Chapter 10

I didn't go to the office Tuesday either. I spent most of the day in my study, in a pair of stained sweat pants and a MADD t-shirt I'd gotten once in exchange for a donation – they didn't know, at the booth, that they were already getting a lot more money from me anonymously. I love being an anonymous donor, and more than once I've stipulated that I'll only give money to this or that outfit if they leave my name out of it.

But I wasn't thinking about drunk driving that day, nor about mothers – or fathers, or brothers, or other family members – who are rightly against it. I'd lost myself in a study of the Song of Solomon. I've never preached from that book, but I find myself coming back to it again and again, and wishing that just once God would lead me that way when I have an opportunity to preach.

My love for the book has less to do with the deep theology of it, and more to do with the passionate love it speaks of. Anyone who thinks God is against husbands and wives enjoying each other sexually needs to read the Song of Solomon. The fact is that if more husbands looked at their wives that way, and more wives looked at their husbands that way, more marriages would be stronger. It's not merely that Solomon and his Shulammite woman experienced a powerful physical attraction for each other, though it's painfully obvious that they did – it's that this attraction was part of a very real and very passionate love between them. Without the love they had for each other, the sexual attraction would have been less, and less meaningful.

And so I periodically come back to the Song, and lose myself in its lush poetry, and picture myself and Cecelia in those images. I'm not entirely sure that every comparison Solomon made about his love fits Cecelia, but I'm willing to fudge a little – after all, if I could write that kind of poetry, I'd have done it long ago, and volumes of it, all with Cecelia as the subject.

Somewhere in there Cecelia brought me a plate of sandwiches – I know because I remember eating two or three, braunschweiger, summer sausage, and avocado. Maybe I ate more than that; certainly there were a few occasions where I'd look up and find that I had a sandwich in my hand with a bite or two out of it, and find myself surprised at the fact.

In A Moveable Feast Hemingway describes a conversation he had with a café owner in Paris. The owner told him that he'd seen Hemingway writing earlier in the day, and Papa had had the air of a man alone in the jungle. And Hemingway had replied, "I am like a blind pig when I work."

I'm that way. There've been occasions, when I've been working, when Cecelia's come into the study and sat down within my range of vision and I've not noticed her for minutes at a stretch.

Today was no different. She must have brought the sandwiches, for Darlia was at school, but I never saw or heard her – the plate seemed to have appeared by magic. I never consciously noticed her till she roused me from my meditation with a hand on my shoulder.

"I truly hate to discommode you, for you ate very clearly enjoying yourself, but Alan and Alison will be here in an hour, and you need to be presentable."

I nodded, and pushed back from my desk. I've got a computer and a high speed Internet connection, and could have found, probably, most of what I'd looked at online. But I'm just old fashioned enough that I want the feel of a book in my hand, the look of pages curving away from the spine. Some day preachers may consult Matthew Henry, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, W.E. Vine, and others from a device similar to Star Trek's Personal Access Data Device, but I'll stick with actual books. Come to think of it, James Kirk likes real books too.

I stood up, and gave Cecelia a hug. "I haven't meant to ignore you all day," I told her, "but I needed something to distract me, and this did it."

"I so surmised, and therefore permitted you to retreat into your studies. I would rather have you treat me, through an intensity of concentration, as invisible than have you mooning around the house in a state of semi-depression. Now go put on some clothes."

I grinned. As far as I was concerned what I had on was plenty good enough for friends, but there are some things Cecelia insists on. One of them is that I at least put on pants and a shirt when we know someone's coming over, and I don't find it worth arguing over. One of the tricks to our successful marriage is we try not to argue at all, and if we must argue we try to do so only over the major disagreements.

I let go of Cecelia, and headed for our room, the first door on the right. I grabbed a shirt out of the closet – the first one there, for I don't spend 45 minutes choosing what to wear – and my jeans off the chair where I'd put them the night before. I put both on, and tucked the shirt in. I rolled the sleeves up a couple of turns, and went into our bathroom to brush my teeth. I'd shaved in the shower the night before, as my custom is, and my heavy walrus mustache – it actually extends a bit below my jaw – had only a slight stubble around it. Somehow, though we have the same father, my brother Memphis and I got very different sets of genes. I look white, and he looks Indian – and we're both half Indian, breeds as they say on the reservation.