An Ordinary Superstition

I want to tell you a story about a customer - an ordinary-looking woman with ordinary blue jeans, an ordinary t-shirt, ordinary sneakers, and an ordinary hair cut. She came into the office looking for a self-storage unit - an ordinary request, given that we're a self-storage facility. I sat down in my office chair behind our big, oak, Amish-built desk and she took a seat on the other side. My friendly cat, Pancake, jumped up to greet her with some head bumps and a squeak. She took to Pancake, as most customers do. I explained the rental contract, the different prices and sizes, and generally how it all works at the Wells County Lock-Up (an unfortunate play on words my father felt was quite creative back in 1999). She sat and listened, like any other customer. She decided which size was best for her needs and I assigned her unit #1310. "It's in building thirteen, and it's the tenth unit down, on the south side," I explained routinely.

"Oh," she said solemnly. "Thirteen is an unlucky number." Her eyes met mine with a shy but piercing sincerity. She was in a double-bind - afraid of the unit, but unable to really ask for a different one without bad manners and giving the game away. I offered to change the unit (which in retrospect may have been too forceful), but I'd already drawn up the rental contract and the pressure to be ordinary was just too much for this superstitious lady, "No, it's okay, I don't want to make you fill everything out again," she said, trying to keep her cool. I could see she was struggling. A few seconds passed. It was too late. She knew that I knew. Her body shifted in discomfort, her secret deviation in plain view for this lowly self-storage manager to see and judge.

"It's a good thing Pancake isn't black!" I said, looking over at my gray tabby/calico cat, trying to loosen the tension. "I used to own a black cat," she replied, doubling-down, "they keep away the dark spirits." When it rains, it pours. Perhaps she thought it wouldn't be so awkward if she just dumped it all out there (it was just as awkward). I pained to act as if this was a completely normal point of view. "Sure! Those dark spirits. Some customers worry about mice, others about dark spirits, it's all the same," was the attitude I tried to give off. I mentioned that #1310 isn't really thirteen - it's one thousand three hundred and ten. She politely agreed but her superstitious heart could tell I was trying to get one past her.

Very superstitious, writings on the wall
Very superstitious, ladders bout' to fall
Thirteen month old baby, broke the lookin' glass
Seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past
When you believe in things that you don't understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain't the way

There's a solar eclipse today. I can't help but wonder if it doesn't bring out the weirdos - not that I'm superstitious or anything.

An Ordinary Rabbit's Head

It's close to noon here in Bluffton, IN. A dry summer day with large fluffy clouds in a bright, almost white sky. It could rain, but it probably won't. I should be outside at the storage facility putting red locks on the doors of delinquent tenants. Instead, I'm at my desk, on my computer, drinking a frothy cup of French pressed Starbucks dark coffee with coconut oil and butter. I learned in Kona last December that warm weather people don't know how to make dark things (you older readers probably already knew this). Coffee, beer, and coffee-beer, they're all the same: the flavors are weak where they should be strong and light where they should be dark. What you wind up with is an unsatisfying, watery, almost magnanimous brew. Sort of like tropical islands themselves. There's a reason Starbucks comes from the dreary American Pacific Northwest and Guinness from just below the Arctic Circle. Kona Brewing Company even makes a banana beer called the Hula Hefeweizen, a foul and offensive concoction.

I drink dark things all the year long, through Epiphany, Lent, Pentecost, and Advent. Especially Advent. The coconut oil and butter blend is a compromise to my Northern principles. A near moral failing. But at least it's not sugar or milk. It also helps smooth out the caffeine effects. It's a great winter morning 6am pre-workout, especially if you stack it with a magnesium pill, an Ibuprofen, and a big swig of water. Thinking of Hawaii makes me miss all those European college kids I met at the beach hostel. We mostly drank Bud Light. I prefer a good stout, but they didn't serve those at the Americanized luaus. Old, wealthy, leathery-skinned tourists in sweat-stained Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirts like syrupy mixed-drinks heavy on the ice and free-flowing light beer to go along with fake entertainment.

Ben Camino tells me it's Ordinary Time. The liturgical color of Ordinary Time is green, the color of salads and avocados and not-yet-ripe bananas. I'm eating a lot of bananas and avocados and salads these days. I grew tired of sweet potatoes and roots. That was a diet for Advent. Seasons pass and seasons come again. I also grew tired of church. Thoreau said something about living each season as it passes. In the last chapter of Walden, he wrote that he left his cabin in the woods for as good a reason as he went there: that it seemed to him that he had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one. It's cliche to talk metaphorically about life and change and seasons, but what better liturgical season to appreciate a tried and true cliche than Ordinary Time?

More than piety or justice, the religious life requires wisdom. I reckon we can't even discuss piety or justice without wisdom (though that doesn't seem to stop folks from trying). Wisdom, I think, involves understanding the difference between a perplexing, unfamiliar, challenging season of life and a life in smoldering ruins. Wisdom can mean taking a posture of non-judgement towards those who experience the faith in strange ways. It can also mean patience, and trust, and believing in that blessed assurance my grandmother used to sing about. Seasons pass and seasons come again. A time away from church service doesn't mean a life away from church service. This is true of writing, reading, prayer, meditation, exercise, social events, friends, cooking, and other things. We all have the right to step away for a time. To everything there is a season. There's probably something in Ecclesiastes about this.

I think this is the real lesson of Thoreau's project: not to move to the woods or quit your job or buy a tiny house or stare out at trees for hours on end, but to live with confidence, to move slowly in a direction that is true, to strip life bare, to find your road, follow your road, to bend with your road, to feel the sun on your skin when it is bright and shining, to wear a coat when there is frost and chill.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we could substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality.

I've shipwrecked myself on a vain reality a time or two or three. Maybe I'm shipwrecked again. It's hard to say. Reality is tricky. Maybe that's why we need Ordinary Time. To breathe in the ordinary, to remember that without the ordinary there can be no miraculous - no virgin birth, no resurrection, no kingdom come; and while the Teacher of Ecclesiastes mourns that there's nothing new under the sun, maybe Ordinary Time is also, and paradoxically, a reminder that this doesn't make the birth of a new baby or a teenage love or a softball championship or a cup of rich, savory, dark roasted coffee any less the work of a miraculous God, even though they will one day be lost to all memory. "All is vanity!" says the Teacher. Ordinary Time looks the Book of Ecclesiastes in the eye and replies, "so what?"

In a typical year, the Indiana countryside by this time would be as golden-brown as a November cornfield, but it's been a wet summer and so the roadside foliage and city lawns all remain a deep, dark green. I'm mowing the grass at least once a week here at the storage facility and as sometimes happens the other day I hit rabbit. I was making my usual passes, running the mower in straight, vertical lines, when I looked to my left and saw it: a decapitated rabbit's head, cleanly cut, resting in the fresh lawn, blood running out into the ground, a distinct mix of chlorophyll green and crimson red. This is an ordinary thing to the earth, but death is a peculiar thing to me. Moments like that sit with me because even though they feel strange, I know they're not. There's lots of dead rabbits in the ground, and mothers and their babies, too. More than I could ever count. I've written somewhere on this blog that death wins all it seeks. What are our small acts of kindness and mercy supposed to achieve against an enemy like that? What good are "inclusivity" and "empathy" and "love" against the god of death? Here's a thing I think I think: death is universal, love is particular. Universal love is a fool's errand, playing death's game on death's terms.

There's a fine line between the poetic and the superstitious. I once heard a story about a woman who watched a hawk devour some small creature and as it flew away blood dripped down from its talons and onto her forehead. That week she was diagnosed with cancer. Marked for death. Ben Camino told me that sort of thing is ordinary, we just miss it. Ordinary Time asks us to pay a little more attention. I'm not sure what it will accomplish, it may not conquer the grave, but it's better than resignation - and I think that's more than we have the right to ask of ordinary things, that they help us beat back the looming shadow of resignation, surrender, capitulation. If a dark, foamy, buttery cup of French pressed coffee from Seattle is what it takes to delay the inevitable, then I'm alright with that.