Real Men!!! Rawr!!!

The fact that you can pose with a chainsaw does not mitigate the fact that you are shaving.

 Yesterday my wife and I were video chatting with my parents to congratulate them on their 31st wedding anniversary. The conversation wandered, as conversations will, to gluten, autism spectrum disorders, the emerging links between ASD and autoimmune disorders, and the prevalence of hand sanitizer parents. We agreed that children probably need more dirt and less hand sanitizer in their lives to give their little immune systems more practice. Big, strong, barrel chested immune systems, that's what we need. This led my wife to tell a true story about her great-grandpa. 

One day, while he was working at the saw mill, a fan blade fell off of a scaffold and hit him in the head. It knocked him over and cut his scalp open. So he climbed down to the ground, picked up some dirt and stuck it in the wound to stop the bleeding, and then climbed back up to finish work. After the job was done they drove him four hours to Seattle, where the doctors opened and cleaned the wound and put in a steel plate to replace the missing piece of skull.

Of course both my wife told the story with gusto, pride and appreciation, and my Mom listened to it with the same feelings. How could you not? That is a Real Man! 

I looked at my Dad and said, "You see how they are both in awe of that? Just watch! What would happen if either you or I ever did anything like that?" 

My Dad laughed at the memories (he actually has things like that a time or two and so speaks from experience). "Oh, we would be dead! The fan wouldn't kill you. The wife would when you got home!"

As a case in point, when my dad got his leg caught in a grain auger, which miraculously broke and did not drag him in and chew him into sausage, he did not bother telling Mom because it was just a scratch. He only lost a few square inches of skin and muscle, and a pint or so of blood. Nothing to worry her about. He let my brother and sister know when he got home, expecting them to let Mom know when she got home. It wasn't his fault that they did not pass on the message, and her first clue was the blood soaked socks on the bathroom floor. Oddly enough, that did not go over so well.

It is part of the paradox of manhood, I suppose. I have written about it before, how women always want a "real man." They are attracted to men with strength, courage, determination, and a certain hardiness or indifference to physical hardship and danger. These virtues can take a lot of different forms, from soldiers, firefighters and rescue workers, to youth ministers, farmers, fishermen, mechanics, outdoorsmen, what have you. These virtues can also be found in men who work white collar jobs, although they may not be quite so obvious.
The point is that while these virtues may be attractive, they can also be inconvenient. Nearly every virtue is at some point. My wife doesn't like me to tell her about my Afghanistan days when I was digging up IED's with my field knife. She is all for having fewer IEDs in the world, but she doesn't want me to be the one doing it (I don't either. It was a pointless mission). A firefighter's wife might agree that someone should be putting out fires and rescuing the people trapped in them. She just doesn't want it to be her husband who has to do it.
That's why I love this picture. That is strength. The strength to be crucified. I have to remember that, but not only when endurance of pain, hardship or risk is required. I also have to remember it when the desire for these things comes. You see, if we are honest, I think we men admire stories like that, and sometimes we take the tough guy thing to an extreme because we want to be tough guys, and we want to be known as tough guys. I am not suggesting that Great Grandpa or my Dad was doing that, but I know that a lot of my crazier adventures, if I am honest about them, have not really been strictly speaking necessary. I did them to prove to myself that I could. A more enlightened manhood, I think, simply does what is necessary. If it is easy, he can live with that. If it is hard he can handle that too.

Occasionally he wrestles bears too. Just because it is fun.

Perspectives

This one time in a third world country in Asia, my team and I were assigned to train with the local military. The base we trained at was a little affair of cement buildings with tin roofs, charmingly straggling down the side of a mountain. We worked there, but we were staying at a little family owned in about half a mile down the mountain.

Now, I am pretty big on working out. Even when I am overseas I maintain a solid workout program. I see it as an intrinsicart of my overall worship of God, to strengthen and train everything He has given me, and hopefully toplaceit at His service however He wishes. Since my favorite workouts, besides martial arts, are weight training sessions, and since weights and kettlebells are too heavy and expensive to take with me, I found a piece of equipment that I can pack for cheap. It is a sandbag, specifically designed for working out. It has an inner liner of tough plastic with a velcro-reinforced zipper, and anouter bag of heavy duty canvas with reinforced handles and an even beefier velcro-reinforced zipper. Simply fill it up with dirt or sand, and you can lift it, swing it, throw it or slam it to your heart's content. Beautifully simple and elegant.

The first day after we had gotten settled in I looked around for a place to get some dirt to fill my sandbags. I planned on leaving them at the base so I could exercise after work each day, but the place I found to get dirt from was at a little construction site next to the inn. The innkeeper was building some new buildings so he had hired some local peasants to make bricks for him. They had a little dirt quarry carved into the hillside and they were carrying the dirt to the platform and pressing it into bricks with a hand operated press. The innkeeper's son said I could take as much dirt as I wanted. He also looked at me like I was crazy when I explained what I was doing.

So I designated Operation Fill the Bags as the workout for the day. I would run up to the base, grab my sandbags, run them down and fill them, and then carry them back up the half  mile to the base, one at a time. Getting them down to the dirt quarry was pretty simple, just a nice easy run. Once down there I borrowed a shovel from the workers and began to fill them.

Now, the workers spoke no English, but they seemed very interested in what I was doing. They stopped their work, all of them, and squatted in place. The press handle operating guy stopped operating his press handle, the dirt mixing lady stopped mixing her dirt, and they just squatted on their heels and watched me with strange, quiet bemused looks on their faces. I filled one part of the way, closed it up and hefted it to test the weight, then opened it back up and kept filling.

The innkeeper came down to laugh, and asked me how heavy I was making thiem. I guessed the one I had finished was about 40 kilos (turned out it was actually 42.) He laughed and said something to the workers. They shook their heads and murmured to each other. He informed me that they had been wondering if I were going to carry dirt over to the work site for them, and they didn't understand what I was doing.

You see, they absolutely could not conceive of any purpose for loading up a bag of dirt except to use it for construction. The concept of doing that simply for the purpose of exercise was utterly foreign to them. The had the looks that said, "What will these crazy white people think of next?"

It reminded me a lot of a look my dad's dad used to wear. He was extremely hard of hearing  and completely out of touch with his grandchildren's world. I remember running up to him over flowing with excitement about dinosaurs or a lego building or some such thing and trying to explain it to him. We could never be sure how many of our words he actually heard and how much of it he just didn't understand, but he would usually end up shaking his head with a bewildered smile. His face seemed to say, "How do these kids have time for this stuff? Why do they need to know about dinosaurs? When I was young all I needed to know about was farm work." And he would shake his head as if he couldn't understand such a waste of time.

The peasant workers had the exact same look on their faces, as brown and hard as the bricks they were making. "This crazy white boy! What is he thinking? Moving dirt for exercise? How does he have time for such nonsense? And I have been moving dirt for my whole life. If he wants to move dirt so much, let him come here and move some dirt in a way that will at least be useful. But if I were that rich that I had spare time, I certainly would not be moving dirt."

It occured to me that there was an unbridgable gap between their experience and mine. From my perspective, what I was doing made perfect sense. From their point of view it was sheer nonsense.

This troubles me in a way. I have always been driven to try to understand other people's point of view as much as possible from the inside, imaginatively stepping into their shoes and really trying to see what they see and feel what they feel. I guess it is part of being a storyteller, but this made me realize that no matter how hard I try, I can never fully enter into their experience. My background has given me a depth of imagination so that I can guess to some extent how they might be feeling. But they have no frame of reference whereby they can understand what I was doing and why. They cannot imagine what I have done, where I have been, what I have seen, what I have put myself through. And there is no way that I can know what it is like to labor at making bricks all day, every day, from the time I was old enough to pick up a shovel, never learning how to read, never imagining a world outside my mountain valley.

And yet God knows both of us. Compared to His greatness our relqtive levels of amallness are nonexistent. He is more intimate to each of us than we are to ourselves,and He loces each of us with an infinite love. Somehow, in knowing Him as I pray we both will someday, we will know each other perfectly.

May I see Him and all that He loves so that I forget myself.

Post Travel Cleanup.

I've been on the road for a while. I started out in June with a short trip to Oregon. After a weekend in Tacoma, I went to Texas for three weeks. Then from Texas I went straight to Colorado for six weeks. After Colorado I came back here for half a day, and went to Oregon for the weekend. Came back for another day and went on leave to the East Coast for three weeks. Never actually living in my room, I began to treat it like a staging ground, where bags are packed and unpacked and laundry is done in preparation for the next trip, and through it all I had thought I was going to be leaving for a deployment right about now, so I had a box packed and ready to go for that since June.

So I had a messy, messy room.

It isn't even a big room. About 12' X 12' with a small closet and a bathroom shared with the next room. And of my approximately 144 square feet of floor space, about 140 of it was covered with stuff. There was a walkway from the door to my computer desk, enough room (barely) for the chair to be pulled out from the desk, and a walkway to the bathroom door. Since that walkway passes right by the closet, I had access to the closet, which I thought was good planning on my part. However, since all of my clothes were in various piles on the floor, between my bed and my bookcases, and more packed in my backpack and various dufflebags, there was virtually nothing in the closet anyway, so that walkway was rather useless.

Between my bed and my bookshelf there is about three feet of space, and that space had a footlocker full of books, a stack of books against the wall, a dufflebag full of cold weather gear, several pairs of boots, my body armor, my large backpack with all my clothes in it (minus the ditry ones, those were in a very organized heap by the door.)

There was simply no walking south of the bed.

So I said to myself, "I need to clean this place up." Since this is the first weekend I've had since the latest trip, I set Saturday morning as the time for the attack.

I started out at about 9:30, with only four hours before I planned on leaving for confessions (Saturday afternoon, you know. It's a Catholic thing.) Obviously the first thing to do was create some space. So all the stuff, including mattress and box springs, went out in the hallway.

Look at all that junk! Why do I even have so much stuff? It isn't even mine, most of it. It's just miscellaneous gear the army has issued me over the years, and I am expected to maintain it. I hardly even use most of it. I think if the army wants me to maintain it they should pay for a storage unit.

I had a box of books packed to go to Afghanistan with me. It has been packed since June. Since that trip got canceled, I now have to unpack all of those books. There is a ton more books on the ground off to the left, which are my books that I intend to read but haven't yet, and books in odd stacks on the shelves which are books that I hadn't read, but then  I did read them during my recent trips, and so they are now waiting for me to put them where they belong on the shelf. All of that is in the subtext of this photo, but you can't see it in the photo itself because I am not a great photographer. What can I say? I'm a writer.


The actual cleaning process started at the bookshelf end of the room. I took all the books that I had read already, put them on the shelves in their proper places (organized by fiction vs. non-fiction, general subject matter, and alphabetically by author's last name. A little OCD? Heck no! There's like 800 books there. How else would I ever find one? OCD is when I am talking on the phone, and casually glance over at the bookcase, and notice that one of the books is upside down, and cannot continue with the conversation until I have gotten up and turned it right side up.)

Then I took my DVDs and stuck them up on the top of the far left shelf, and then line up my waiting-to-be-read books in no particular order across to the other wall. Now that looks cool!

This is the view from the clean side of the room. All the clean clothes I had just tossed into a pile in front of the closet to make room for the book organizing frenzy that was about to happen. I hadn't even touched the desk, yet. The next target is that little 9-box shelf thingy that I keep drawing and caligraphy supplies (a hobby I have no time for) my letter writing materials, my little black bag with some basic diagnostic medical equipment, and every-thing-that-I-bring-into-the-room-and-don't-know-where-it-goes. That got cleaned off and organized. I now also have room in it for Christmas presents (I stockpile them), paperwork, current college texts, and a whole shelf just for copies of my books, which I need to restock because I am almost out.

There now. Doesn't that look nice? I even have pictures on top of it. A Catechism of the Catholic Church, two Bibles (one of them is just the New Testament, but it is the Ignatius Study Bible), the Quotable Chesterton and the Quotable Lewis, a Korean-English Dictionary, and a Tagalog-English dictionary make a pretty decent handy reference section. Why a Tagalog-English dictionary, since I don't speak Tagalog? I don't know. But it's a lovely book anyway. One of these years I need to invest in a Webster's dictionary, just on the principle of the matter. You know, one of those gi-normous heavy leather ones. I might move my Grey's Anatomy text there as well, and maybe get a Thesauraus.

 

But I Digress!

 

Organize the closet. Not exactly dress-right-dress, but I know where everything is. It is not organized by sleeve length, or by color (what would be the point? There are about three colors in the whole dang closet.) It is neat, and all the clothes are clean. And, because I just have so much junk to keep, and only a tiny room to keep it in, I filled up the bottom with bags of army gear and my martial arts gear. 

Save some more space by putting stuff under the bed,

Then put the bed on top of it:

And Voila! My own sister couldn't have done better and my mother wouldn't have.

Home sweet home!

 I thought about putting these photos in in reverse order and making up a story about how I came back to find my room all neat and organized and had to return it to its natural state, but I know several people with OCD who would have been on the floor in the fetal position by the end of it. Better to leave them with a happy ending.

Totally random because that's what kind of day it is. I saw this guy on my way home from Mass this morning. I have no idea what breed of cattle it might be and thought my dad and my brother might like to see it. Unfortunately, I don't think they read my blog. So ya'll can see it instead. ;-)

Change of Plans

Last saturday evening (not the saturday evening that just went by, but the one before it) I was in Front Royal, VA visiting family. Two of my cousins and a bunch of friends decided to go to a swing dance. My cousins had been to one before, at the same place, and said it was a lot of fun: live orchestra, lots of young people and (best part for them) guys who knew how to dance and would ask the girls to dance. This is, apparently, a rarity. Guys wander into ballroom, dragged by their girlfriends, dance an obligatory dance and then, shocked at the sight of people spinning and swinging around the room, wander off to a shadowy corner to stand awkwardly with their hands behind their backs. The two gentlemen who actually know how to dance then have their pick of the bevy of ladies standing in a line along the walls staring wistfully out onto the floor.

Drawn by the promise of dozens (and dozens) of graceful young Fred Astaires, my cousins were able to get a party of five ladies together. Drawn by the fact that these five ladies were going, myself and one other guy decided to go as well.

Unfortunately that was a bit of a disappointment. The half hour lesson at the beginning of the evening taught us exactly three moves, all of which I already knew, and none of which were adequate to maintaining a dance for more than one song. Three moves runs out pretty quickly, and after that Mark Twain's dictum becomes your only life-line, "Just move your feet and keep the conversation good." Although I imagine that worked out better for Mark Twain than it does for the average joe.

Then there was the band. The band itself wasn't so bad. The singer was. If you cast your eye over this photograph to the left, you will see a pink, sparkly creature with a really bad blonde hairdo. She looked and sounded exactly like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Lena Lamont, which got on my nerves after about the first two seconds. Rather a pity, as their selections were great. I like big band music, but what this poor lady did to the music was heartbreaking. Obviously at some point in her life someone told her that she could sing and she started singing with a band. I can imagine the looks the musicians must have given each other, the whispers, "Who is this doll?" "I don't know. She sounds awful, though." "You should probably go tell her that." "Why don't you go tell her? Why do I have to be the bad guy?" "I'm not telling her." "Let's just let her keep going for a bit, maybe she'll get better." And here it is, years and years later, and she is still going and apparently hasn't gotten much better. Or (frightening thought) she has gotten better.

The dancers outside our group were mostly old folks, 60+ years old. Let me tell you, some of them knew their business, especially the men. I plotted a direct correlation between the presence of suspenders and spats and the level of dancing ability. A guy in just slacks and a button up oxford shirt might know a move or two, but most likely he was just fudging his way around the floor. Throw on a bow tie and his skills were likely to improve by about 22%, both in number of moves known, and smoothness of execution. If he was wearing suspenders you could expect moves, smoothness and a little sway in the hips, a touch of spring in the step, some sprightliness in the way he grasped his fair partner's hand. But if he was wearing spats!? Wow. Between dances I stood to one side in my cargo khakis and black polo shirt, and stared in awe at these masteres of style. Someday, when I am sixty and have a totally sweet salt and pepper moustache, I too will wear spats and suspenders and unleash the swing dancing magic!

Unfortunately for the ladies in our party a good number of these fabulous gentlemen were a bit snobby about it, sprinkling cool, condescending compliments or saying things like, "Come on, you can do better than that." My friends were, unfortunately ignorant of the honor being bestowed upon them by such notice, so they decided to leave. And we didn't get our $20 back.

However, it being still early in the evening we had to find another activity. It made no sense to have driven an hour and a half out there for less than an hour of dancing and then turn around and drive back. So a vote was taken and we decided to find a karaoke bar. One of the ladies with a phone that can do things when you talk to it found us a karaoke bar fifteen minutes away that would allow patrons under 21 years old, so we loaded up in the vehicles and headed out. the lady with the intelligent phone was leading the way, but she couldn't find the place. Her phone dropped us right in the middle of a little Korea Town.

As I looked around I thought, "I wonder if this is a noray bong." (That is a really bad transliteration of the Korean word for karaoke, which literally means "Song room".) I looked around the plaza, and sure enough there was a building with the words "Noray Bong" on it in Korean (I took Korean for six months in the Q course). We drove past it once, and the girls got sketched out. We drove past it a second time and they got sketched out even more. One of the girls said, "Wow, this place looks like a really cheap, sleazy strip-joint." And it did.


There was a neon light over the front, and through the windows we could see a counter/bar and a deserted table area. From the front area a psychadelically blue-lit passage led back into a shadowy back area with little doors leading off on either side into individual rooms. The rooms had padded leather benches and mirrors all around the sides, with a table in the center. Oh, and the rooms were rented by the hour. So yes, it did have some resemblance to the sleazy underworld establishments you see on movies and whatnot. The group was about to decide to give it up and find somewhere else to go but I said, "Whoah, guys, this is Korean karaoke. It isn't like American karaoke. In America there is just one karaoke machine in the bar and one person at a time goes up and inflicts his voice upon everyone else. In Korean karaoke the group rents out the room and they go in and sing to each other for as long as they like without bothering or being bothered by anyone else. Plus you can order food and drinks. At least let's go in ask how much it is for an hour." So we did. (The clerks eyes went almost round when I asked him in Korean how much it was an hour.)

It was only fifty dollars an hour, which is not that much divided between seven people. We had some kimbap (kind of like Korean sushi) and some non-alcoholic beverages, and had a good time goofing around with each other. Karaoke is always more fun when you're all friends and everyone can sing pretty well. Although I must say, the group-impromptu-choral arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody could have been better. It was a good laugh for everyone though. And no alcohol was involved. So a night that looked like it was going to be awesome turned out to be aweseome, but in a way that no one at all had expected.

The moral of this story is that we all sing better than the sequined lady, but she gets paid for it and we don't. But we have more fun with it, I bet, so all in all I would rather be us. Wouldn't you?

The Tiger, Part III

You can read Part I here. and Part II here.

Below him, heading up towards the pass was a great company of men on horses. They wore their beards and moustaches long, and their swords and bows were short and curved. Some wore iron mail visibly, some carried lances, some torches. The leader rode at their head with a lance in his hand, and streaming from the lance were locks of long black hair. Three human heads were impaled on his lance as a standard.

Edward stood watching them with hot tears stinging his eyes, feeling rage rolling through him, deep, red, hot and powerful. He looked around him. The terrain was favorable. They could not get around him to the right or the left. They had bows, but the ravine became so narrow in one spot that they would have to come up one at a time. That would negate their numbers and limit the effectiveness of their archers. If they cared to try him bow for bow, well, he had a full quiver of well fletched shafts and he would wager himself against any of them. There was no fear or hesitation in his heart, and no hope that he would ultimately be successful. There were more than five hundred horsemen that he could see, and he would not be able to kill all of them before he fell of fatigue. "Let my hand grow tired and freeze to my sword," he swore. "I will lessen them somewhat, God willing."

As the horde drew closer at a light canter he selected a shaft from his quiver and took aim at the leader. They had not sighted him yet. He knew he was going to die that day, but there was no sense in wasting it. If he was smart about this he would be able to prolong it for quite some time. Every moment he lived, every moment they died a little more, was one more moment for his little village to live in peace. He wished he had someone he could send as a messenger to warn them of the coming danger, but there was no time for that. They had to be held there or nowhere, and on the whole, maybe it was better that the people live in ignorance, rather than fear. As soon as he was dead, they would have enough of fear before they died.

They were in range, but he waited. It was only a light hunting bow, not a heavy war bow. It would not punch through decent armor. Better to wait until he was certain to hit the bastard in the face. Thirty more paces, twenty more, ten more, now. A deep breath, hold it, and release. The arrow sped straight to its mark, and Edward's practiced eye knew that it would hit before it reached the target. He backed further into the ravine watching carefully. The arrow hit the leader just below the right eye causing the man's head to snap back violently. He swayed in his seat, and then fell with a clatter of arms and armor.

The rest of the throng gathered around him, shouting and looking around to see where the shaft had come from. A few guessed it had come from the pass which they could see only as a narrow, dark passage in front of them. Four riders were sent up the hill at a gallop. Twang, zippp! The first one fell. The other three threw their shields up before their faces and kept galloping. The rest of the horde let out a yell and charged after them. Edward backed further into the alley. The first rider came through alone, moving fast, no doubt trying to ride down whatever farmer or herdsman he thought was hiding in there. Edward saw the surprise in his eyes at seeing a warrior in armor waiting, but it was too late by then. The Tiger crouched, parried the lance and lunged, slaying the horse in one lunge. Before the horseman could reach his sword, he too fell dead.

"Sorry cousin," Edward muttered to the dead horse. "I have no quarrel with you, but I needed the road held, and horseflesh holds better than human."

Two more dismounted soldiers climbed over the carcasses, and died there. The Tiger piled five more corpses in the alley before the enemy stopped coming.

All that afternoon the battle continued off and on. A few times they would rush in, tie ropes to the corpses and drag them out with horses, and then try to send as many horsemen as they could galloping through, no doubt trying to force him back into the open where they could deal with him on their own terms. Every time he would simply do the same thing again. Their weapons, and more importantly their shields, were too light to be effective against his heavier European arms and armor in tight quarters. The first horse that came through always died and blocked off the rest. On foot he was a match for any of them. Each time he fought a handful of them died and the rest retreated, giving him a minute or two to catch his breath. Then they would come again and it would start again. For hours this went on, again and again and again, until Edward thought to himself, "If I keep this up just a little more, I will buy them enough time to go to bed. Better they die in their sleep, never knowing what hit them. I pray these animals are that merciful, Lord."

Nightfall came, and the attacks slackened. He cut strings from the clothes of the fallen and made tripwires across the path so that he could not be surprised. Anyone who caught one of them would knock over a stack of abandoned arms and the clatter would alert him. His position was probed three times during the night but he held.

"If I can but hold out until dawn, they will have one more peaceful night. Isn't that worth a night of vigilance, Lord?"

At dawn the attack renewed in earnest, and for three hours he had no rest. He had not been wounded, yet, but he now knew what was meant by a hand freezing to the sword. His forearm and right hand had cramped until he could not release his grip on the hilt of his sword. "Thank-you for that, Lord." He laughed grimly. "Else, I think I would have dropped it from exhaustion."

They left him alone for about an hour, and it was all he could do to stay awake through that hour. His blood quieted and cooled, and the wind came whipping through the pass and chilled him even more, and his head nodded and his eyelids drooped, but still he stood his ground. There wasn't much else to do.

At about noon he heard something above his head, just a little scrape of something over the rocks. Glancing up he saw the toe of a boot sticking over the edge of the ravine and knew that he had been flanked. Someone yelled in front of him, and he looked to see a warrior with a beard down to his waist charging with upraised sword. He took the blow on his shield, and ducked low, lunging upwards under the ridiculously small round shields these heathen used. His blade went through his enemy's body and he lifted him up bodily over his head and tossed him behind him. He could feel the two arrows from the two archers above him stick in the lifeless carcass before he dropped it. He snatched up a fallen lance and threw it, killing one of the archers. The only other weapon at hand was a rock so he threw that at the other one, before he had to defend himself against opponents behind and in front. Before he had tried to select the narrowest parts of the ravine to fight in, but now he had to find the widest parts, places where he would have room to turn and maneuver. It was death to face enemies directly in front and behind. He set his back to a wall under a slight overhang and fought it out, attacking very little to the left, mostly covering himself with his shield. It looked like only five of the enemy had been nimble enough to scale the cliffs and come at him from behind, so he concentrated on killing those first. He got three before the enemies on the other side, discovering that they could not get him past his large, three-cornered shield, decided to push him. So they hit his shield in a rush, knocking him off his balance so he ran into the other warrior's swords. They cut him, and cut him deep before he despatched them. One had stabbed through his chain mail leggings, cutting a deep gash across the front of his leg. The other had knocked his helmet askew, rattled his head, and cut his nose so all he could taste was blood, streaming down through his moustache. There was no time to think about that. Before those two fell he was already turning and leaping back to avoid a second rush like the first one.

"This is it, Lord," he whispered. "I can't guard two sides to save my life, so I'll keep my face to the front until I feel cold steel between my shoulder blades. Then I'll probably have my face to the mud and won't care anymore."

The rush came at him as he said this and he leapt nimbly back to avoid it. The front runners in the wall of human flesh coming at him were not so nimble and they tripped over their fallen friends. Edward was on them in a second, killing the ones who were trampling on their struggling comrades, and making sure to despatch the ones on the ground before they could get up. He cried out and split a helmet with a single stroke, from crown to chin. Rage filled him again, battle lust erased all his pains and fatigue and he attacked like his namesake, bulling into the first two men, and driving them back on the ones behind them, hacking lustily, singing lustily, smiting and striving and hewing like a man possessed. He drove them back, killing any who couldn't flee, until he chased them out into the clear light of the sun. They fell back shouting in dismay and he stood out in the open, blinking at the brightness. Something was knocking at the door of his mind, very urgently, but he could not attend to it. All he knew was that it didn't stink so badly of mud and dead men out here. Then he remembered that he was in the open. He heard the swish of arrows, rather than saw them as he turned and ran back into his lair.

"The Tiger waits in his lair. Come and get him, if you dare." He chuckled like a boy. One of the dead had a wineskin on him, and he poured it on the wound in his leg, relishing the sting of it, and how it made his heart pound and his head light. He had a terrible thirst, which he quenched with the snow that lay untouched outside his narrow battleground, until he heard the steps of men advancing cautiously into the ravine and he laughed with joy. "Come, friends. Let us dance." He realized that he had not been stabbed in the back. There was no one behind him. He never found out what had happened to that second archer.

The battle continued again until nightfall, sometimes with a break of an hour or so. Maybe the enemy was deliberately trying to make him let his guard down. Perhaps they were just arguing about what they should do next. Each time the fighting lulled, the urge to sleep was even fiercer. By now they had to have realized they were fighting only one man. He couldn't understand why they didn't just rush him and finish him off. Surely they had to have at least a few men who knew how to fight.

"Lord, I don't know how much longer I can continue this. Soon, I am going to fall asleep, and then they will kill me anyway. At least I won't have to stand on my feet anymore."

Nightfall came and something crashed in front of him. Someone had thrown an earthenware jar into the ravine. He must have been asleep. The next instant he heard voices, and more jars crashing, and then everything became bright. He realized what was going on only very slowly as his exhausted mind came into full wakefulness. Of course, they had thrown wine or oil jars into the ravine and lit them on fire hoping to smoke him out. The wind was tearing through the ravine, sending foul smelling smoke into his eyes and mouth. He crouched as low as he could to get somewhat under it, and wrapped a rag over his eyes, and held his ground.

"At least now I can't go to sleep," he coughed. "Should I thank you for that, Lord?"

The fire was uncomfortable, but it burned for only about twenty minutes. Even before it was completely out, he heard the footsteps of the enemy and roused himself for one last battle.

"Whatever happens here, Lord, this is the end. You cannot ask me to keep going on like this. I can barely see, I can barely stand, I can barely lift this sword. If you could see your way to let one of them get lucky with a lance or a sword, I would be eternally grateful." For some reason this struck him as hilarious. "Eternally grateful! Of course, eternally." When the enemies reached him he was laughing uproariously and running at them like a bull.

Many times that last night, he felt like he could not go on. Every time they would draw back to collect their dead to make room for another attack, he would listen to them shouting angrily at each other outside his tunnel and he would sway with weariness, knowing, not thinking but knowing, that the next assault would be the last one. He knew he could not lift his sword for another stroke. He knew the next time a shoulder hit his shield he would fall on his back and be stomped mercilessly into the mud. And he would probably be so grateful to be able to lie down at last that he wouldn't even mind.

Then they would attack and he would lift his sword and lunge for their faces. They would hit his shield and he would fall back, and then thrust forward as he had been trained, his heavier, more solid shield knocking their shields and weapons aside, making room for his thrusts. The way would get bogged down with the dead, and they would pause and drag the corpses back out while he would recover and have time for more despairing before the next attack. How long this went on, he never knew.

Then he woke up. He was sitting against the wall with his sword still cramped in his nearly useless hand. The daylight was bright, the dead were stacked around him. He leapt to his feet in a panic and rushed through the ravine, thinking to find his enemies bearing down on him. But he was alone. He could see their trail as they headed back the way they came, a much diminished band. Far off, miles in the distance, he saw them riding away, and he could not tell how many of the horses had riders, and how many did not.

"I suppose they must have given up and decided to go by a different route. And I must have fallen asleep waiting for them. Well, that's good, Lord, because it means now I can sleep." With a sigh, he laid back down, and was oblivious in a second.

 

 

Four months later, Lady Celia received a messenger at her husband's castle who told her that her brother had returned to the family's home, and that he would be making a trip to see her very soon.

"How did he seem to you?" she questioned the old family servant who had brought the news.

"Very well, Lady. He was sorely wounded during his travels, but he will not say how."

"Thank you Peter. He will tell me, though."

However, to her surprise he never did tell her. He never told a living soul, except his wife when in God's good time he married. He refused a position as the King's advisor, and instead retired and spent his time training the young squires who came from all over Christendom to learn skill-at-arms from his hand. He never again fought in any war, but lived out all the rest of his days in perfect peace.

The Tiger, Part II

Part I is here.

When he woke up he was in place of warmth and complete darkness. As he tried to open his eyes, someone seemed to stab a red hot needle into each one. He closed them again.

He didn't know how many days he slept and woke, to drink some very strong tasting broth, only to sleep again. He lay naked under what felt like a fur blanket of some sort, and a cloth was bound over his eyes. Strange voices spoke in a strange language, softly, and that was his world. He didn't mind it though. It was a pleasant world, simple, uncomplicated, soft, and above all warm. He could smell the smoke, and hear the crackling of a fire most of the time he was awake. It smelled like they were burning dung.

Eventually the blindfold was removed and he looked around him for the first time. Many people, all very old, all very brown, with high cheekbones and serious, intent faces stared at him without speaking. He stared back. Eventually, one by one, they got up and left. It appeared he was in some sort of mud dwelling with a low, flat roof. The embers of a fire smoked lazily through a square hole in the ceiling. Whenever the curtain over the doorway was opened he could see snow, sometimes swirling in a white mist, sometimes falling lazily against a wall of stars in the night sky, sometimes lying blindingly white in the sun, sending daggers of pain shooting through his head. He preferred it when his eyes were closed.

After a few days of this, he rose, accepting the clothes he was offered. He had tried to speak to his hosts in Latin, German and French, or in the few words he knew in the Moorish tongue, but no one even answered. Among themselves they spoke a soft, guttural language that seemed more suited to whispering than to yelling. They seemed to have no desire to communicate with him at all. As soon as he was up and about, they left him completely to his own devices. Meals were served regularly and if he was asleep, he soon learned, he would miss the meal. No food was ever left when all had done eating.

In a week or two he began to wander outside the hut and found that there were about twenty such dwellings scattered around what looked like a giant flat plain, surrounded by mountains. On one end of the village was a much larger hut with a sheep pen outside it. Children dressed in fur and wool watched him curiously from afar, but the entire village seemed to share the same intent, serious, silent stare. No one spoke to him.

Eventually he found his armor and weapons. Or rather they were brought to him. They had been wrapped carefully in a leather cloth and left by his bed while he was out on one of his daily walks. After that he began wearing his armor daily to re-accustom himself to the weight. Out on the plain alone he began practicing with sword and shield. At first the exertion was almost more than he could handle, and he thought ruefully that "The Tiger" was more like "The Kitten" these days. Slowly he began to grow stronger and his speed and agility returned. The snow made it harder to move, bogging him down a bit like the heavy mud he had endured in the wars, but a lot more slippery. This forced him to work twice as hard, but he welcomed the challenge. One day he shot a cat, a large white cat that looked a little like a leopard. He carried it back to the hut, and roasted it over the fire. The entire village came and partook of the feast, accepting the meat he offered them in complete silence. At first he had thought that they didn't speak to him because they either didn't like or didn't trust him. Now it occurred to him that they might very well have no concept of people who spoke other languages. If he wouldn't speak to them in a tongue they knew, why should they waste their energy speaking to him? They seemed a very practical people.

Months wore on like this in a silent but courteous existence. Edward found himself retreating out into the wild to pray, as well as to practice his swordsmanship. He didn't know what else to do. He was not restless anymore. He was empty. He trained because that was his way, but he did so with little sense of purpose. Every day he asked God to bless and watch over his family, and every day he asked, "Jesu, why have you brought me here?" And always the only answer was stillness, the gentle whisper of emptiness, wind, and cold. It might have been his heart talking, for all it said to him.

The weather began to warm, slowly, but noticeably. The children and women began to appear dressed in bright, vivid colors, bright, sky blue, brilliant yellow, like the buttercups back home, and deep, deep rich burgundy. It made a brave show, and somehow awakened longings for he knew not what. Some of the younger children would even smile at him now, as if the warming weather had warmed their thoughts of him. Or perhaps they had just gotten used to him.

On a day in what he took to be mid spring he took his weapons and began to walk. He had a notion that if he climbed one of the nearer hills he might be able to get some idea of the lie of the land, and still likely be back before nightfall. He would shoot some kind of animal along the way so he wouldn't have to go hungry.

He began walking straight westward until he reached a trail heading into the mountains. He followed that northward until he lost it, and then continued moving upwards. There seemed to be two large mountains with what looked like a pass between them. If he could reach the pass and look through it, he would be able to have a clear look to the west for at least a good day's march, he hoped. Looking back into the valley below him, he was amazed to see how much of the snow had melted. The village he had been staying at stood out clear and brown, with little bits of color, amid a predominantly white background. He could see the river, gray, brown, and even a little bit green in spots winding its way through the valley, from where it emerged from the mountain glaciers, to where it disappeared in whiteness at the end of the valley. He saw something he had never noticed before. Along the slopes of the hills he could see patterns of ditches and hedgerows, arranged in irregular shapes, which he took to be irrigation works. Acres and acres of such fields stretched as far as he could see on both sides of the valley. The men and women of his village no doubt had constructed these fields, or their ancestors had. They had probably been living in this valley for hundreds of years, quietly handing on their fields and irrigation ditches, flocks, huts, traditions and languages generation after generation. Strangely, his heart swelled with love for them. They were so stupid and ignorant compared to his people back in Europe, but what strength! What toughness and determination! "Lord, these people are as tough as the mountains they live among. Surely, Lord, Your Love is here with them, as surely as in Christendom."

He continued on. It was a stiff climb to the top of the pass, and before he got there he could smell the smoke. Something on the other side had made a dreadful burning. A saddle between the two hills narrowed until it became a ravine, with sides so steep that no horse and precious few men could have climbed them. It was in the middle of this narrow pass that he stopped. Before him lay a valley much like the one he had come to think of as his own. In the center of it was a village much like his own, except that this one was on fire. Thick, black smoke rose from every hut and small black shapes lay motionless scattered over the snow. He could tell what they were, even at that distance.

The Tiger: Part I

Once, there lived a knight. Edward "the Tiger", he was called, for though a young knight there was nothing he would not dare and do, and nothing that he had ever set his hand to do in which he had failed. He had fought in tournaments and battles, quests and adventures and had never lost. At jousting he unhorsed anyone who came against him until many thought that Launcelot had been reborn. In the press of battle he would often dismount and fight on foot, surrounded by the press of enemies. At times his comrades feared the worst, for he had been known to move so far from any friends or allies, and to bury himself so deeply in the thick of the melee, that even from horseback his friends would lose sight of his red helmet plume. But each time they rode to his rescue he would shake off the crowd of his foes and behold, he would be standing in the midst of the press of them, utterly untouched and untouchable. His sword flashed too rapidly to be followed, and thrust and hewed too mightily to be blocked. This was how they first called him "The Tiger" for his every movement was smooth and powerful. Every enemy attack was smashed by his shield flying and swiping like the wing of a heron, and every attack was answered by an instant counter so that to strike a blow at him with lance or sword was certain death. Such was his skill in battle that wherever his red plume and gray heron arms were seen, the enemy ran before him. Only the bravest, seeking to boost their own reputations, ever challenged him, and every one was destroyed.

In the times when he was not fighting, the report of his exploits spread among the courts and castles to the delight of all who heard them. Wherever he went he was welcomed. He was tall and handsome, and every lady who met him thought him also well-mannered and pleasant, so consequently he was never short of fair admirers. Many a nobleman tried to arrange a wedding between this brave knight and a daughter. However, Edward only smiled and shook his head.

Tournaments were held in his honor. Castles were awarded him. His father was raised from a relatively minor lord to the King's personal circle of councilors. His family was made rich and powerful. His brothers and sisters all made wealthy and influential marriages. It seemed there was nothing he could not do. There was no favor the King Charles would have begrudged him, perhaps not even one of his own daughters, or at least neices, for Edward had broken the backs of the Moors in many battles.

When the wars were over, and the borders had been secured, everyone told him to come home. His father was anxious that he should marry and take up a position in court, close to the King's ear. His mother wanted him to rest and stop riding off to fight in the wars. No one was prepared for him to leave. At a rare family meal with his parents and most of his brothers and sisters he told them simply, "I'm going away. I don't know when or if I will ever return."

"Where are you going?" his family asked him.

"I am going East."

"To the Holy Land?" His father asked.

"Perhaps."

"Are you going on pilgrimage?"

He nodded thoughtfully, as if that was a new idea. "Yes. I think so."

"Why? If you wish to do a pilgrimage we can arrange that next year. I am sure some of his Majesty's ships will take you most of the way in the spring."

"I am afraid that will take far too long. I am gone tomorrow."

Of course there was a great uproar and much argument from his father and tears from his mother. He remained immovable. His purpose was fixed.

After the meal, as he was retiring to his room for the last time, his favorite sister, Celia, came to him with a lamp.

"Are you going early, little brother?" she asked.

"Before light, lady."

"Why?"

"I must."

"I know. Brother, you always do what you must, I know that you must do this. I would like to know why, though."

He sighed. "I have fought many times, sister. I have never once been free. Every fight, battle or tournament, I have fought for this land, for the King, for my Father, for my family, for the audience, for the damsels crying my name, for every reason you can think of. I have even fought for love, once." He laughed.

"I didn't know that," she smiled with interest.

"When we were children and that peasant boy threw mud at you, and I pummeled him until he begged your pardon. You were my sister, and I would not have you treated so."

"I had forgotten about that," she laughed.

"Of all the battles I have ever fought," he said, "That was the only one that made any sense."

"What of all those battles to drive the Moor away?"

"They were good and necessary, but they did not make sense."

"And that is why you must go?"

"I must learn why it is that I fight."

She looked at him understandingly. "Life has never come easily to you, little brother. Even when you were learning to crawl, I could not keep you still. You would be everywhere, in the fire, on the stove, under the cows, hanging off the bridge above the mill wheel, trying to climb the tallest trees, running off to the forest alone. I hope you find what it is you seek."

"As do I."

She stood on tiptoes to embrace him. "Go with God, little brother."

Before the sun rose he saddled his favorite horse, and rode away, taking only his sword, his light armor (consisting of a cuirasse and helmet, with chain mail and leather arm guards and leggings) and a shield and lance, with a light hunting bow to secure his meals.

Edward rode for many months. His shield had no device on it, and his helmet was bare and practical, with not even a crest. Before the first month was over it didn't matter anymore. No one had ever heard his name in these lands.

Eventually he came to wide, barren, mountainous lands, cold, bitter, swept by wind and snow. These lands seemed even colder and more bitter than the alps themselves. He didn't know where he was going, but he was driven to go there beyond all sense or safety. He could not sit still and rest at any town he came to. Sometimes he slept in a barn or house if hospitality was offered him for a night before moving onwards, sometimes he slept in the open, his back against his horse for warmth. Sometimes he did not sleep at all. He wasted a little from poor food and little sleep, but still he pushed himself on without pity. Without a destination mere movement became his only goal. Just to cover as many miles as he could, in a generally eastern direction before he collapsed from sheer exhaustion. After a few days of this, he was caught in a blizzard, which rushed up behind him with no warning. He forced himself on, knowing that to stop moving meant death, punishing himself and his horse until the poor beast, not being as driven as his master, gave up and died rather than endure the torment. Edward could not. He left his lance, bringing his shield and the hunting bow from long habit, and continued to walk. The longer he forced movement from his torn and ravaged limbs, and the more pain he endured from his blistered, bleeding feet, and the harder the cold and wind nipped and froze his nose and fingers, the more the deep relentless burning grew inside him. At times he feared he was going mad, until he decided that he already was mad. His sanity had fled a long time ago. Behind him, wherever home lay, there was a warm house and a loving family. Peace, quiet, contentment and ease lay behind him. On the road he had many times thought of how simple it would have been to turn back. He could have gone to any seaport, paid a few coins and bought passage to Europe, and once there, the mention of his name would erase all his troubles. He had not taken that opportunity. Now here, in hell, there was no such chance. He would continue to walk until he died, and when he died, he would do so never knowing why he had died. In rage and pain, he lifted his face to the heavens, only to find he could see only swirling white, and he cursed himself for a dog. Pain shot through his legs, from ankle to hip, and they came unstrung, and he fell at full length in the snow. After that his legs, which had been absolutely numb for as long as he could remember, gave him no relief. The pain was incessant and terrible. He might have stayed on his face and gone to sleep, but the pain throbbed through him too badly. He couldn't move his legs, but he put his hands under him and crawled until he remembered no more.

Sometimes I am Proud...

A few weeks ago I was in Boulder, CO. It was the evening after a hard day of climbing at the boulder park and a bunch of us were going out to eat. We were heading down towards Pearl Street in a 15 passenger van and the guys were all playing "Legal or not," a game which involves guessing the age of passing females from as far away as possible.

At one point we passed a little shopping mall, and G, the driver, remarked, "Whoa, definitely not legal. And the guy who is following her looks super creepy. Looks like someone is about to get raped."

"Are you serious?" one of the Captain's asked.

"Yeah, dude, that guy looked super sketchy."

"Alright, then, let's turn this van around and check it out."

I'm going to pause the story right here to explain something about the way SF guys, and a lot of soldiers who have Iraq/Afghanistan experience, view the world. We are all observers. Some of us are better at it than others, but we all have a lot of practice observing things as we pass by them and making snap judgments based on what we see. Potentially lives hang in the balance of these snap judgments. Depending on the personality type of the observer, some develop an almost arrogant confidence in the accuracy of these judgments, while most have a subconscious habit of second guessing themselves. I tend towards second guessing, but historically my guesses are right, so I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I am usually a middle class observer. My eyes aren't shut, but I don't have the detailed photographic memory of, say, a sniper. I remember things in terms of connections and concepts and the story, not visually. I hadn't been paying as close attention to the girl that G was talking about, but I had seen her in passing, so I replayed the image in my mind. There had been a girl, probably in young highschool age range, walking north along Broadstreet with a young boy of about the same age. At the time the van passed he had been slightly behind and to her right side on the sidewalk, maving at about the same pace, but close enough that it seemed to me they were walking together. At the same time a homeless man (there are a lot of them in Boulder) had been walking out of a side alley from east to west, and had paused at the crosswalk, right in in front of the teenagers. He wasn't looking at them, he was watching the crossing sign on the opposite side of the road. I reviewed that memory and concluded that most likely there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. All this took a second or two.

In the meantime the guys up front were arguing about whether to turn around. Most weren't willing to give a definite, "No, I saw them and there is nothing wrong," but they didn't want to delay dinner based on G's gut feeling. G is not known for being the brightest light on the Christmas tree. However the Captain was adamant. "If you have a funny feeling we are going to go check it out. I am dead serious. What's the worst that can happen if there is nothing weird going on? We are five minutes later eating. But what if she is in trouble and we don't do anything?"

At any rate, the Captain carried the day and we flipped it in a little housing development and headed back north again. As we drove back to that intersection M said, "Okay, what's the plan?"

The Captain said, "They will be on your side of the vehicle so keep your eyes open as we get closer. When we pass we'll slow down and take a closer look."

M said, "I'm nearest to the door so if it does look sketchy do you want me to just jump out and punch him in the face?"

"If he's molesting her then f--- yeah! If not I'll get out and talk to him."

By that point we were coming up on the intersection, and we could see the girl up ahead. As we got closer it became abundantly clear that the boy walking with her wasn't a day older than fifteen. They were just a couple of teenagers out for a stroll, and the homeless guy was nowhere in sight.

"Nope, I'm not punching a fifteen year old," M said. "Nothing going on here."

"No, but we pretty much just saved a life," G said.

"Hey, at least we did something," the Captain said as we turned around again. "I mean, what if you had read about a kid getting raped in the paper tomorrow morning, and we could have stopped it? Too many people go through life and see things happening but don't f---ing do anything, but at least we were ready to."

You know, SF guys aren't saints, by any stretch of the imagination, but generally speaking they are men. And every once in a while they do something that makes me proud to be one of them.

Although, I couldn't help but think how creepy it would have looked to anyone paying attention. A stretch van with tinted windows and seven dudes in it drives by, then turns around, and drives by again slowing down as we pass this teenage girl. Yeah. That doesn't look weird at all.

Fortunately for us, most civillians don't see anything. Especially teenage ones.

Little Mother, Part II

This is Part 2 of a short story I wrote. You can read the first part here.

They slept in the cave of meeting at first until the young men of the tribe chased them out. She found a small cave further down the cliff, a little distance from the village, and set up her house there. Mother-of-the-idiot grew thin and Knows-nothing grew thin. She made her own garden and worked it with her own hands. At first her son would dig up the seeds as she planted them and ruin all her work, but over time she taught him to help instead of hinder. She suffered hunger and thirst, and for a time no one in the village would speak to her.

One morning she found the leg of a deer at the mouth of her cave. She could not imagine who had left it, but she was so hungry she didn’t wonder. She roasted it and she and her son ate it.

Winter came and they were cold and hungry. She foraged for roots, learned to trap squirrels and rabbits, and gnawed on bark when the stomach pains became too much. Knows-nothing became harder to manage as he became hungry, so even when she could find food she had to give most of it to him. But every so often throughout that winter she would find the leg of a deer lying at the mouth of the cave in the morning. Whoever left it was a clever hunter and woodsman because he left no tracks, no sign, and never woke her up though her sleep was always light and fitful because of the cold. She sometimes dreamed that Shoots-three-birds-with-one-arrow was still trying to provide for her in this way.

Spring came and she finally returned to the village for the first time since the winter had started. Most of the tribe were surprised to see her and Knows-nothing alive. She learned that much had changed in the winter. Looks-at-flowers had died, and Shoots-three-birds-with-one-arrow had married a new wife. All the girls her age were either married or promised to be married. The elder’s son was also married. He had been given the man name Shoots-three-legged-deer.

Time passed. Mother-of-the-idiot worked hard and harvested well. She learned to spin thread and weave cloth and began to trade blankets and clothes for food. The next winter she did not starve or freeze. And still, every few weeks, she found the leg of a deer at the mouth of her cave.

Many years passed. In time, Knows-nothing died. Mother-of-the-idiot found him one morning, lying in his bed with a smile on his beautiful face, squinting with pleasure like a child staring at the sun. His mother buried him alone and stared at the emptiness around her. She was too old now to be married. She had never been beautiful, but now she was so burned and worn and twisted by the years of hard work that she was downright ugly. She was also the village crazy woman, now. No one bothered her, but they all thought her an idiotic eccentric. She had a few fertile years left, but no man would want her. She would never have children of her own, so she began making clothes for the other children. She spoke with the midwife and learned which women were with child and made blankets for them and for their new infants. The midwife was now so old she could hardly walk from her hut to the caves so she took Mother-of-the-idiot as her apprentice. And now, every few weeks, the leg of the deer would turn up at the door of the midwife’s drafty bark hut.

In time Mother-of-the-idiot lost her name. She became known simply as The Midwife. She came when she was wanted, and left as soon as she was no longer needed. She grew old and gray and bent and frail. Her father died, his wives died, some of her siblings died. She had not been allowed to meet her nephews or nieces, but they allowed her to deliver their children. But still, every so often, the leg of a deer would be left on her doorstep.

Then one morning she died.

“Little daughter,” a Voice called to her.

She murmured, and left her eyes closed in the delicious warmth that surrounded her.

“Little daughter,” the Voice repeated. She could hear the Voice in her soul, almost as she could hear her mother’s voice when she was little, not simply with her ears but feeling the words vibrating through her mother’s chest into her little girl’s heart.

“Little daughter, arise. Wake up.” The Voice caressed her with terrifying strength and heartbreaking gentleness. She opened her eyes.

Instantly she wished she could shut them again, but was unable to. She had seen Him. He was too beautiful, too terrifying, too holy. He was completely strange to her, but at the same time there was something familiar about him. She felt as if He was killing her just by being who He was, but she no longer wanted to live.

“Welcome, my beloved daughter. Welcome. Welcome. I have been waiting for you for so long.”

Mother-of-the-idiot could not find a word to say in reply. The Voice continued. “You cared for me for so long and so well. I have been waiting all this time for you to be ready so that I could thank you for everything you did for me.”

Finally she cleared her throat and found her voice. “But Sir,” she said, humbly. “You must be mistaken. I do not know you. I have never served you. I am only a poor, wasted, dried out old woman. I have seen you and now I can die happy. But I swear I never saw you before now.”

“No?” the Voice answered with a gentle laugh. “Little Mother, don’t you recognize your own son?” And as she looked into the glory that was Him she saw another person. It was her son, Knows-nothing, smiling at her with his beautiful wise eyes. Knows-nothing was embracing Him, holding onto Him so tightly that she could not tell where one ended and the other began.

“Little Mother,” the Voice said, “My Mother, thank-you.”