Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train,
‘Til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.
In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive.
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well
The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down, and the people were singin’
They went La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La, La
Some personal mottoes:
Panic now, ask questions later.
Why settle for feeling depressed when you could feel anxious AND depressed?
Stress: It’s what’s for dinner. And breakfast. And lunch. And brunch (don’t forget about brunch now).
—
These aren’t really personal mottoes in that I didn’t choose them…
They chose me.
If Reader’s Digest was ever going to condense the Bible, they could get away with one sentence. “Don’t be afraid.” Scripture repeats this over and over. It calls to mind a teacher patiently drilling a second grade class through the multiplication tables. They’re slow-witted, but practice makes perfect the Lord thinks to himself. It’s not hopeless. In my case I still forget sometimes what 9×12 is and I still haven’t learned to not be afraid.
I have been thinking more about “what it means to be married.” I have been thinking about what it’s like when marriages end.
A good marriage ends only in death.
When I think about being separated from D… or D being separated from me, it makes my heart hurt. I don’t know how I could live with the pain and the longing and the missing.
When I think about dying before him, it’s worse. I can’t stand to think of him grieving and suffering – and me, not able to comfort and console him! Not able to hold him and be held by him. Would heaven be heaven without him?
I shouldn’t say that, good Catholic that I want to be. The presence of God is what makes heaven, heaven. I know that and the difference between the Ascension and the Assumption and the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception. And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
It’s terrible to wonder about. Yet it is inevitable. One day, one of us will go. The other will be left (a little while? A long while?).
I’m lying around in the house on West Clifton Boulevard, thinking about everything that will happen one day.
I run to D, crying. “What’s wrong?” he says in that loving, I-will-make-it-better-because-I-am-a-snuggly-bear way.
“I miss you!” He gives me a funny look because after all, he’s right there.
I miss you already, I should have said.
Perhaps I’m strange. Perhaps I’m the only newlywed who thinks about these things. I’m 26 and most people don’t think about the end at 26. What a crazy thing it is to open yourself up to love. You’re guaranteed to get your heart broken. But it’s worth it, I think.
The cliche is true. The parting is sorrowful, but the parting is sweet… because of the sorrow. I’m enough of a woman to know the value of really wringing your heart out with grief and misery every once in a while. I would be lying if I said it didn’t feel good to feel bad sometimes.
And I know the parting is not that tragic, it’s just for a little while. Or do I? Maybe if my faith was stronger it wouldn’t hurt so badly. I have faith, of course. But do I really believe?
I fear. That’s what I do. D is fearless and I admire that about him. I hope that marriage will help me absorb some of that, as though we could become not only one flesh but one soul…
Faith and fear can not exist in the same heart for long; one will soon drive out the other. I know which one I want to win.
Christ, deliver me.
Things I will miss most after the end of the world:
Windowless rooms. Surely every room in paradise comes with a view.
Dark-bottomed pools. Is there dark-anything in the sweet hereafter?
Even a strange, hair-raising, lovely dark thing like a black-bottomed pool? Heaven means the light of glory illuminating everything… even the deep end.
Vicks Vapo-Rub. No coughs, no colds, no use for Vicks after Jesus comes back.
Marriage. I like being married.
If there’s no marriage then there’s probably no shock and awe either.
(you know what I mean)
I don’t think they will let James Joyce in. I don’t think A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in the library.
If your hereafter is less than sweet… maybe James Joyce will be in it.
Who am I to judge. May the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.
Most of all when the time comes I hope I am capable of resting in peace, in the land of wall-length windows and good health and platonic love.
Mammograms do not save lives. Usually.
boobs on a naked lady**
While I am being heretical (see below), why not wade into the mine-field that is women’s* healthcare? Mostly because it is not so much a treatment area as an ideological steel pipe used for whacking people senseless if they don’t toe the line.
Recently the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recommended that healthy men with no family history of cancer cease getting the PSA test. The test, which was initially praised as revolutionizing prostate cancer screening, has been revealed to add no benefit to survival rates. At the same time it caused a lot of over-treatment and awful side-effects from the treatment (incontinence, for instance). Most men who tested positive via the PSA test, if they had cancer, would die from something else long before the extremely slow-going cells ever metastasized. Rarely, some people even died from treatment the received as a result of a PSA test.
This didn’t make much news – nobody seems to care THAT much about men’s healthcare. Especially men themselves – have you tried to take one to the doctor lately? They kick and pinch and scream. I digress.
A similar change in strategy was recommended to women some years ago, regarding mammograms. This kicked up a great fuss. Many women who had cancer discovered via mammography are convinced it saved their lives. And understandably so. But for between 87%-97% of women who found their cancer via mammogram, the screening did nothing for them.
And for the vast majority of women who never develop breast cancer, mammograms bring the same drawbacks the PSA test has. Over-treatment. Needless anxiety. False positives. Even some increased cancer risk.
This really gets the goat of organizations like Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which make pushing mammograms their bread and butter. In spite of their name, most money raised for SGK does not go to finding a cure. It’s spent on providing screening and “awareness.”
Just something to keep in mind when October comes and the pink stuff comes out.
*actually when I say women’s healthcare I’m simplifying. Men get breast cancer and die from it, too. But again, nobody cares about men. SGK certainly wasn’t thinking about men when they picked freaking PINK as THE color. Nope.
**this piece is actually titled Portrait of a Nude Woman by Rafaellino del Colle. Pretty close to title I chose.
Least is the bee 