Sanctuario de Singularity
Gandalf reaches into the depression containing the Holy Dirt of Chimayó
My youngest son grew impossible legs while I traveled, while I coughed against a fever bed as hot as my New Mexico sun. He grew gangly arms, let his face thin to the same pointed-chin I own, moved from familiar Little Rascal to a tall introspective boy I don't quite recognize.
All things change, I think. But I miss the child I could carry under one arm, the imp whose arms rose to circle my waist. I rose from illness, from three weeks of my own unwilling transformation, to find my son's hair meeting my chin.
All things change, I think. I've changed, too, but in ways I can't identify yet. I'm not taller, not smarter. But something is different. Radical. I am in a cocoon, a luna moth, with wings heavy and lime green with iridescent scales. What's my destiny? I don't know.
Both my sons stared at me Saturday morning. I sat on my bed, surrounded by piles of product, padded envelopes, my heart determined to catch up with work. My arms couldn't meet my desire, shook from fatigue as I carefully inspected each item.
"C'mon, Mom. Let's go do something. We haven't gone anywhere in weeks." Gandalf, accented weeks as though he were a prisoner in solitary confinement fed on moldy bread and stale water.
"Yeah, Mom." Harry picked his nose as he agreed with his older brother. I leaned over, grabbed him a tissue from the night-stand.
"All right. We'll go on an adventure. But I get to pick the destination!"
The boys helped me fill sport bottles with the mineral-laden town water. I threw cheese puffs and trail mix in a large zip-lock bag and added a handful of chocolate chips and a generous portion of chopped walnuts. I stood, bare feet on kitchen linoleum, and decided what wilderness we would visit. Someplace quiet. Somewhere gentle. The village of Chimayó. I almost left the house without Avon, but tossed ten samples of the new Avon Super Shape Anti-Cellulite Stretch Mark Cream in my purse.
Two hundred years ago, a Chimayó friar was performing penances when a brilliant light burst from the hillside. He dug into the ground where the light appeared. His hands found a crucifix. The head priest brought the crucifix to a fancy church far away, brought it to be venerated, but three times it disappeared and was later found back in its hole. Then the miraculous healings began, healings associated with the dirt surrounding the artifact.
I told the boys this story as we drove through the parched mountains west of my town, told them about the Chimayó chapel, and the way the newly-whole left crutches and before-and-after photographs in thanksgiving.
"Geeze, Mom. You believe that stuff?"
Gandalf spoke with a mouth full of snacks in the backseat. He cocked his head to the left, the way he always does before he explodes in a torrent of intellectual excess.
"According to historical research, there is no evidence that Jesus was divine. In fact, one could make a case that he never existed at all."
Gandalf continued, his words some kind of middle-school version of the DaVinci Code. Harry didn't pay attention. He leaned against the car door, a clipboard balanced on his knees, as he drew illustrations of penguins in space.
I didn't answer. I kept my hands on the wheel, let my car slide past one herd of antelope, then another. They raced the wind, thirty, forty, fifty moving as one beast, a mass of delicate antler, of striped flank, of hoof-earth unison. Even though it was Memorial Weekend, we didn't pass another car.
Chimayó snuck up on us. We fell from the mountains into the desert, with short sun-faded scrub and piles of white sand, fell into a village of a few adobe houses, a shack selling last fall's pinon and cheap religious trinkets, and the old chapel of miracles. A small dirt parking lot sat in front of the chapel with enough room for perhaps three dozen cars. Handicapped Parking Only. The blue sign spoke of hope, of the people who pilgrimage to Chimayó. We parked half-a-mile away, under the sparse shade of a mature cottonwood.
The church welcomed us with a sheath of red desert roses overhanging the open wooden door. We filed inside, behind an old Latina in a wheelchair and her young caregiver. The chapel looking like nothing and everything at once. The walls were cracked brown adobe, tired, carrying the energy of a million broken people. Low wooden benches rested in uneven rows. Twenty or so visitors knelt on hard pine kneelers, their hands clasped in prayer, their eyes on the painted altar. Mexican saints surrounded us, their peeling fingertips pointing toward Heaven. The boys watched the flicker of a thousand votive candles. I pointed to the famous crucifix, to the hundreds of rags and crutches and photographs piled along the church sides.
Gandalf found the holy dirt site first. A depression sank into the church floor, a child's orange plastic shovel helpfully left inside. He bent low, dug into the ground, handed me a shovelful of healing dust. I found a tissue in my purse, opened it, let the dirt collect inside, folded it as carefully as I could. We left.
"Mom. Mom. Are all those crutches fake? Did people really leave those behind because they were better?"
Gandalf's face crunched in an expression of confusion. I could hear his brain cells whirling with information he could not process. Harry shrugged his shoulders, picked up his penguin portrait as I gunned the car engine, one eye on the map.
"Of course it's real. You don't know everything just because you're two years older than me. Haven't you figured out yet that there are mysteries?"
Harry sighed long and loud. I smiled, but the boys didn't see.
"Well, boys, to be honest, I don't know anything except that many people believe it's real. Sometimes believing in something makes something real, makes things happen. Harry is right about one thing. There are mysterious things that we don't understand. Maybe some day we will. So. It's still early. How about we drive to Los Alamos?"
To Be Continued....
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