"Perhaps in time I may meet with another Mr. Collins"

I dreamt for a second time this week about Mary. She has the face of the girl who plays her in the Nativity Story and she's kneeling and saying "do unto to me according to your word." I run past her and let the dirt and dust of the judean streets cling to me...or were they the streets of other countries I had know before...I woke up with a feeling I've had all week dissipating in the antiseptic air of my room. I woke up wondering if those thoughts I've been entertaining of possibly moving to India were even plausible. Could I get used the difference between a people whose idols were sports, beauty and leisure and those who made actual idols of marble and wood to worship? Could I ever leave the church, the 'family,' and people I love so much here?

It seemed so right as I had started considering it while visiting the home of this delightful Sikh family this past weekend and recognized the similitude of our souls in the unique eastern hospitality that they showed, in their loyality, in the boisterious cadence of their speech, and in the dramatic slant of their stories and jokes. As they painted pictures of what it was like during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and described their sometime hilarious experiences in the west and why they had decided to move back to India, I could feel their 15 yr old daughter staring at Jane and I. We found out later it was because she thought we looked like bollywood actresses. Poor dear thing was quite deceived of course :-) but as I thought of what it was like for her to grow up alien and over-protected the states and what it would be like for her to go back to India, I was naively happy.

Was it too late for me? Would I always be passing oblivious, happy men at holiday parties wearing cream colored sweater vests with geometric patterns as they talked to all the cowboys and mountain men who had spent hours at cvs buying hair products?...were there already too many steel skyscrapers, nameless backroads, empty red barns and fallen corn stalks in the landscapes inside of me? ...perhaps there was too much of me in the lines of Seeger and Dylan that have been playing on repeat lately.

If I could just kneel like Mary...I smile and laugh as I think about Jane telling me that, like Elizabeth Bennet, perhaps in time I may meet with another Mr. Collins. Dearest Lord I hope not.

"I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine. The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the building burned. I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned slowly into autumn....Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats, blowing through the letters that we wrote."