This I Believe Party

Our local NPR station, WKMS, and our wonderful magazine, Paducah Life, sponsored a This I Believe essay writing contest, and yesterday they held a party to celebrate. It was held at our most wonderful independent movie theater, Maiden Alley Cinema. (Maiden Alley, just a block off the river, used to host another ... um ... business ... er ... clientele... oh, never mind.) This weekend the theater is playing The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes, a documentary on Garrison Keillor.
At the party, there was an open mic (mike?) session, and I read this:

I believe that if you walk through a busy airport with a big bunch of daffodils that you just picked from your garden people will smile at you. Everyone. Daffodils have the power.


I believe that a lifelong laughing friend of the heart can recline, supine, paralyzed by a cancer in her brain, locked by her disloyal body in a little dark room, with the blinds drawn so she can “rest”. This friend who always laughed and helped, loved open fields and dogs running, and brought more smiles than any daffodil, now in her special hospice gown with oxygen and sensory deprivation. I believe that her soul will triumph and I won’t understand the mystery of it.

I believe that God reveals himself in the friend with cancer when she cries, “Oh help me” and in the baby who smells right and who searches my face with virgin blurry vision. Those eyes not fully of this world. Yet. Still.

And yes, I believe there is God deep in my Old Dog’s eyes, eyes of knowing and acceptance and love resounding. Tolerance.

God is revealed in the gentle back rub of a soul mate; that touch which asks nothing but to give comfort. Feeling the softness of skin on skin. Humanity in touch.

I believe in community. In a fine southern river town where people care. In the mysteries of that water, quiet, deadly, beautiful, peaceful, powerful as heaven.

Constant as a friend.

hug your friends today, be they human, hound, far, near, gone, new, needy, laughing or sad