There are two chairs flanking Grandmother’s bed and I am to sit in the chair by the window. That is the chair in which children sit and I am a child so.
Grandmother is in the bed sleeping. I am keeping vigil. Mother says Grandmother is dying but she looks like she is sleeping to me.
Grandmother is wearing her steel spectacles and they rise and decline very gently as she sleeps. When she dies Mother will remove her spectacles and we will give them to a child in Africa who needs spectacles and has never had spectacles but when he gets spectacles his whole world will change and that will be an act of goodness.
If you do three acts of goodness Jesus stops what he is doing and glances over at you with a look of infinite tenderness. If you earn enough looks of infinite tenderness you can burn away your sins as if they had never been committed and not even Lucifer will know that you sinned.
Lucifer knows you sinned by the stench of sin upon you. The stench is on your soul, not your skin or your clothes. You can no longer buy off sins like you could in the old days.
That was a mistaken custom and Martin Luther was correct to call Mother Church to task about that. He was a Catholic priest which we forget. So you can technically be Catholic and Lutheran, but only if you are Martin Luther.
Grandmother said that and she was never wrong about anything because she spoke forcefully with conviction of her faith as a guide to her every thought and action.
Grandmother says bad thoughts are sins. Mother says well now that is an amorphous area and we should be cautious about filling the boy’s head with fearsome intimations. Intimations are hints and suggestions toward corporeal or substantive things.
After Grandmother dies in this bed she will cease to be corporeal and will become utter spirit and we hope she will be returned unto the Lord from whom all things derive.
I watch Grandmother’s spectacles rise and decline and suddenly they stop and I am terrified and rather than call out for Mother I turn and keep vigil on the birds outside the window.
There are cardinals and one flicker. A flicker is a woodpecker although rarely will you see a flicker hammering away on a tree.
Keeping vigil is a holy and unselfish act