I’m A Believer

JK JK JK

Do you knock on wood? Pick up heads up pennies? Purposefully toss salt over your shoulder to counteract the potential bad fortune supposedly prognosticated by unintentionally spilt salt? I do all those things with some regularity and little thought. In the moment I am knocking/retrieving/tossing I might experience fleeting awareness that these are superstitions and superstitions are ridiculous. I proceed anyway. For I was indoctrinated to be superstitious from the moment I was born, and this superstitious behavior was sealed in when, mere weeks after my birth, I was dunked in water supposedly holy and thus washing away some original sin.

I roundly rejected religion when I was nineteen, and not coincidentally shortly after my “father” disowned me. I could never untangle the man from the church. A convert, he illustrated the saying about how those not born into it are the most zealous. He spent far, far more time attending daily mass than tending to the nine children born not for the love of children, but because the powers that be in Rome demanded that believers were obligated to deliver as many more believers as possible.

Of course the indoctrination was impossible to fully eradicate. Hence my clinging to good luck pennies and fending off bad luck by rapping my knuckles on tabletops. And while I long ago quit praying, to this day, four decades after my own conversion to nontheism, I still call out, if sarcastically, for the assistance of Jesus, Mary and Joseph to have mercy on my soul anytime shit hits my fan. So, yes, there are days around here an eavesdropper might confuse me for a believer.

But I will never again be a believer. And yet, I recently experienced an inexplicable miracle in response to an unintended prayer.

Last Tuesday night I got home from my birthday show after 10. My adrenaline was surging from all the fun I’d had. I was wound up beyond wound up. I also knew I needed to sleep for I had a rare morning appointment scheduled for the next day, I wanted to be refreshed and alert, and I am absolute crap if I don’t get a bare minimum of seven hours of slumber. It was nearly midnight by the time I crawled under my blankets and a pile of dogs, closed my eyes, and began my nighttime rituals. The first and most important of these is counting backwards from 100 while I regulate my breathing. The second, also very important, is to catch my mind in the act of drifting to weird, unpleasant and sometimes scary thoughts, at which point to say to myself, out loud, “Change the channel.”

My son swears I taught him this trick when he was little, though I do not remember doing so. He told me this when he was ten years old and, not long after 9/11, when he had a bad dream tangentially related to the attacks of that day. As he related the details, I asked him if he had been frightened. He said no, he just changed the channel as I had instructed him to do.

I still don’t feel right taking credit for that advice, but I quickly latched onto it for personal use. To this day I find it incredibly helpful as night settles over me and I settle into night.

This particular evening, as I lay there counting and breathing and flipping through the channels, I heard inside my head my own voice saying, “Please god, let there be no Thelma diarrhea tomorrow.”

This amused me, that after more than a half-century of rejecting prayer, my exhausted mind had, without my permission, turned to that long discarded ancient childhood bedtime ritual. For when I was little, I was forced to pray every evening. So ingrained was this habit that it did not feel forced. It just was. An activity never, ever, ever to be skipped.

Praying is where I first learned the habit of ineffectual bargaining. I’d let god know that if he would do x, I would do y in gratitude. Long after I left the church I continued to unwittingly mimic this behavior as I got involved with one narcissistic abuser after another, lingering in dangerous relationships, unclear on the concept that walking (or better running) away was the only true solution. Instead I would stick around and try to fix things with a secular variation of prayer, begging the abuser du jour to grant me mercy, for which, in exchange, I would offer up something holy— like my self-esteem, my backbone, my soul.

Remembering this, purely in jest, I added a line to my Diarrhea Prayer for my own amusement. I said to the entity I have no faith in, “And if there’s no diarrhea tomorrow, I will resume believing in you.”

My “prayer” regarding the diarrhea was, as so many prayers are, an act of desperation. Thelma has been sick for nearly a year now. Something is deeply wrong with her bowels and so far no doctor has been able to solve the problem. I’ve been to multiple vets across several appointments. I have spent more than $1000 to get wrong diagnoses, x-rays, medication, and sundry expensive foods. Nothing has helped. I have watched Thelma’s body perilously shrink to nearly half her healthy size. It is alarming and disturbing.

Most days she will have multiple accidents. This is why my floor is typically covered in a massive canvas of pee pads, across which Thelma will Jackson Pollock her way, leaving a tremendous mess I will not further detail here because you get the idea. While I am pleased with the patience I have developed around her illness and all that involves on my end, the whole protracted ordeal has been exhausting for both of us.

Hence that silly little prayer that flitted through my racing mind as I attempted to beckon the sandman. Could I please, please, please just have one morning where I wake up and don’t have to deal with a river of shit?

I was more startled and alarmed than relieved when, lo, I awoke on Wednesday morning to no liquid poop. The pee pads remained snowy white. I panicked. I am a woman of my word. Did this mean I would have to hold up my end of the deal and start believing in Sky Wizard again, as I had been forced to do as a child?

Fortunately, I was spared on a technicality, for upon being released to the backyard, Thelma let loose an arcing steamy brown stream across the lawn. Barring a full on cure to her ailment, I thus concluded I could remain a heathen.

A few nights ago, I went to the best funeral service I’ve ever been to. This necessitated entering a church, where I sat with many other non-believers as we honored our friend. She was also not a traditional believer, according to the eulogy of her sister who grew up to be a priest. Attending that service, which fell at the end of a work shift, meant I’d return home later than usual, exponentially increasing the odds that I would have a mess waiting for me.

Though I did not utter a word of prayer in that purported House of the Lord, for the second time in less than a week I discovered the pee pads unsullied, white as the driven snow, no offerings from the disgruntled bowels of Poor Thelma. Was this a sign that god approved of me going to church? Was I being rewarded?

It’s not really funny, the backstory of this Pray the Poop Away episode. Parsing it offers an opportunity for me to become enraged anew at the manipulation of religion, and how it is often imposed upon us when we are way, way too young and pre-frontally undeveloped to apply logic to superstition and thus dissipate it. But my gratitude for the poop reprieve superseded any residual aggravation around organized religion. I couldn’t help but laugh at the entire situation.

Thelma has been showing very slight improvement lately, nothing you would notice unless you were intimately involved with her heinie on the daily as I am. In part I credit another superstition, that Laying of Hands can be curative. I believe this so much, in fact, that to me it’s not a superstition. Every day, several times per day, I take the time to place my hands on Thelma’s abdomen and radiate healing energy into her large intestines, for this is the one thing the medical people can agree on—whatever is happening, it’s an upper bowel situation. Is this really what’s healing her? My hands? I don’t care because the superstition serves me. I keep doing it.

There has been a silver lining to her chronic illness. Thelma has been, since she joined the pack when I found her and her sister Louise thrown out by the side of the road at eight weeks old, visibly neurodivergent. She is suspicious, cautious, and food aggressive. A Heinz 57 for sure, she clearly has some retriever in her. Countless times she has entered a room with something—for example an entire roll of toilet paper—wedged in her mouth, the expression in her eyes suggesting she shares my surprise and isn’t quite sure herself how this thing got stuck in her jaws.

During the early days of lockdown, when Norris was still alive and I had five dogs up in my grill all day, I unintentionally cast Thelma in the role I had occupied in my family. She was the troublemaker, the one most likely to get into mischief, the squeaky wheel, the one most in need of discipline. It took me longer than it should have to notice that I, in turn, became with her as my parents had been with me. Impatient. Non-understanding. Short tempered.

When I did finally notice I was treating her with less respect than the others, I created a ritual to help us both. A ritual far more powerful than any traditional prayer I ever uttered. She would do something that displeased me—start a fight with the others, eat a shoe, make a fuss. And I would catch myself just before resorting to my regular habit of chastising her. Instead I replaced earlier words of displeasure with a chant. “Belly belly belly!” I would say cheerfully, a signal to us both. Hearing these words, she’d stop whatever she was up to and allow me access to her belly, belly, belly. I in turn would rub, rub, rub. We both felt better immediately.

Even if Thelma starts delivering firm poops in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, I will never again buy into the notion there’s some white dude somewhere pulling the strings. My personal religion can be summed up easily, in the lyrics of Chrissie Hynde, who wrote that the reason we’re here is to love each other. And in the lyrics of Iris Dement, who wrote that she prefers to let the mystery be. And, of course, most important of all: In Dog We Trust. Always.

NOTES:

Y’all, I would so love to hear in the comments about your superstitions, rituals, religions, and righteous pets. Please don’t be shy about it. Let’s have a conversation.

Mark your calendars— On Saturday Feb 25th I’m hosting the first of what I hope will be an ongoing thing here at the ranch: Tiny T Tiny Flea Market. It will be a mashup of art, garage sale items, food and entertainment. Oh, and yoga for everybody. If you’re a vendor interested in participating, you can just hit reply to this email.

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As ever, I would love for you to send me your stories of kindness to hang on the walls of the TinyChapelOfKindness.org. Speaking of which, Mike Lee of KUT, Austin’s NPR affiliate, just did a sweet piece about the chapel. You can listen here: https://www.kut.org/life-arts/2023-01-09/everybody-is-welcome-spike-gillespie-creates-a-tiny-chapel-of-kindness