Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Passing God’s Test: Two Sweet Slices of a Decent Weekend

Let’s start with a little list to get the juices flowing: WAYS GOD TESTS ME
* Short Answer
* Multiple Choice
* Flaming Lionpit

Okay good then, and now we can move on to a few notes to keep the golden moments from getting too far away from me:

FOOT MASSAGE: Several little rub-down joints have opened along my stretch of the Inner Richmond, and one is so near to my home that I couldn’t help but get hooked in for their advertised $25/hour foot massage.  I mean, for an Andy and and Abe, how can I go wrong?  Even if the place was a roach-ridden rathole with soggy linens and black mold that spelled out satanic curses, I’d at least get a blog post out of it.  And so I did, but not for that reason.  This place turns out to be nicely decorated with one of those “water-wall” waterfalls, a big-screen tv, and nice big comfy chairs.  Seems they’ve even got a steam sauna and full-on lie-down rooms in the back but I wasn’t ready for that much treatment.  Instead I just settled down with my feet in a bucket of hotsoak and “Joe” (I don’t think that was his name in the original Cantonese) started working on my back, neck, and arms - 20 minutes of accupressure and deep tissue manipulation.  He used his elbow, people.  He snapped my fingers for me.  He pushed his fingers right into my fontenelle, and I tell you what, that does not happen to Chuckles every day.  After a third of an hour of this I was pretty relaxed, except for the times he got right into a plexus and set me writhing with the effort of not pulling away, but he was just getting started.  The next step was 20 more minutes per foot (with “foot” defined as including the ankle and shin).  He ran his iron thumb down the muscles of my foreshank, worked the blood back into my toenails, and ground his knuckle so deep into my sole I could see it coming out through the top of my foot.  To those who think this sounds unpleasant, or who saw The Amazing Race and know it can hurt, well, sometimes it did.  But I have some troubled pods and I needed someone to FORCE the vital essence back where it belonged.  Joe had the goods and he gave them to me.  A powerful experience.  Powerful good. 

CROQUET: Friends invited us to a Memorial Day Croquet Picnic, which is sadly unacronymical because it was such a good time I wish I could reference it with fewer syllables.  Kel was stuck at home with a sleeping Jesse, so Zach and I made an appearance.  His good friend Eli was there and they played like maniacs, tag and rockets and tree-climbing and tag again and again and again, and at one point I caught them both sitting with their backs against a big shady eucalyptus tree on the far side of all of us, effectively hidden but still very much nearby, eating crackers and chatting quietly like good friends are supposed to do even when they’re not yet five years old.  But the best of all, I think, was when Michael broke out the mallets and wickets and started teaching them the fine art of ballwhacking.  Michael is a dandy - he dresses for every occasion and never a hair is out of place.  To balance this out, he’s one of the nicest, funniest, warmest people anybody has ever met, and he proved it by taking it upon himself to teach two four-year-olds how to play croquet, with infinite patience and generous flexibility.  He took it out on the grownups during a later match, where he wiped up the lawn with some of my other friends.  But with the kids, he was pure gentility - even when they all stripped the heads off the mallets and he taught them the fundamentals of swordplay-with-sticks.  Sure, the jug red wine was tasty, and the watermelon, and the korean veggie sushi and the potato snax.... but the sweetest of all was to witness the kids learning how to picnic like grownups.  Grownups with mallets and swords. 

There, that ought to commemorate that.  Or something.  It’s the little things that add texture, and that are so easily misplaced.  Speaking of which, if any of you have a spare Dr Manhattan watchcap, I’m willing to make a reasonable offer for it.  Yes, some things were gained this past weekend, and something was lost.  And even though the loss was difficult for me, the gains were so rich and resonant that I think I can still go forward with a stalwart heart.  And renewed arches in my feet.  And a wooden mallet.  Do NOT forget the mallet.  I already have the firey lionpit.  Liony firepit?  It’s all good....