Soul Food

www.route-66-diner.com

I didn't intend to take the whole day off. It was just a lunch with Dan but there's no way I can return to work now. Not after those cinnamon rolls. Not after the lunch I just packed away.

The Route 66 Diner is located, not surprisingly, in Tulsa's Route 66 district. Fresh bread is made everyday and eating it is a spiritual experience. This is the kind of bread that should be served in churches, although the yeast thing would drive some of my holier-than-thou friends nuts. (note -- did you know that the whole thing with yeast in the bible is the idea that sin causes us to go outside our boundaries, like dough rising, hence the whole unleavened thing. After today's bread, I say, what kind of a God wouldn't eat bread like this???) I remember when I was a kid, eating my grandmother's baking and I would find myself humming, the food was that good. As I sat today in the cool autumn air, finishing off a slice (more like a a slab) of that great bread I felt like that kid again, coming in after playing outside, eating something that was both soulful and sinful.

After the lunch I couldn't focus, couldn't concentrate. I indulged other appetites. I stopped by the library and checked out two new authors. I stopped by my favorite florist and found candles and I am content this afternoon, in the lingering scent of fig/olive and the remains of a cinnamon roll to simply loll through the afternoon.

Girl at Cafe

I'm sitting here at a local restaurant stop and I have given myself a 30 minute window to write for 30 minutes. I people watch and I see this lady sitting near me and I want to write about her...she is reading a very large book, it looks like a bible and my mind goes to work on all the assumptions that I have about someone that would read their bible in a coffee shop over their lunch hour. They are not good assumptions, I'm afraid and I am embarressed by my own cynicism. I feel guilty so I ask her, "what are you reading". Maybe she knows what I'm thinking? So I try to be nice, to assuage my guilt in some tangible way. She smiles up at me and says, "The book of Matthew" and I cringe. I am torn between two very distinct possibilities -- either I play dumb, like someone who has never read the bible for myself or I try to disarm her with intellectual questions. I find I am a bit put off by her saying, "the book of matthew" in such a matter of fact way. What if I was someone who just landed on earth and didn't know what a bible was? What is the book of Matthew? Why would one read it..? Who is Matthew? Why did he write a book..??? My questions start and I am again, feeling very sad that I am so cynical of someone who clearly is having a great time. I'm getting all worked up for truly no real reason.

She then says, "reading the bible helps me stay calm"? Oh yeah? I am tempted to say, just to be crass "I feel the same way when I take a Tylenol PM late at night?" Should I say, "what do you need to be calm about?" or do I just let it go? So many questions, so little time.

I find it is times like this that my sad bias towards those that would read their bibles in broad daylight astounds even me. I wonder, "was I ever that smug?" Did I ever have a time in my life when I had so many answers? Probably. And that's exactly what is bothering me, I think.

I am bothered by my lack of answers on faith and the cosmos. I am bothered by my lack of faith in so many things. I am most of all bothered that I can create this whole scenario about a poor girl who just is trying to find some peace at her lunch break. Symbols are powerful things and there are few things more symbolic to a recovering fundamentalist than a big bible. I have this theory, the bigger the bible, the smaller the mind.

None of this is fair, I realize. I am reacting to 40 years plus of brain wiring that has suddenly, at age 40, come unwired, blown a fuse, or whatever the technical, electrical terms would be here.
40 years of bible toting, bible banging, bible-throw-it-down-your-throat-until you puke. I have become innoculated, unable to read it myself for the sheer emotion that seeing a bible brings to me. I have become, comfortably numb in this post-faith state that I find myself in these days.

I want a God that is so big that he/she/it cannot be understood and that I can spend the rest of my life ponidering the many things about it/him/her. I don't want pat answers. I'm tired of cliches. Don't give me a 3-point sermon or 7 steps to anything. I want to think, to ponder, to reflect. Most of all I don't want to spend time with those that live in bi-color -- black or white-while I dabble in the deepest recesses of gray.