CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
Helen slipped on the ice at the end of our street and fell backward and, as granddaughter Brigid said when she was little, “bonked her noggin.” She is in concussion protocol.
She lay there until Heather and Jack came along. Heather and Helen get together on Tuesday mornings for coffee. She was very helpful. Jack is a blind and deaf Yorkie. He wasn’t as helpful. Helen called me. I got there in about 3 minutes and got her home.
The triage nurse said to put ice on her noggin, which seemed contradictory, and adding insult to injury, since ice was what caused the problem in the first place.
After that, the first thing she did, knowing that a concussion sometimes takes away your senses, was to bake brownies, to check on her taste and smell. They seem to be okay. So are her priorities.
The first thing I did was email Glenn to tell him. He’s sort of shut in, so I always email him when some disaster befalls. Helen says the first thing she’ll do when I die is email Glenn to find out why I died.
She was dizzy the first night after the bonk and bounced from wall to wall in the hallway on her way to the bathroom. Well, that’s what old people’s walls are for, to bounce off, so we don’t fall down.
However, she hit the thermostat and unknowingly turned the furnace off. That’s not good when the temperature is 9 degrees.
She’s acting sort of different in other ways, too. Our church is hoping that more of us can come to worship in person, now that it seems the pandemic is beginning to wane, so our pastors are encouraging people to wear name the name tags that the office makes for us and puts out on a table for us to pick up as we come in.
Actually, name tags are probably more important when we are masked. I have a better chance of knowing who a person is if I can see their face, with or without a name tag. [Yes, I, too, hate using “their/them” when it should be singular, but it seems to be necessary these days.]
Anyway, Helen remembered that several months ago, when we were still going to church in person instead of worshiping via livestream, she had brought her name tag home to put a rainbow ribbon on it and hadn’t had a chance to return it to the name tag table at church. So, wearing her nightgown, drinking coffee, she wore her name tag for worship this morning. Probably a good thing; I’m not quite sure who she is these days.
Also, her memory reasoning seems to have sharpened. In 1965, when I was the Methodist Wesley Foundation campus minister at INSU in Terre Haute, we bought a pink kitchen set for our little girls. It was really neat. Unfortunately, it was made of especially endurable cardboard, and dowel rods, and had to be put together. From 18 pages of instructions!
We could not start construction when the girls might have found it, so we had to wait until they went to bed Christmas eve. Helen and I together spent Christmas eve, from when the girls went to bed until when they got up Christmas morning, putting that kitchen together. [Probably the greatest strain our marriage ever had to survive.]
Just now she said, “I just thought of something. We could have taken those pink kitchen parts to The Wesley Foundation before Christmas, and worked on it there where the girls wouldn’t know about it. We could even have paid students to put it together!” Only 57 years too late.
One response of her noggin getting bonked is a reduction in the complexity of her dreams. She says it’s quite nice. “My dreams are so simple now. I wake up feeling refreshed instead of distraught, the way those complex dreams make me.” Maybe we all need a noggin bonking.
John Robert McFarland
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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