Trees, Walking

Auntie Martha and Significant Other (aka "Signe") Sam are visiting and you are overwhelmed with joy. You brought them your entire library of books to read this morning, one by one, and Dada reports that as you walked across the room in front of them, you'd tilt your head to the side and give a faux laugh every now and again, just to remind them of the fun they must surely be having in your presence.

While you slept yesterday we ate sushi and Tagalongs and discussed Sam's proposal to produce a Marlowe play about gay King Edward in the studio space at the Guthrie. At dinner we filled tortillas with chicken and black beans and cheese and tomato and salsa and heard about Martha's interview with the head of LVC, how she gave him a run for his money with her questions about the Lutheran tradition of social service.

I'm teaching The Gospel of Mark and the graphic novel Marked in my composition course right now and so today I posted on Facebook my favorite line from the Gospel: "I can see people, but they look like trees, walking." The line is spoken by a blind man when Jesus has healed him only partially. Jesus spits on the man's eyes and then asks the man if he can see. The man responds with the tree line. Then Jesus covers the man's eyes with his hands again and the man's sight is fully restored.

I like this passage not only because I think it contains the most poetic line in a Gospel that's rife with dull, dry reportage on events, but also because it's the one time (that I know of, and I'm no Biblical scholar), that Jesus heals someone half-way. The rest of the time, it's either all or nothing, you're either blind/leprous/hemorrhaging/seizing/possessed or you're all better, full of new life both externally and internally. I feel half-cured today. Half-blind, half-faithed, half-hearted. The world is still shadowed with filmy gray snow. I feel betrayed by people I trusted. I love that there is a moment that describes this state-of-being in the Bible, that I can live in that moment today with hope that things will get better.

For instance. When I brought you into your room today for your nap, you danced. That's the first thing you do now, every time I bring you into your room. You run to the center of your pink elephant rug and quickly lift your feet up and down in one place--your version of dancing. Today you also practiced falling down. Dance, dance, dance, fall backward onto your butt. Dance, dance, dance, fall backward. Then you fiddled with the humidifier knob and fiddled with the space heater knob and fiddled with the stereo that sits on the bottom shelf of your bookcase. While I read "Spot Goes to the Beach" you tried to take the child-proof lid off a bottle of liquid Benadryl so my reading was accompanied by the click, click, click of the top not coming off and the click, click, click of your refusal to accept that particular outcome.