On pins and needles

 On pins and needles 

I said to Uncle Albert, “Roz says she’s done. She’s not writing any more posts for me.”
     He said, “Aren’t you well enough now?”
     “Not quite. My sense of smell: It’s as if the coffee’s brewing but can’t wake me up yet.”
     “Why don’t you get your dead sister to send you a letter? You could run that.”
     “Hah!” I said.
     “Hah, what?”
     “As if it were as easy as that. I’d have to write to her, and I can’t, right?”
     “Phone her,” he said, obviously a great joke: he raised his eyebrows and laughed.

The last time Moira wrote, she wrote about our mom, who died in 2007:

You asked about Mom. I never see her except from a distance. And I’ll wave my arms over my head, and she’ll wave back but with just her hand and she keeps going. Though he didn’t know her growing up, Bucket does see her, quite often, and they talk. He says she likes to talk, or more to listen, though she does seem confused about many things. She admits it. “This,” she gestures “is bigger than the world,” which, apparently, was confusing enough. This is what Les says. But it is and was also delightful enough, heaven and earth. Les says it doesn’t seem to matter to her whether she understands particularly what is going on or not. Not understanding something doesn’t mean that it isn’t interesting as far as it can be understood and it isn’t worth being curious about even beyond that. He says,“I wouldn’t say she doesn’t put experiences into categories, but the categories are pretty broad, and there is one large, general one, ‘odds and ends,’ I might call it.”
     Does this make sense to you? Is this the way you remember her? I ask because I find I can’t trust my memory.

As if I could trust mine!

Uncle Albert wants to know how Moira writes if she doesn’t have real hands.
     “What makes you think she doesn’t?” And I told him about the letter about Mom. “She’s waving her arms, isn’t she? And what would be on the end of them?” A blue jay flies from somewhere high across the window on his way to the seed the cardinals have spilled from the feeder to the ground.
     “But what does your friend Jesus say in the one bride for seven brothers story? In the resurrection, there will be no marriage or being given in marriage.”
     “Yes, I know it: ‘For they shall be like angels in heaven.’ But what’s your point? Angels don't have hands?”
     “I wouldn’t think real ones.”
     “What do you always say, ‘Well, that’s what thinking does for you.’ Who writes the names in the book of life?”
     “Well, that’s what thinking does for you. Aren’t they written ‘before the foundation of the world’?”
     “Still, by who?” Then, “whom,” I amended.
     “You know ‘before the foundation’ means before there were angels.”
     “So God has hands.”
     Uncle Albert shrugs. The jay starts singing. “Without feet,” I say, “how do they dance on the head of a pin?”
                                                                          02.18.22