Traveling Mercies

I started reading this book called "Traveling Mercies" that my hairdresser told me to read. He said the lady in the book sort of reminded him of me, because she was reverent and irreverent at the same time, and she had a very real but funny flavor about her. I always investigate these things, when people say, "You remind me of..." If it's a person or an author or a musician or whatever, I always check it out, because I want to know what the person MEANS when they say something like that. I normally look at what people MEAN before I look at what they do. Motive before action. Very important stuff. It makes me miss counseling.

So I started reading this book today, and we never have any food in our house, and we never have, as long as I can remember, so I resorted to eating a couple of stale peanut butter crackers I had shoved in my desk drawer from a few weeks ago.

I was lying on my back and I had peanut butter cracker crumbs all over the place on my chest where cleavage should be, and I was reading a part in this book about this lady who was in the church choir who always looked down her nose at this guy who sat at the back of the church who was dying of AIDS, and how one day when they were singing "His Eyes is on the Sparrow," the lady left the choir and walked to the back row of the church and held the man up to stand even though his body was deteriorating because of his disease, and this lady and this man were both crying and holding each other, and I don't know what happened, but I started to cry. I've always loved that song, and it's like I felt really connected to an idea of love that seemed very raw and appealing, even if we only see it once or twice in a lifetime.

I just laid there (one of these days I'll learn all the tenses of the word "lay" and start to use them properly) on my bed with my crumbs all over my concave chest and cried my ass off.

Usually I hate crying because my face gets so raw and I feel so swollen and fat and disgusting that I just want to hide under the couch, but when I was reading this book and crying I was thinking about my hair man and how much I love him and how I feel like God sent him into my life when I felt really alone.

I hope I can be like that to some people.

Isn't it weird to think about the people in your life that came in right at the perfect time, or said the perfect thing, or gave you a hug or wrote you a little note out of the blue, and it's right when you felt like you were about to break, but you didn't, because that person gave you just enough to feel like waking up tomorrow was worth it? I love that.

So anyway. I don't know why I felt like I needed to write about this little experience, but somehow, I felt enlightened, covered in Ritz cracker dust and tears.