Prophets and Bricks

I was at work and the phone call got patched through the security booth to me where I was working in the maximum security prison that day. Normally, my wife does not call me at work unless there is some good reason. In this case, our tenant (an eighty year old woman who had been one of the more significant influences in my life) got pissed off and started throwing bricks at my wife's friend, Lori.

It's not like our tenant wasn't capable of acting eccentric at times; she was entirely capable. But, the fact that she started throwing bricks at my wife's friend really concerned me. Even if my wife's friend was a nuisance (who acted like she had the hots for my wife), throwing bricks at her was a rather extreme thing to be doing. I don't advocate that type of behavior and I certainly would not appreciate having bricks thrown at me.

I suppose everything would have been all right if I had not been doing some remodeling at the time and there were no bricks readily available. On the other hand, there is no telling what this plucky woman might have found to throw if she was really mad. She could have found something, I'm sure, with which to make her displeasure known and, in the process, captured the attention of most of the neighborhood ' bricks, or no bricks.

Sadly, her behavior had been getting more and more unpredictable and, in this most recent development, dangerous.

This was Geneva, the woman who had told me more things I didn't want to know than things I wanted to know. But, her motivation was always the same: tell the truth; do it with love. And she really was loving by telling the truth. Whether she was speaking tenderly or throwing big bricks, I knew she would shoot straight and let me have it ' no beating around the bush.

Bricks or other projectiles aside, she was a woman who would quickly give a stranger the shirt off her back ' literally ' to be helpful. Caring. Self-sacraficing. Textbook definition of generous.

Yet she had been thrown out of many churches and a few businesses. She had been hauled off by the police in many a town, including ours. She's been hit by a car or two and lived to be a nightmare to the drivers and their insurance companies.

She had an unnerving habit of finding just the right things to say which were eerily disconcerting ' stuff people didn't want to hear. Stuff that made people squirm. She was, frequently, both divisive and unsettling.

Geneva could find the chinks in anyone's armor and flush out their blind spots. She could stare down a mafia hit man in a New York minute. She had nerves of steel and was fearless in the face of any opposition. She was not a respecter persons nor impressed with any earthly authority.

And she was getting senile, I concluded.

Or 'God'� was telling her to 'throw bricks at Lori.'�

I'm not sure which was worse ' my long time friend and spiritual mentor getting senile, or God telling her to throw bricks at people. Either way, it didn't make any difference; she was my tenant and my problem.

Or, in this case, Lori, the closet lesbian's problem.

[to be continued]

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