New Testament Ray is moving to Chicago for a semester or so to teach at the Lutheran School of Theology there (LSTC) as visiting guru or however they arrange those things. My last year in seminary our visiting guru was John Bright, a fucking brilliant Old Testament guy out of the thinking end of the Baptist tradition (yes, it exists), and a full-fledged Southern Gentleman, a beautiful demeanor and drawl like a light in the drab Minnesota nice that smiles while it strangles you. Dr. Bright (not ‘John’) was very proper with a dignified formality, announced two weeks before the end of the term ‘Ah’d lak to make some informal comments and reflections on the prophets’ and spent ten hours puttin’ it all together in an off-hand sort of way that held me spellbound and at the end elicited a standing ovation from all of us—the only one I ever encountered in school. So Ray’s in good company, though hardly could be considered as out of the dignified professorial formality school, being more like a kid in a candy store when doing the new testament thing; but he’s brilliant (in some areas) nonetheless, and the whole church will be enriched by his guruizing.

However, he’s driving to Chicago by way of Los Angeles—typical for an academic: nothing is ever direct—though the detour makes sense because of his lover out there, the (presumably) delectable Liz. So I offered to drive with him to Phoenix, and on Thursday zipped over to Austin where he was closing out his apartment. He picked me up at the airport (where I’d parked for the flight back from Phoenix) around 5:00, informing me that all the big stuff was out of the apartment and there was only about two hours’ work to finish it off, which, when I saw it, elicited ‘two hours my ass; we’ll be lucky to be done by ten’, and it was midnight by the time we showed up at Gentle Greg’s place for a free bed and nice (though brief) hospitality. The last three hours of work was to Ray’s mantric response to all of my inquiries, ‘fuckit, it’s too late, throw it out’, and I tossed whatever it was in the pile of shit he had to haul to the trash, the bin being some 200 yards away through apartments and parking lots. I made him haul that shit alone, because he’d already been at the moving business for 15 hours straight, and I knew he’d be useless as a turd in the car the next day. No sense in wearing us both out. We packed his gorgeous Audi for the trip and I came to know what John Glenn felt like when he was shoe-horned into that first space capsule.

We pulled out of somewhere around Austin about 8:45 a.m. on the Third Friday of Advent with NT Ray at the wheel and me wondering how long he’d last before nodding off. I’ve come to realize that I have a soporific effect on him, ala ‘I can relax around you, Larry’ just before the snoring begins, regardless of what it is we are doing, though we made it the several hours to I-10 without incident, where I took over and cruised that marvelous work of human engineering at an easy 88, leaving mere mortals in the rearview mirror with a tap on the accelerator—what a fine machine that Audi is. (At dusk, ‘hey, where’s the light switch?’ ‘Larry, it’s automatic; everything in this car is automatic—if you know German’ and peals of slap-happy laughter).

We breezed across the west Texas vistas, threaded our way through El Paso, and hop-scotched the semi’s going into Las Cruces, where we had supper. He slept a lot, talked with the Presumably Delectable Liz almost as much, and would occasionally thrill us both by looking up from a snooze and screaming ‘WATCH OUT!!!’ upon seeing the vehicle in front of us I’d been trying to pass for five miles. Dude, go back to sleep. After dinner he took us to Willcox (Az) where there was room at the inn, though mr. directions couldn’t find the bar in the place and it was too cold to keep looking, so we had a couple of sodas and called it a night. It was a three-hour trip to Phoenix the next morning through unbelievable traffic across a land that might have once been desert, but is no longer even that pretty, being littered with human junk. I caught the flight back to Austin; caught my pickup back to Houston; and the next day did the Sunday gig at Beaumont thinking I’m gettin’ real tired of I-10 and marveling that only two introverts could call spending that much time together and speaking maybe 19 full paragraphs a ‘great visit’. Man love doesn’t require a lot of words, ’cause it’s in our genes to be silent together while stalking the prey, y’know (a reality the darling still cannot conceive of in her interrogations of my times with others).

Teacher Son Saul showed up Monday morning while I was still unbending from the shape of car and plane seats. I’d agreed to play santa’s workshop elf in his project to build the Washers Box game (like horseshoes, but with washers in a wooden box) for gifts, a cool idea patterned on the one his grandfather (my father-in-law, rip) made for us a few decades back. ‘How many you do you want to make?’ thinking three or four: ‘Eleven.’ Thus we became full-timers in the garage those two days when the temps took a dive into the 30’s cuttin’ and poundin’ and cussin’ and making the requisite forty-seven trips to the hardware store after the initial parts list had been purchased. We were so busy we barely greeted my mother-in-law who had flown in from St. Louis for the week, and, true to Santa Keene fashion, finished the gifts about noon on Christmas Eve (and, by the way, in a real first for workshop Larry, without cuts and blood).

That left us time to clean up for the trip to B’mont where Doc Boner and his crew the Houston Slide Oil Company were playing for the service I was preaching, so the whole clan ended up journeying to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, albeit it different shifts, T S Saul volunteering to take the early drive with Pastordad, the rest following behind later, though Doc Boner’s crew was ahead of us on a different schedule. The service called for a children’s sermon and the Blessing of the Crèche or whatever, but there being no children among the geezers for the sermon, I grabbed The Queen who’d come with New Momma Deb and One L Wil, and warmed everybody’s hearts by praying with Her ten-month-old Highness before the manger; geez that ought to get me a raise. Afterwards we went in peace and dispersed like shepherds into the dark night, the journey to Bethlehem and back having run six hours.

T S offered to handle the drive home, so I kicked back with a smoke and not a thought about the traffic—I’ve driven roundtrip with him to Canada and trust his piloting in spite of his unnerving habit of cell phone text-messaging as he drives. We interrupted the silences with conversation, first as to the metaphorical nature of the Bible, ala Pastordad: ‘God is an energy. You can no more catch God in words than you can catch light in a net,’ which led into his expertise of literature, especially poetry, and an explanation of the ‘metaphysical conceit’ of John Donne’s work in, e.g. ‘The Flea’—’Dad, the poet’s trying to convince some chick to let him bone her’. He cruised me through the beauty he sees in it all—’the last three pages of Camus’ The Stranger are the best ever written’—and I bumbled in to mentioning that one of my favorite poems was that one by Yeats, which I can’t remember the title of but has the phrase ‘widening gyre’ in the opening line. Being, as he said, ‘not particularly familiar’ with ol’ W.B. it took him nearly five miles to come up with the title—”The Second Coming”—and another eight miles for the first three lines,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. . . .

I coughed up the final, claiming it to be the best line in all of Christian literature,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Then we fell into silence for awhile, approaching home. Geez, I love it that I raised brilliant kids.

The clan gathered again Christmas morning, all twelve of us: the darling and the mother-in-law; T S and Easy Laughin’ Cheryl; Doc Boner and Cat Lover Rayna; New Momma Deb and One L Wil; and, of course, The Queen, whose pile of gifts from doting aunts, uncles, and grandparents were the envy of all and the occasion, much later in the day after she’d spent hours manically dashing from one thing to another and finally, as all kids do, broke into the screaming squallies, of grandpa’s observation ‘it’s a symptom of affluenza—that peculiar insanity brought about by having too much,’ which, however, was not well received by the doters, this still being Christmas and all.

I got my bb gun for Christmas—a Red Ryder at that, and a bottle of 2400 bbs. After T S and Easy Cheryl left Doc Boner and I stepped into the back yard to try it out, whereupon I immediately plunked a squirrel in the ass who did a nifty mid-air summersault and hauled it up the tree, though then I felt bad ’cause he hadn’t been breaking any rules, so swore off plunking innocents for fun. We tossed a couple of cans out there and took turns trying to hit them, stabilizing on a table and getting all zen-like in our breathing, hitting about 60% on a good round. The mother-in-law showed up and being a gamester wanted her turn and on the second shot managed to hit the edge of the table four feet in front of us bouncing that bb back and terrifying Doc and I with the thought of eyes put out. In deference to her, however, we later discovered that the table blocked her view of most of the target; still, that it hit the edge and didn’t simply skim off the top is a million-in-one shot (the kind, undoubtedly, that always takes an eye out). The darling appeared wanting her turn then just stood there and aimed her shot while Doc and I chuckled to each other behind her knowing there was no way she could hit the can free standin’; she’d be lucky to hit the fence. The first plink amazed us; the second awed us; the third out of five started us thinking. One L Wil showed up, and the game was on, complete with rules and points and bonuses and scorecard. One L and Doc were equally chagrined and proud when the darling and I were tied for champion even after four or five shoot-offs, when the game was called on account of hunger. The champion debate continued over the meal with my claim of having shot the only perfect five for five round, she discounting it on the basis of me having 45 minutes’ practice before her, and besides you can’t decide bonuses after the fact, so it was a stand-off. Everybody won and we called it a day, more or less, fading into that Christmas night twilight of contented stillness.

We all gathered yet again the next day, though missing Cat Lover Rayna who was at work at the clinic loving cats, at T S and Easy Cheryl’s place so they could show it off to Grandma (being the great grandma—GG—of The Queen). T S had come down with the Houston Sinus Coughin’ & Sneezin’ Snotitis of the season and so over-grilled the brats, though doing a magnificent job with jalapeno poppers and hospitality. I enjoy watching my kids and their spouses having conversations that don’t include the darling or I—they occasionally do stuff together without inviting us; it’s nice to see they can have these relationships without and/or in spite of us, ’specially given the diversity of everybody’s uniqueness. Ever quick with the obvious insight it it suddenly dawned on me that we had raised three teachers—Boner at the college level (eventually), T S at high school, and New Momma in upper elementary (toss in the darling at the pre-K/early elementary realm and we could open our own school)—without any particular intentionality, each one being a natural teacher, as it were, like some genetic thing; and in different ways each of their spouses making that possible and how good that is for the world. I did not, however, bask for long in this self-congratulatory warmth as it became necessary to join the game and prove—eventually before them all—my awe-inducing side-splitting ineptitude at the Wii game; in spite of T S’s best efforts at coaching they were all stunned into hilarity earning ‘y’all can kiss my ass.’ The damn electronic game presumes you have sense of touch in both hands; so does everybody else. Since the saw chomping I have it in only 1.2 hands.

(An aside: the kids gave us a Wii for Christmas last year; they followed up this year with the ‘game’ called ‘Wii Fit’, which comes with a platform that looks suspiciously like a bathroom scale, earning Boner’s observation, ‘Yeah, nothing says ‘you’re fat’ like getting a Wii Fit for Christmas.’ Okay: ’since the folks won’t go to the gym, we’ll bring the gym to them’.)

I took yesterday off—jumping at the opportunity afforded by the local senior seminarian in town to visit his folks—’You wanna preach the Sunday after Christmas? Why sure, do the whole thing. I’ll stay home.’ It took me a good 15 years to figure out that there was nothing intrinsically noble about sticking around for the downer Sundays like after Christmas and Easter and Memorial Day weekend and so started pawning them off however I could. (I have never, for example, preached a sermon about The Slaughter of the Innocents [thanks mostly be to the Lovely Lynette at Messiah], that horrific story that comes a Sunday or two after Christmas. On the other hand, I always lost the battle about having church when Christmas falls on Sunday in spite of the services the night before, church councils insisting it must happen even though, no, they won’t be there either; what I call an exercise in piety by proxy—’I'll vote to make somebody suffer for Jesus.’) So instead of preaching I spent much of the day writing, eventually stepping out into sociability with whoever happened to be around.

At twilight time I recalled the video conference (via webcam; I’m so technomacho) with NT Ray on Christmas Eve. He was ohmygosh a ‘little tired’ having pulled into Presumably Delectable Liz’s place Saturday night just in time to go hoofing it off on ‘the Posada’ (Las Posadas), a Christmas tradition of the poor latino community in which P D Liz is a pastor. It’s a sort of an enactment of Mary and Joseph looking for a room at the inn—going to from house to house being refused until finally finding the place, the inn, so to speak, where the party is held. This goes on for nine days—a moveable feast in the name of Jesus. Ray caught the last four days of it and was approaching psychic and cultural overload, like some hallucinogenic mind-blower at the Fillmore back in the 60’s: ‘I’m a little tired, but I feel good; just wish people would stop sliding off the wall.’

Think about that: we of white European descent took the birth of Jesus and turned it into the penitential season of Advent—gettin’ ready for Jesus by feelin’ bad for our sins. The friggin’ Mexicans took it and turned it into an extended party.

I’m pretty sure they got it right.

I’m pretty sure that the presence of Jesus is a moveable feast, wherever the door of hospitality is opened.