I can only imagine what the passing motorists thought.
It was one of those moments that really makes you wish
thought bubbles from comic strips were real. Here I am, striding up the
sidewalk in my Sunday best, bright yellow shirt; a straw fedora; a bright red
tie that would do credit to Donald Trump; my cane stuck in my belt like a sword because I don’t
have a free hand, and a giant bottle of Cook’s Brut champagne swinging in each
fist.
I’m guessing the dominant thought bubble would have been
something along the lines of “???”
I can’t blame them. I have moments where I wonder why I
thought this was a good idea myself. Champagne bottles weigh a lot more on the
latter end of a mile-and-a-half walk than they do at the beginning. Seventy
pounds apiece, at least. Who keeps feeding these things?
Don’t worry, my Baptist friends: I was not strolling home
from church with massive amounts of alcohol. Actually, they were full of orange
juice.
(Honest.)
It came about innocently enough. We were having a special
farewell party for the family of one of the deacons, who were moving to San
Diego. There were bagels with various cream cheeses. There were mimosas (almost
a necessity if you are having to move to San Diego, in my opinion). There was
fruit. [It was supposed to go on the bagels or in the mimosas, but most of the
kids just shoveled it in plain. By the handful. I’m sure their mothers were all
delighted with the state of their clothes later.] And when it was all over,
there was far too much orange juice; somebody’d totally miscalculated the ratio,
in a blatant failure of hard-learned eighth-grade math skills.
But, being a highly skilled scrounging bachelor, this was
cause for rejoicing. “Would you like to take some of this orange juice home? We
have too much.”
Would I?
[Millennials, insert crafty-looking emoji with sunglasses here]
But there was a catch. The orange juice had all been made
from frozen concentrate and mixed in
situ. There were no containers. How would I get it home? Why, in one of
those empty champagne bottles littering the table, of course. How clever of me.
A twist of plastic wrap around the top, and we’re ready to roll. On second
thought, I’ll take two; one can never have too much orange juice.
Wait, second catch. I walked here this morning because it
was 68 degrees in early July and sunny and glorious. Could I walk back a mile
and a half carrying three liters of orange juice in glass bottles? I hefted
one. Totally doable. I’m still relatively young and hearty, even if I don’t
ever work out!
Halfway up the long hill back to town my wrists are starting
to cramp and I’m realizing that plastic wrap has very little friction,
especially when you wrap it around the smooth neck of a glass champagne bottle.
And for some reason the old song “Sixteen Tons” won’t quit running through my
head, edited to fit the situation:
You load sixteen
pounds, and whatd’ya get?
Another day older and
deeper in sweat
This OJ’s a-fallin’
but I can’t go:
I’m stuck on a hill
where the goin’ is slow...
It probably does weigh sixteen pounds, I think. I wonder how
all the speed-walkers with the weights manage to do this. No plastic wrap for
starters. I pass an old man going the other way and expect a question, or at
least a raised eyebrow. Nope, nothing. He’s obviously lived in this Pacific
Northwest college town for far too long for this to qualify as weird. I set the
bottles down to wait at the traffic light and flex my fingers. The break feels
amazing. Isn’t that just like the Christian life, I muse. We Western Christians
expect life to be like a normal Sunday walk: long periods of sunshine and light
breezes interspersed with a few brief hard bits, trials to keep us from being too comfortable. But the sermon series
is on Acts this summer, and Paul’s life seems far more like today’s walk—long
periods of pain and struggle and uphill climb broken by brief moments of
blessed relief, when God is near.
But the rest breaks are not the end of the journey. They
can’t be, you’ve got sixteen pounds of free orange juice to haul before it
spoils in the afternoon heat. The breaks aren’t when you roll over and camp
out, they’re when you thank God, your muscles unclamp, and you pop your neck
and get ready for the next quarter-mile stretch. It was a good reminder for
when I’m going through the dry spells of life, when little seems to be going
right and family, friends—even God—seem far away. I can just hear Him chuckling
gently in my ear, “Keep going, kid. Anybody can carry this burden another
hundred yards, you’re getting close! (At the end there’s free orange juice.)”
My apartment looked really good as I crossed the last
parking lot. One of the bottles had slopped a little bit thirty yards back, and
if you thought plastic wrap on glass was slippery, try wet plastic wrap! Not to mention I’d had a few mimosas too many back
at the church...
Out of agony-born curiosity, I did actually weigh the
bottles on the bathroom scale before I slipped them in the fridge. The needle
read approximately fourteen pounds.
It lieth. Definitely sixteen, at least. Besides, fourteen
doesn’t work in the song as well.
