I am not a big fan of marijuana.  I prefer a cocktail.  But lately, I walk around feeling somewhat stoned.  The fact that I use the word “stoned” is a dead give away of my amateur status when it comes to anything hip.  Nonetheless, as I was saying, I drift through these gray, wet fall days feeling stupid, my head wrapped in gauze, my brain spinning through annoying and random thoughts, dumb.  I can’t focus.  Last night, for example, despite getting a text from my son around midday reminding me to pick him up at the airport, I watched Chernobyl with Melissa and went to bed.  Nick had to take a cab.  I stranded my son at the airport.  I wish I had a good excuse.  I don’t.  I didn’t.  I even woke up around 1:00 am, wandered around the house for a bit unable to get back to sleep, and did not think once about my son standing outside baggage claim futilely texting me.  I had forgotten about my phone as well.  Even when I am fully awake, I hear the thing only about half the time.  

            This morning, Melissa found me asleep on a single mattress on the floor of our other son’s room – something I am prone to do when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep.  She jumped on top of me to wish me a happy 31^st anniversary.  I had remembered our anniversary.  We talked about it the day before and decided to postpone celebrating until a non-school night.  I cling desperately to these little facts like the fact that I have not, as best as I can recall, ever forgotten our anniversary.  Melissa, pinning me under the comforter, demanded to know why I was not in our marital bed.  I fixed her coffee like I have almost every morning, another small fact I cling to.  We decided, while reading the New York Times, that we would sign up for another year (of marriage, not the Times), but no long term contracts, strictly a year-to-year status.  I don’t blame her, but glancing over my reading glasses at her across the room wearing her new outfit, baggie red pants and a tight, low cut “onsie” – an adult version of the baby onsie – I hoped she would re-up every year.  God knows I married up.  I’m not so stoned as to miss that fact.

            We’ve been home from our sabbatical for three months.  Melissa has returned to teaching.  We’ve reconnected with friends.  We have been home long enough that people no longer ask us where we’ve been.  The trip is a wonderful, poignant memory, something I hope we can do again because I find it too hard to call it a once in a lifetime adventure.  Funny though, as much as I loved the places we visited and the carefree life we led, the thing I miss most is time with Melissa.  She heads to work every morning by 8:00 am and returns around 6.  I keep busy.  Seriously.  Don’t ask me what I do, but it takes the whole damn day to do it.

            It’s those hours during the day that drug me.  I’m not lonely, or alone.  I work out.  I have meetings at Seattle University.  I visit with neighbors.  I see Michael selling Real Change outside the QFC.  He lights up when he sees me because he knows I am a reliable customer.  It’s the same line everyday, deep baritone voice like Larry Munson calling a Georgia football game: “I’ve been waiting on you sir!”  I hand over my two dollars, and he hands over the paper, which I never read.

            Inevitably, I forget the one thing at the grocery Melissa specifically asked me to buy.  Later, Melissa, in that endearing, borderline annoying teacher’s voice she uses with her ninth graders, cheerfully suggests I write things down. “It’s the only way I can manage,” she tells me as if the idea of making a to do list is an epiphany on par with divine revelation.  I smile and nod and agree and head back to the store to buy the forgotten item.  On the way, I wonder if she realizes how much it is not about forgetting the details of my day, but all about being drugged with the memory of having nothing to do except hold her hand and take a walk.  

            I’ve re-read our blog searching, I suppose, for the thread that holds it all together.  It’s not hard to find.  I may not have been aware of it when we were traveling and writing, at least not as aware of it as I am now, but it is hard to miss.  Regardless of how a random collection of atoms evolved into a unique and unprecedented arrangement sufficient to spark self-awareness, I can’t miss the miracle that we humans not only have the capacity to love and be loved, but to understand it, to feel it, to ache for it, to know that without it we would not survive. 

            In what feels like a past life, my time studying theology at Seattle University, I recall something I think Karl Rahner said.  He noted that humans were created to receive and understand the “Christian Message.”  Stripped of that loaded phrase, I think what Rahner was saying was simply that what makes us human is our ability to comprehend at some level the infinite power and beauty of love.

            I find this truth all around me these days – in the start of the school year with its emphasis on making your mark, in the work I am doing at Seattle University with its exploration of a hunger by people, especially people in the workplace, to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, and in the various political movements, especially the environmental movement by young people beseeching their elders to wake up before its too late.  That innate sense that life is bigger than any one of us is rooted in the miracle of our exclusively human self-awareness.

            I promised Melissa this morning before she waltz out the door in that adorable and sexy outfit (if I can use those two words in the same sentence without sounding creepy) that I would, in fact, make a to do list.  Instead, here I am spilling my heart on this digital screen.  Before she left, I told her I loved her and that she was the best thing that ever happened to me.  Somehow saying out loud something intimate and true fills the room, at least momentarily, with a sense of unity as if there is no I-you, only thou, one flesh, entangled atoms momentarily synchronized into one thing.  

            I hope she re-ups every year.