cruelest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...
— TS Eliot “The Waste Land”

This could be one of those posts titled “how it started/how it’s going”.  How it started? A 77oF day, with a glorious blue sky. The cherry tree behind my garage blossomed, and when I looked up from my desk through the open skylight I could see the branches framed, stark against the sky.  Like a James Turrell skyscape. Such tender, ephemeral beauty.

How is it going? A front came through, bringing a deluge of rain. Beating the blossomed trees. Thunder rolled. Lightning made it look like broad daylight. An epic spring storm. Also, I left the skylight open. 

In principle this should not have been a problem. The roof windows are solar powered and have a sensor which detects rain and swiftly closes them. Except when it doesn’t. Which it didn’t. 

I came home from the first night of the parish mission — at which point it had been pouring for more than half an hour — to find water trickling down the wall. And  the bowl I keep on the altar in my prayer space with its (mostly irreplaceable) collection of prayer cards and notes and other spiritual ephemera was also collecting water. 

I hit the close button, took a breath, grabbed a towel from the closet and mopped. Then I picked up the bowl.

I started emptying it, laying the cards and notes out to dry. The beautiful Japanese book of pilgrim stamps that I have collected was dry, but… the cards from friends’ funerals and ordinations. The notes from the kids. Markers had bled. Papers were so soaked there was no way to separate them. I could only wait to see what could be salvaged.

The next afternoon I sat on the floor and sorted. I let go what could not be saved, I spent some time reflecting on the bits of my friends and family’s lives that lived in this liminal holy space. Life and death. Memories stirred by spring rain. I grieved the loss of friends, rejoiced again with others joys - births and marriages and ordinations and professions of their vows. I laughed. I wept.

I washed the bowl and blessed it. And filled it once again, placing it on the altar where it might breed lilacs from the dead and the past.

So how is April going? Well, I am writing this in a 7th floor surgical waiting room in Philadelphia. Math Man is having emergency surgery to repair a detached retina. This is not the first April day I have spent waiting in a hospital for news of a husband in surgery while the world explodes with life. April is a cruel month.