Free What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage Page B

hundred yards to the thin strip of sandy, weedy beach and stuck our toes in the lake. It was as warm as bathwater. We didn’t see anybody out, but when I whispered to Joyce that we ought to go skinny-dipping, she swatted me on the behind like I was five years old again.
    We walked out up to our chins, feeling the murky bottom of the lake oozing up between our toes, and then lay out on our backs side by side. The water was so still, all we had to do was flutter our hands and feet a little bit to stay close and afloat.
    “It’s not just the physical stuff,” Joyce said.
    That
just
leaped out at me. The physical stuff is never
just
to me. Not anymore.
    “What isn’t’?” I said.
    “Things we have to work on. Remember all those books we bought that day?”
    How could I forget them? When Joyce came to Atlanta right after I first diagnosed, we took a whole day and went to every spiritual bookstore in town. Joyce thought this might be a good time for us to start meditating, so we were ostensibly in search of books to guide us in that practice, but I was lying through my teeth. My quest was for the secret of what God really wants so I could do it, be forgiven, and get well. I wanted to live forever, of course, but at this point I was prepared to accept an ordinary African-American old age, full of high blood pressure and bad feet, but ultimately dying in my own bed in a nice clean nursing home with color TV.
    Every place we went had books about dying and preparing for dying, but I avoided those like the plague, no pun intended. I was interested in L-I-V-I-N-G. The dying part would have to take care of itself.
    So we bought:
     
    2 books on Buddhism
    1 book of daily prayers for positive people (the author meant
positive
in outlook, but I liked the unintentional double meaning)
    1 book on yoga with photographs of blissed-out-looking people standing on one leg with their eyes closed
    1 silver sea charm to ward off the evil eye
    3 packs of Blue Pearl incense
    1 brass incense holder
    4 tapes promising to teach us how to meditate in a variety of ways, including one that guaranteed the same results as the traditional methods, but you only had to sit there for three minutes a day instead of an hour.
     
    Joyce was going to wear the evil-eye charm, but she kept looking at the symbols and weird writing all over it and she got nervous that it could be a trick, that the thing might have the opposite power and conjure up the Devil instead of chasing him off. I told her we should have gotten wolfbane like they do in the vampire movies, but she didn’t think that was funny.
    Then I started trying to figure out who we could send the charm to. Somebody who deserved some bad luck for doing some evil shit they never had to pay for. But that made her even more nervous since if it was a Devil charm and we sent it to somebody and something bad happened, we would be sort of like agents of the Devil, right?
    It was really pretty funny since we had bought all this stuff to help us calm down and we were working ourselves up into a frenzy just trying to figure out how to use it. It’s like reading those magazine articles about reducing stress. I read those articles all the time and I look at the things they recommend and I usually am not doing one single thing on the list. I
consider
doing them all the time, but I rationalize not starting to work on them immediately by thinking how they’d be so
easy
to do if I ever really wanted to do them. This is bullshit, of course, since each one of them would require a major redirecting of energy and since I’m already so guilt-ridden about not having done this stuff a long time ago, I could never just take one at a time. I’d have to tackle the whole righteous group simultaneously, or not at all, which brings us back around to why all that stuff we bought that day is still almost untouched by human hands.
    “Do you still have them?” Joyce said. I was sure I did.
Somewhere.
    “Well, I’ve still got