Caranamity ~ Heart, Art and Soul

In grammar school and high school I was friends with a cute, blue-eyed Irish boy named Joe. I always liked him a lot; we flirted quite a bit, never anything more. We graduated from high school in 1967, went off to different colleges, and then on New Years’ Eve 1967, I ran into him at Mass. Afterwards, he came over to my parents’ house, and we walked around outside in the cold talking. I remember lots of snow drifts all along the sides of the road, but I don’t remember what we talked about. I wish I did, because it was the last time I ever saw him.

I went on and left college at the end of 1968, got married on Election Day 1968, moved to Tennessee in January 1970 and in November 1970 had a baby girl. Then sometime in early 1972, when my baby was a little over a year old, my sister called and told me that Joe had died in Vietnam.

It’s funny how we always take it for granted that someone we used to know is out there somewhere, that when and if he or she crosses our mind, we’ll be able to find that person and reconnect if we want to. I couldn’t even process the news about Joe’s death. One day in October 1971, while I was watching my baby learn to walk, or going for a stroll on a pretty fall day, or cooking dinner, my friend Joe had died. And I hadn’t known, didn’t feel anything different in the fabric of the universe around me. It seemed to me that when someone we cared about  left this world we should at least somehow feel it.

I dreamt about Joe almost every night for several years. It was always the same – he was talking to me, and asking me to not forget him. It wasn’t exactly a nightmare, but I always woke up feeling sad and scared. The scarey part, especially when you’re only twenty-something, was the thought of someone being gone and no one remembering. So I DID remember, and kept a small sad place in my heart for Joe. I tried telling people the story, but no one around me ever really GOT it, so I quit talking about it.

This summer I turned 60 and it was the hardest birthday I ever had. For weeks I had been thinking about all the years gone by –  the friendships I had let go, missed opportunities, and running out of time. Then I got together with two guys from high school – Gary and Tom. We had not seen each other in 42 years, and we only had a few hours together. I found out that both of them had been good friends with Joe, even after high school. We ended up talking about Joe a lot that night. Gary had managed to find out how he had died, and shared the story of how Joe ended up in the military. We all told stories that we remembered about him. Hey, I could talk about Joe to these guys – and they GOT it. They understood.

We had a lot of fun that night – at least I know I did. I wish I could have spent a lot more time talking to those guys - it just wasn’t enough time after all those years. A few days later I got in my car and headed back to Tennessee. Driving alone all that way – and being kind of emotional about my birthday anyway – I cried, because I hate to leave my family in New Jersey, but also thinking about my visit with my high school friends. Because it hit me – that in the time we spent together it was so obvious – we all remembered Joe  and thought about him. We joked about getting older, but I knew that as long as one of us is still around, we WILL remember Joe. And for the first time in almost 40 years, that little sad place in my heart reserved for Joe wasn’t quite as sad…and I didn’t feel quite so alone.

This summer on Long Beach Island the beach was littered with strange, semicircular grey objects that were kind of rubbery when wet, and crumbled like sand when dry. It was obvious they were organic, but what were they? I’d seen them here and there on the beach my whole life, but never took the time to figure out what they were. This year they couldn’t be ignored – there were just too many.

I asked a lifeguard and he said he had just heard on the radio that the grey things were somehow related to snails and egg cases. So when I googled SNAILS EGG CASES  here’s what I got: Moon Snail Sand collar.

Before I go on about the moon snails, let me digress a little bit. I was raised Catholic and like so many of my generation, walked away from the Church at  18. Over the years I’ve been wandering back towards it, but people might call me a Cafeteria Catholic – one who picks and chooses the doctrine I want to believe. For me this would never be true about real moral choices like abortion and capital punishment, and I do believe that the Bible is the word of God. But here is where I stray: when it comes to the creation story, I have no problem seeing a million years for God being as a single day for us humans. I have no problem with the idea of evolution,  NOT as a random act of an unseeing godless universe, but as the act of God at work creating over those millions of years. As an artist, whose attempts at creation are so tiny in comparison, I know the feeling of trying this and that until I get it right – IF I ever get it right. NOT that a perfect God has to try to get it right, but let’s consider the possibility He would do it for FUN. And in this process, one of the creatures He comes up with is the moon snail.

This snail has an ENORMOUS slimy circular foot that surrounds its shell, and when it’s ready to lay its eggs, it covers the foot with a layer of sand, glued together with, well, snail snot. Then it lays its eggs on the collar, seals them in so to speak, and slips out from under the collar leaving it behind. ( Click HERE to see more about moon snails, including a picture of a sand collar, or HERE to watch a YouTube video. Yes, YouTube video about moon snails, quite a few of them. ) The snail then goes about its business, terrorizing clams, which it eats by drilling a hole in the shell. The little moon snails hatch and the sand collars wash up the beach, leaving us to wonder what they could be.

Now.  Seriously. Did you watch the video? Could this have happened by chance? Or by random mutation? C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, says this:

“Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity……..in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone could have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”

In a similar train of thought (similar to me but maybe not to C.S. Lewis were he still with us) I don’t see HOW moon snails could have happened by chance. If I needed another reason to believe in God – and I DON’T need another reason – then the moon snail would do it for me. Who Else could have dreamed up this queer twist of a creature?