Let Me Be the Vessel of Your Will
Dec. 8th, 2020 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWith just four days remaining in the great You, Too, Can Pass the USMLE and Become an American DOK-TAH! sweepstakes, I have shifted into confidence-building mode.
I am praising Nafisa lavishly: You got the comma right! Way to GO!
I am actually advising her to study less (knowing full well she won’t, of course.) At this point, it’s all about relaxation.
Last night, I actually found myself advising her to pray: “Ask God to make you the vessel for His will,” I said. “You will be such a wonderful doctor! Let God use you.”
Across the Zoom ether, I watched Nafisa’s eyes fill with tears.
I could scarcely believe the words were coming out of my mouth!
For one thing, I don’t believe in God. Or, at least, in an anthropomorphic God like Allah or his disgruntled cousin Yahweh.
But they’re words I sometimes murmur to myself—like I’m asking for a personal favor or something—and not just when times are tough: Let me be the vessel of Your will.
Here I am in the halcyon days of my first marriage. That’s my first husband to my right and our friend Marco to my left. We had just completed some bicycle race across the Golden Gate Bridge:
In those days, I was a demon bike racer. In fact, bicycles are how my first husband and I met. Bill was not my biking partner of choice, though: He was a much faster cyclist than I was and had this distressing habit of speeding up to the summit of whatever steep hill we were on and then coasting back down to circle me as I plugged up the grade, gasping for breath, like some kind of raptor flying circles around an animal it had marked for death.
Eventually, I would have divorced him for that alone.
Even if everything else had been perfect.
No, my biking partner of choice was Bibbit, and unfortunately, I have no photographs of the two of us cycling together.
You know the game you play where you try to remember that one time when you were perfectly happy?
(It makes for good literature. That scene in Brideshead Revisited with Charles, Sebastien and the strawberries, where Sebastien says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember”? I am very sure that is Evelyn Waugh remembering the One Perfect Day.)
For me, it will always be that glorious day when Bibbit and I rode our bicycles up Spruce Street and onto Grizzley Peak Boulevard, and the sun was out and a light breeze blew, and the smell of the sage and the brickelbush rose in the air. I got a flat tire! Neither of us had remembered to bring our puncture kits! And we just laughed. Sat by the side of the road, yodeling Some Day, My Prince Will Come and laughing. And eventually another cyclist did come—we didn’t ask to check his pedigree for royal blood—and changed my tire for me. (If we’d been committed feminists, of course, we would have insisted upon changing it ourselves! But it would have taken a lot longer.)
Ah, Bibbit!
I’d give a lot to find out what happened to you.
And now back to our regularly programmed, boring but remunerative work.
I am praising Nafisa lavishly: You got the comma right! Way to GO!
I am actually advising her to study less (knowing full well she won’t, of course.) At this point, it’s all about relaxation.
Last night, I actually found myself advising her to pray: “Ask God to make you the vessel for His will,” I said. “You will be such a wonderful doctor! Let God use you.”
Across the Zoom ether, I watched Nafisa’s eyes fill with tears.
I could scarcely believe the words were coming out of my mouth!
For one thing, I don’t believe in God. Or, at least, in an anthropomorphic God like Allah or his disgruntled cousin Yahweh.
But they’re words I sometimes murmur to myself—like I’m asking for a personal favor or something—and not just when times are tough: Let me be the vessel of Your will.
Here I am in the halcyon days of my first marriage. That’s my first husband to my right and our friend Marco to my left. We had just completed some bicycle race across the Golden Gate Bridge:
In those days, I was a demon bike racer. In fact, bicycles are how my first husband and I met. Bill was not my biking partner of choice, though: He was a much faster cyclist than I was and had this distressing habit of speeding up to the summit of whatever steep hill we were on and then coasting back down to circle me as I plugged up the grade, gasping for breath, like some kind of raptor flying circles around an animal it had marked for death.
Eventually, I would have divorced him for that alone.
Even if everything else had been perfect.
No, my biking partner of choice was Bibbit, and unfortunately, I have no photographs of the two of us cycling together.
You know the game you play where you try to remember that one time when you were perfectly happy?
(It makes for good literature. That scene in Brideshead Revisited with Charles, Sebastien and the strawberries, where Sebastien says, “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember”? I am very sure that is Evelyn Waugh remembering the One Perfect Day.)
For me, it will always be that glorious day when Bibbit and I rode our bicycles up Spruce Street and onto Grizzley Peak Boulevard, and the sun was out and a light breeze blew, and the smell of the sage and the brickelbush rose in the air. I got a flat tire! Neither of us had remembered to bring our puncture kits! And we just laughed. Sat by the side of the road, yodeling Some Day, My Prince Will Come and laughing. And eventually another cyclist did come—we didn’t ask to check his pedigree for royal blood—and changed my tire for me. (If we’d been committed feminists, of course, we would have insisted upon changing it ourselves! But it would have taken a lot longer.)
Ah, Bibbit!
I’d give a lot to find out what happened to you.
And now back to our regularly programmed, boring but remunerative work.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 02:32 pm (UTC)You are absolutely correct about that behavior justifying filing for a divorce.
S and I have had to engage in a lot of extended negotiations around bicycling, but in the very least he's understanding of the need for give-and-take.
One of my favorite bicycling companions is my friend DR. When I bike with her, we're never in an especially big hurry and we always go somewhere interesting and fun. Ah!
no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 02:45 pm (UTC)I was a pretty ardent cyclist up till the time I moved to the Hudson Valley, in fact. Twenty miles a day. But the roads where I live now are twisty and turny with low visibility. And I've gotten morbid about accidents. Tumbles didn''t used to phase me, but now I think, Broken hip! And that's kinda the beginning of the end for people my age (68).
I was a jock in my youth. Like I went most of the way to a black belt in Tae Kwon Do but had to give it up after I had my first kid 'cause no time.
Up through last year, I was running most days. Now I walk five miles most days. If I can lose that 10 pounds I gained from Covid-stress eating, I may go back to running.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 03:05 pm (UTC)I'm not sure whether S and I will make the expedition by bicycle or by kayak first. We shall see!
no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 03:11 pm (UTC)Yah, I have eyed the Railroad Trail. Which is paved! And hooks up nicey to the Walkway. At least 10 miles without cars! 😊 Now that I have a car that I can actually put a bike into—for some reason, bicycle racks on the backs of cars make me nervous!—riding a bike again is seeming a lot more possible.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-14 12:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-14 03:05 pm (UTC)