I had an eight hour lay over. So minus hailing a taxi and general transit and ferry times, we had two hours but it was enough. I got out at the street and walked in the darkness down the gravel easement. There are potholes and wild rabbits, by the way. No lights were on. Kitsap County back roads apparently aren’t on the grid for luxuries like street lights. Your black iron gate was latched but not locked.
My boots made a solid sound down your driveway. It was either that or the sound of my heart—my blood in my ears. I’m not sure which one. I zipped up my leather jacket then unzipped it. Then nervously zipped it up again. Coming to see you is like coming to see an ex-lover or older sister or parent... something in there somewhere... even though you aren’t any of those things. My feelings get all jumbled. They tumble around in my gut. I shove my hands in my jeans pockets. I look at my feet and lift a hand to knock carefully. Dawn hasn’t come yet.
The door opens before I make a sound and without a sound. You are dressed in worn blue jeans distressed at the knees. Nowadays people pay for jeans that look this way. Yours are twenty years old. But Levis are always in style. You're wearing a white bottom down shirt, long sleeved, and a black leather vest, zipped up. Your gold cross is a shadow at your collar. Your bangs have grown and hang in your eyes. In this light you could be any age. I prefer to think of you as timeless.
As we walk, I avoid your gaze. I still find your eyes unnerving. Saw them first when I was thirteen, though I suspect, you didn’t really see me. You claim not to remember me at all, standing in that long line for autographs. But you were nineteen so it’s probably better that way. I think, subconsciously, I haven’t dated anyone blue-eyed simply because I might call them by your name. You’d find that humorous. You have a very dry sense of humor.
I wrote once that I've always liked the metaphor of friendship as a puzzle. My father used to describe it as a Japanese puzzle box. That as we live and make lasting friends, we build a puzzle box that is our self. At the center of the box is our heart and that is where Christ resides. To me, you are a puzzle box. Complex and hidden, layered and full of surprises. I think this is why I come to you with all the Big Issues. You are a small, mortal, living metaphor. You mirror life the way I see it.
You walk quickly. I remember this now. You are always more fit than you attest and your constitution belies the fact that you work on a computer all day. I don’t ask where we’re going. I know you have limited time and I have a plane to catch. But you barely speak and walk with clear purpose.
A mile from your house, deeper still into the woods, we walk under the aging, rusted arch: The Fraola Cemetery. Dawn’s light is starting to color the sky. Your sense of humor doesn’t seem present today.
There is an maple tree, twenty-five or thirty years old. We sit side by side, twenty feet off the ground, watching the sky through the gnarled bare limbs. Peach, rose and pale orange creep through indigo. The day is stealing away the frozen night.
“This is where I want to be buried,” you mention nonchalantly. “Or cremated and sprinkled in the pet cemetery at home in the back yard.” You don’t laugh. I put my arm around your waist. There seems something unspoken today. Something quiet like fate.
We talk about particle physics. You tell me about the Large Hadron Collider that crosses the France/Switzerland border like you just vacationed there. You punctuate your descriptions of experimental physics with in-jokes like “And to think that *atom* means ‘uncuttable’” followed by a snort. Silly Greeks. What were they thinking? The universe without quarks is like a cemetery without a gnarled maple tree!
Costing five or ten billion dollars, the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world. It’s sole purpose (if you aren’t sure what a particle accelerator is) is to speed up particles (that’s itty bitty noms of matter) to near the speed of light and them crash them together and see what comes out. Sound costly and experimental? It is but take into account that while NASA brought us global uses for Velcro, particle physics has brought us microprocessors (if you’re reading this online, you’re using one) and magnetized hard disks (inside your iPod). Without figuring out how the stuff *inside* those itty bitty noms works, we wouldn’t have any of the itty bitty toys us grown ups all love and rely on.
But you don’t want to talk about the politics of science with me today. Today you want to talk about the Higgs particle, or, as the media likes to herald it (as dubbed by physicist Leon Lederman) the God particle. Unlike other subatomic particles, the Higgs boson has mass and lots of it. As a matter of fact, the Higgs may be what fills up space—proving nonexistence of true vacuum by zipping in with its own smexy boson self. But better yet, the Higgs may be that generous particle that allows otherwise zero-mass itty bitty noms to acquire mass. Get it? The Higgs makes mass and matter where there was none. The God particle.
After I first met my friend, listened to an hour-long speech about the politics of science fiction and sexuality in a neo-puritanical society grasping for relevance (yeah, nineteen), I fantasized for months afterward of growing up, marrying and making babies with that incredible brain. LOL! Now there’s science fiction for ya, right? Just proof positive that geeky grrls leap (the fence?) for brilliant thinkers. Maybe I should design a shirt for brainy folks: “E=MC2: I Recruit” Or maybe a muscle shirt that reads: “God gave me this brain. It’s a sin to play stupid.”
Still sitting on the tree limb, dawn fully upon us, my friend says, “When you think about the science behind the universe... When I think about the science inside our bodies. About the inside of atoms and quarks and bosons.... When I think about the unknowable, unproven, and unseen... Written scripture seems so insignificant. If you can’t comprehend basic particle behavior and form your own opinions on theoretical physics... then don’t tell me how to live my life. You’ve got nothing on God.”
I blink my eyes. “You know I want you, right?”
And my dead-pan delivery rewards me with laughter so loud and perfect and full and honest that I think it breaks the stillness of the cemetery and collides hypothetical massive scalar elementary particles all over the darn place. It wakes the dead to riotous guffaws. It defies the laws and makes new ones. You live your every moment by God’s law, handed down directly to the heart. You open your eyes every morning to His day. You find strength and courage writ large between the lines of man’s scripture. I am inspired by your queit certainity.
You turn and climb, then jump down. Your leather sneakers crunch on the dry leaves. You nail the landing, of course. I stay behind for a moment. Sitting high atop our perch. Knowing it may be a year or more before I have a stolen hour with you again. Knowing how your responsibilities drag you away from everyone, really. You give so much to everyone that there is no time for “you” at the end of the day. I close my eyes for a moment and pray that in that moment when you close your eyes for the last time, that you will not only know peace but know how much you have meant to everyone. That not all of us overlook you.
In the crooks of the tree, leaves have gathered and have lain, still and curled, since fall. They are nested in clusters. I reach out and take a handful. They are like paper or shells. I crush them slowly. Rub my palms together to wear them away to dust. The pieces fall like ash on the gathering breeze.
I think about how another friend, so dear to my heart, asked me for a blog that explored the assignment of gender to God. Not to Christ, who obviously walked as a mortal man, but to God, that limitless, mighty creator who may or may not have fingerprints made of Higgs particles. We do it, of course, across many cultures, because of socio politics and the nature of dominance. I could wax not-so-poetic for a dozen blogs on the topic. But instead, I find myself laughing. Tension and quiet flowing off me like city grime after a long day at work. How random and ridiculous it all seems. Gender? What biological parts our bodies boast. Seriously now? How... how in Heaven and Earth and the great cosmos itself does a *stupid,* base and juvenile element like *gender* get assigned to the genesis of everything?
I never realized before how ludicrous it is. But in that moment, the new day resting on my shoulders, the sky pastels and magic, in that moment I laughed so bright and clear, and dared to leap those twenty feet only to tumble into the leaves and roll over grass and stones, still laughing.
I always say “He” and “Him” when I refer to God or Christ. Because “he” and “him” are reserved for mortal men. But language is small. Language is insignificant in the grander painting of everything we are and everything God is. Language exists only as a way for us to touch each other. Not as a way for us to touch God. Arguing why we call God this or that way, this or that word, is just filling space. It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. He knows when we call His name. He understands it in a hundred million ways. I may as well call God “boson” or “quark” or “lepton.” I may as well call Him by any of the flavors of elementary particles that fill our existence like angels dancing on the head of a pin.
It isn’t what we call Him. It’s only that we call.
E.J.
