The next day, headed out to do the morning chores, I walked past the abandoned dog house of a farm dog that had died.  There, curled in the back of it, red-haired with wide, white eyes, was a stray.  Something someone had perhaps once loved but abandoned.

Dogs from the city get dumped in the countryside all the time.  Often the dog will linger a few days right at the very place, as though it thought its owners had made a mistake and will be back.  How the owners think it will all play out, I’m not sure, though I am sure it usually plays out contrary to them.

“You know I try not to judge, but sometimes I judge people.”

“Who do you judge?”

“Those who should know better, but they don’t.”

“It’s all right.  Sometimes maybe I judge them too.  Is it that they don’t, though, or is it that they can’t?”

The way the dog was pushed back into the corner, the way he held his eyes in terror, and his total and absolute stillness, told me he already knew most of the dark little secrets of man.  Maybe I should feed him?  No, it might scare him off.  He’s found a spot to hide.  Let’s give it a day.

The next day he was still there.  Looking to the back this time, curled up and pressed against the far corner in the same stillness that suggested once again he didn’t want to be disturbed.  One more day, then.  One more was enough.  On the third day, as I went to bring him a handful of food, he was gone.

Whatever happens to all our strays?

As a child I remember riding the two short miles to the rural church of St. Patrick’s for Christmas Eve Mass with my forehead pressed against the cold, hard car window.  I was scanning the starry sky for the streak that would represent Santa Claus coming to carpet bomb my parents’ living room with presents.  The next morning, in each wrapped mystery, I expected to find a happiness I had not known before.

Those days are past me now, and even if they weren’t, I have no desire to keep such ambitious anticipation of the presents of Christmas from its rightful heirs.  Anymore,  I think of the gifts that presented themselves all the other days of the year, and how for most of them I never got around to even getting the wrapping off.  Sometimes what keeps us from opening these isn’t a lack of that ambitious anticipation, but excuses made of more fiction than the jolly fat man in the red suit ever was.  Perhaps peeling that back is a small part of what Christmas is supposed to be about in the first place.

This Christmas, if you need to, may you unwrap a few of those.

I was walking along a tile ditch in the dark, hoping to find the hand level I had left behind me.  I’m always going back for what I’ve left behind.  While I’m gone, the world goes on without me.  This is the principal difference between myself and it.

In the distance the windmill lights twenty miles south blinked in unison.  Although I knew these lights were perched upon their tall towers, they looked to sit on top of the horizon, as though I could simply cover the miles and touch them.  I have tried that many times, only to find them beyond all reach.

Curvature of the earth, I thought.

Finding the level, I headed back with the tool that was supposed to trump my own perception and keep me on grade, an instrument of reason, I guess.  Had a boy held it he might have thought with that little three foot level he could plot a straight course through the world we are in.

It was no longer a boy that held it, though.  I was old enough to understand the same gravity that kept the bubble centered was also the same force that would bend it around the world, bringing me back to where I started if I could fly high enough over the valleys, dig deep enough through the mountains, and find a way to sail its immense seas.

There are some convinced that the pursuit of their own particular truth is taking them in the same straight line the boy once dreamed of.  I think the world is a big place.  It’s big enough for it all to be true, and sooner or later our own particular ones get bent by that.

Our reason leads us back to the same place our heart does:  our beginning.  The only differences are circumference and time.