Preaching

“Here we all are on a beautiful spring Sunday morning, you there in pews, women in fancy hats with feathers, men in suits with vests that are too tight, and children wishing to be anywhere else. I stand here in the pulpit, robed and magisterial in my purple stole. I’m supposed to have the answers and maybe you have questions. Yet, today, my mind is topsy turvy. I need help, and that’s what being part of a congregation means: collect into a flock, and a flock works as one. So, to understand my predicament this morning, you must understand Saturday night. Maybe last night, maybe another Saturday night.” I wipe my brow. I adjust the papers on the podium. Nothing is written on them. It’s a prop. I must speak from the heart, not the brain.

“It’s hot in here. Stay cool.

“To understand the end, right now, let’s explore the beginning. Beginnings are emotional, and emotions are tricky, yet they need to be poked. No telling what might turn up. Like overturning a rotten log: maybe you’ll find a wonderfully delicious mushroom. Or it might reveal a rotting stink and slime. Endings are anything but emotional. They are thought out, often not well. They make sense, sort of, until they don’t. Once they go off the rails, we panic. We rationalize our behavior as different because their circumstances are unique. You’ve heard that before: ‘You just don’t understand. I’m different.’ Aren’t we all except we really aren’t.

         Now begins the sermon.

* * * * *

         It is a bar, neither full of hanging ferns nor a dive. Just a place trying to survive and make some money. To stay alive. The bar stools are red leather, round, and padded. Their legs lay flat on the floor. None of that rocking while drinking and talking. I have a diet Coke with a twist of lime. Other customers don’t trust a sober man. Sometimes a man knows drinking isn’t sensible. That happens to be me. It’s not that I can’t hold my liquor, or I’ve had a fight with my children, or my dog has died. Nothing like that. I have cancer. Bad. A rare one. The Mayo Clinic diagnoses, and that’s not even where mine was discovered. Try right here in a small, rural in North Carolina.

         So, I’m sipping my diet Coke, minding my business, and listening. That’s why I come to bars: to hear things. Strangers willingly tell other strangers their secrets. They say things they wouldn’t dare tell their spouse or therapist. Just last week, a man told an attractive younger woman, almost a girl, that even though he was married, he really liked guys. This sweet young thing had her hand on his knee. Instead of removing her hand, pushing back from the bar, and chasing after someone else, she squeezed his leg and nibbled his ear. I thought his comment was a pickup line. Maybe it was. I lost interest. Why should I care if the person most invested doesn’t?

         The seats on either side are empty tonight. I like it that way. If I sit down next to someone, then I’m making the choice, and I want them to choose. I’ve been here long enough to put $10 in the jukebox. Right now, on my dime, it’s Percy Sledge. Oldies are safe.

         Her dress swishes and her heels click before her scent, a subtle lavender bent, envelopes me. I can see her in the mirror in front of me. She’s not beautiful in the traditional sense. She’s sensual. Her lips stick is a muted red. Her hair wavy and blonde, both natural. She’s wearing a blouse. She has a nice figure. Her purse is neither under nor overstated. She’s got on a jean jacket. She crosses her legs and flags down the bartender with a finger wag.

         “A Dewar’s, neat.”  Classy. Veteran. Not messing around.

         She pulls out a cigarette, and I offer a light, but the bartender wags his finger at her. She smiles and I away put the lighter.

         “Not drinking tonight,” she asks, “or not drinking any night?”

         Bingo but I don’t say it. I turn my body towards her. We smile at the same time.

         “Neither am I,” she says. She points at the drink. “Best to have one. Important to act like I’ve been here before. And good not to drink, but if someone notices, it looks like I am. Nobody likes sobriety in a bar.”

She nods and smiles again. Her teeth are white and straight, natural. I never thought’ I’d have to think about whether someone’s teeth are natural? If their hair, eyes, breasts, lips, chin, nose – the list seems endless – aren’t the way God intended, what else isn’t also. Probably honesty and intelligence.

We don’t touch our drinks. We talk instead. Really, she talks, and I listen. She’s a good talker. She doesn’t talk about herself except indirectly. She’s a birdwatcher, not a word she used. I figured it out. She talks about bird calls, feather patterns, and beaks as important differentiating features. How birds are a lot like people, the way they fight and mate, how they socialize. As my interest wanes, she changes the subject. She asks questions, but she doesn’t ask the usual: the weather, my job, hers, where we live, or go on vacation. She twirls her glass around but never drinks it.

I’m not an alcoholic. She is. Recovering. I also figure this out. I understand why she might be here. You can’t change everything; things break down by complicating an already complicated situation. Focus on one thing.

The bartender blinks the lights. No “last call.” We’re the only customers left. I put two twenties on the bar.

Standing up, I pick up her purse and hand it to her. Instead of sliding off her stools opposite me, she gets off on my side. Our faces are inches apart. She doesn’t smell like alcohol. I like that. She stares into my eyes. Her irises are flecked with both gold and red, subtle shading among the blue.

She whispers, “You’re dying.” I nod. “Not like tonight, but soon.” I nod again.

* * * * *

Stories have middles, not just starts, and stops. Middles are the tough part. It’s not exciting like beginnings, the start of a journey. Endings are tragic, like being pushed off a cliff. I’ve never fallen off a cliff, but I’m quite sure nothing good happens when you land. Just a splat.

Middles are where stories take place, the boring stuff. We’re talking about the bar and this woman, but also everything that happened before tonight. My alcoholic wife. My son’s suicide. Are this woman’s eyes the cliff and just beyond?

* * * * *

We’ve talked for three hours. I don’t know her name nor does she know mine. Neither has asked. It never occurred to me to ask.

“Death’s something to talk about in the abstract because it’s abstract. My own dying isn’t interesting. It’s a fact like you’re a recovering alcohol. It’s boring. It’s over and now the focus should be on the now and the future. Plus, those kinds of conversations tend to be so melodramatic.” She nods.

“You aren’t telling people, are you?” I shake my head. “You want to live, not figure what it means to, right?” It’s like she can read my mind.

“I once went to an Al-Anon meeting. My wife and son were both alcoholics. I was a mess. I was lost. Nothing was said about drinking. It was all about anything but.”

The barkeep comes by again, wiping, again, with a wet dishrag where the now ice-melted drinks had sat. The woman grabs my hand and pulls me towards the door, her eyes still locked with mine, our faces about a foot apart now.

Outside, the parking lot is empty except for two cars. The halogen streetlamps glow that creepy noir dome of light that, if this is a movie set, someone would die soon. Violently and suddenly. It’s chilly. Our breath turns to mist. I think about black and white movies, how these scenes tend to take place on train platforms. It’s always the man on the train, off to somewhere exciting, the woman on the platform, their steaming breathing mixing with the smoke of the locomotive. They’ve already embraced, said their good-byes, shed tears, showed their backs to each other, and turned again searchingly to yearn for each other.

None of that tonight. I have my hands lightly on her hips. She has done the same. Our cars are on opposite sides of the lot. I haven’t dated since my wife died five years ago. I didn’t go out tonight expecting to meet someone. I don’t want awkward. For more than three hours I’ve been in a different world, one that doesn’t weigh me down with both my wife’s death and my son’s suicide. Even before the diagnosis, they hung on me like a heavy fog. The diagnosis has been freeing, like a peek of the sun burning off the mist that has settled into a suffocating accumulated wetness.

“Thank you” seems too easy. “See you around” is too flip and dishonest. “Maybe we can meet here again” is neither in nor out. Exchanging numbers devalues this experience.

* * * * *

Endings mean the resolution of a story’s conflict. I’m not sure what the conflict is, who the protagonist is, and what was resolved. I don’t know whether this is a happy ending or an ambiguous one. Even if it’s an ending at all. What I do know is that I feel better. Right now. In this moment. I made a connection that mattered, with someone else who also connected with me. That’s so rare, this fast and this late in life.

* * * * *

We lean in and kiss. Not a hard, aggressive kiss. Not a light one either. It’s a pressing of lips, a mashing and flattening. Long enough to feel the cracks of her skin. I pull away.

I turn and walk to my car. I don’t turn around. If she follows, I won’t say no. I whistle a little jazz tune and listen for her shoes to crunch on the gravel. They don’t.

My car points away from her. I didn’t lock it. I climb in, put the key in the ignition, start the car, and drive out of the parking lot, turning left onto the highway, away from her and a kiss that makes my life worth remaining alive for just a bit longer, if only to remember it and mythologize it.

* * * * *

Wiping the sweat from my brow, I straighten my blank pages. “That’s enough for me. I hope it’s enough for you.

“Amen.”

The End