Foreignness...

Well, the appointment that next day (the 8th) was a crap appointment, the ripples from which are pretty devastating from a medical care standpoint ... not a physical one.  And today's was no picnic either (about half drown in one of those ripples) and I want, very much, to write about what has happened, but I have been wanting to write, too, about the baby in the jar.  And so I am.  Only, really, what I want to say is so very clear in my head, but keeps stumbling about on the page.

The world I grew up in and that in which my best friend grew are planets apart.  We are just far enough in age that there are some cultural stuff that is familiar to me and not to her.  Plus, well, Texas is just plain different from the rest of the other states.  But I mean our families.  And the families of my other dear friends.  I knew this, but I been realizing, for a while now, just how profound that is for me.  It is a chasm too vast for me to cross, I think.

Not that I need to do so in order to be or remain friends.
Not that they want me to.
I just need it to be okay to have such foreignness in me.

I gave an example of that foreignness ... wanting to write about the baby in the jar.  When I was a little girl, I played with the baby in the jar that was in my grandmother's bathroom cabinet.  She was a science teacher and saw nothing wrong with having the body of a human being in her bathroom cabinet.

For the most part, I only have flashes of fragments of not quite memories.  I am a stranger to my life and my lack of personal history oft makes me feel the alien.  A gift my sister has been giving me of late is telling me stories of growing up.  What I do remember in detail is what she doesn't know.  And what I wish with my whole being I could forget.  What she remembers I do not know.

Some of the fragments, the flashes, are just a breath of feeling.  When I was in the fourth grade, we moved across town. This was in Houston, before we relocated to Dallas, the city where I would call home.  We lived in a townhouse adjacent to a wood.  On the other side was the Goodyear blimp hanger.  The wood was filled with wild dogwood.  It was a magical, magical place.  If I close my eyes, I can almost ... almost remember it.  The flash is this snippet of looking up at the sky through the blossoms.  Oh, how I wish I could remember that place!

Back in those days, security was a different animal, so I often snuck up to watch the maintenance on the blimp ... even daring the hanger.  What a wild thought!  It was massive.  It was a marvel.  It was as otherworldly as the dark wood dappled with sunlight.

I rock my body in time with the one I hold in my hand as I shake the jar.  I can feel the cool glass. I can see the curve of the nose on the tiny body.  I can sense the emptiness of the tiled bathroom.  My musing.  My isolation.  My fear.

I grew up playing with a baby in the glass jar.  That was my normal, my frame of reference for building a world view.  Sometimes, I find it very, very, very difficult to wrap my heart and mind and soul around the forgiveness of Christ whilst standing in a world where playing with the body of a human being is normal.

How can He possibly forgive me?