Pilgrim's Progress

The First Time I Met Otis

I was 11 years old.

I sat in a wing-backed chair in the solarium.

I watched from the sky as foggy light filled the room.

His breath subdued all sound.

“Why do my fingers bleed when I gather flowers?” I asked.

He held me until I fell asleep.

Otis and I have a cerebral jocularity that’s hard to come by these days.

Typical volley:

“I Don’t Know How to Love You”

"This ain’t 300 AD, Man! Grab a dishtowel!"

“So, Why is it necessary to create 5,000 species of butterflies?”

Without a prayer or a Chinamen’s chance, I stand there, legs apart,

shakin’ my fist to the sky.

And on the dialog goes.

When your first morning thought is Otis,

He tells you stuff you never heard before.

Or before you think of the question,

the answer is already there.

I cut off the top of my thumb on my belt

sander. I watched it eject from my body

like a grasshopper.

I yank the rest of me away and the

sander rolls off like a Tonka truck.

I jerk it back with it’s wire leash, and

somehow turned the blasted thing off.

I pull my coat over my good arm and

start on the run over the tractor snowbanks to

my neighbor Mercy’s house.

But when I got to the top of the stairway,

I fainted. Out cold.

I woke up to Rufus pawing on my ear and

crawled to my cell phone to call for Mercy and John.

Our first stop was Urgent Care. They took one

look and sent me to ER.

I’m doin’ the “Reagan on the stretcher” jokes

and singing off key Christmas carols

in the corrider.

John told me how his 18 month old son

lost his pointer in a food processor.

Everyone has a story like this.

A brush with injury is a lesson hard won.

It was priceless to me.

After my singing got old, I straggled over to a nurse

practitioner.

“I’ll stay here all night if you please gimme somethin’

for the pain.”

He stuck me with nerve blocks, antibiotics,

tetanus, and some heavy artillery for the pain.

Then I let myself cry.

I cried because I had no daughters or sons or

mothers to call.

John left the room for a minute.

“So Otis, what’s up?”, I say.

“I put you here.”

In place of my own, He gave me this soft-spoken,

unadorned, faith walking family who wreathed me with

a kind of love I’d never felt before.

The children took my boots off and made me

tea. They stood ready, rubbed my back

and drew pictures for me.

I had no insurance so Mercy called her trusted

homeopathic advisor.

Three times a day I stuck my sheared stump

into a mixture of ‘hot as I can stand it’

herb infused water, then a two minute dive

into polar bear water.

“Within a week it will grow back.”

Mrs. Advisor says.

We studied my injury for home school.

We chat, fold clothes and sing while

they mend my thumb and the pain felt

good because Otis used them to love me.