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through childhood and adolescence, to independence! We
are bound together by blood, by responsibility, by parental
and filial love, by those strong cords inbuilt to preserve the
integrityoffamilies.Wehavelittlechoiceaboutit;it'snot~
we bring up our children, but howliow we live out our
roles.
And now they are themselves the parents of a new genera-
tion-Lauren, Lindsay, Katherine, Michelle, Jack. How
quickly the roles reverse! We who were dependent children
become the ones depended on. And I know-from the
experience of watching my father succumb to leukemia at
eighty4hree, and my mother grow old and blind, to die
opinionated as ever, and always dogmatically certain that she
was right, and that if we disagreed with her, we were wrong-
that dependence on others lies ahead of us. It may not be
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what we choose. But we can at least try to learn from past
failures, and maintain our grace and dignity as we grow
toward heaven in company with friends we choose, and the
family we were given.
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Eating the Wh,o~ Egg
for my great-great-grandfather
Oral history tells us you went through
three wives. One story is that
every day you breakfasted with
your current spouse on toast
and a threeminute egg,
chipping off its white cap in the precise
British way, and in a grand gesture,
spooning to your wife that minor albumen,
watery, pale as her self. That was her meal;
you feasted on yolk, rich and yellow
as a gold sovereign, and crushed the shells,
feeding them by gritty doses to
your offspring lined up along the tabl~
a supplement to stave off rickets and
accustom the family to patriarchy.
Nourished thus on remnants and rigor,
your tribe multiplied to twenty-two.
The legend astonishes me still. And I
still bear, along with those woman
genes, a vestigial guilt
whenever I cook myself a breakfast egg
and then devour it, white, yolk,
protein, cholesterol, and all. Like
seeing the sun after generations of moons.
Like being the golden egg, and eating it too.
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Luci
Majeleine
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they
have to take you in.... I should have called it something you
somehow haven't to deserve." So wrote Robert Frost. lovew.
But is it always true? I hope that whenever anyone in my flimily
turns up, no matter how unexpectedly, or for whatever reason,
the welcome mat will always be ou~
That was certainly true for the prodigal son, although his
elder brother did not share in his heart the loving welcome of
the father. What about people who talk about "heaven home"?
Is everybody who comes knocking at the door welcome? We've
all heard stories of the living room full of family photos, but
one is turned to the wall. Whoever was in that picture has been
Lhrown ou~ Negated. Unwelcome.
I know a woman who is a strict Baptist. (She is a "fundalit,"
which is a word I created to describe fundamentalists who are
~iblical literalis~~ndamentalist/literalist~and believe, for
~ample, that God created the earth in six actual twenty-four
~our days, and that the actual age of the planet can be calcu-
ated from the genealogies in the gospels. I don't want the
~ord "fundamentalist" to become a narrow description that
.`xcliides me, as I attend closely to the fundamentals of our
aith but am most assuredly not a "fundali&")
In any event, the woman received a phone call from her
~. He had called to tell her that he had AIDS. Without hesi-
ition, she said, "Come home." And she lovingly nursed him
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thrrnigh his long illness until his death. Accord~ng to her pe~
sonal religion, that was the only thing to do, the Christial
thing to do. It has, by the way, made a powerful impact on be
Baptist church.
But I've also heard of families who, when they've learne
that their child has AIDS, have closed the door, crying "sin
Statistically there is a horriiying number of people who h~
died of AIDS, alone, rejected by their families. Also, accordil
to statistics, people with AIDS live in cities, but where did dii
come from? Where was home? It was hamlets, villages, s~
towns where there was no welcome. We each can ask: H~
ready am I to offer such hospitality? How ready is the conufli
nity I live in? How prepared is my church community?
There are people who make it their life's work to care fc
people who, for myriad reasons, have been abandoned, turne
away, disowned. Teenagers. The very old and in. Is home ti
place where, when you have to go there, they have to take yc
in?
The prodigal's father didn't have to take him in, but h
welcomed him with joy. Jesus' message to me in this parable
that when we come to ourselves, see ourselves as we really an
and turn with true repentance to home, Cod is there, waitifl~
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