Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 90

“All our days pass away under your wrath; 

we finish our years with a moan.”

I received a poem from a friend of mine, who’s been thinking about Rahab the harlot, loved by men—many of them, presumably—and God. The voice of the poem feels to be woman, who asks if all Rahab’s men used her, or if maybe there were some who did not: “did not some/come to love/her?”

The answer to me was obvious: of course some did. Didn’t she know that? She had to. I did, after all.

My very first sexual experience happened when I was 13 or 14 and seemed to me—I may be wrong—delightfully mutual. We didn't fornicate; we played. It was the Fourth of July--I haven't forgotten.

I was attracted to her that night, her tank top —a triangular shift of cloth, orange, pulled across her chest and fastened with two pair of cottony strings over a naked back-- was, well, appealing.

By the end of the night, a certain inevitability led our flirting to a featureless, darkened backyard, where we lay together in the grass. Soon enough, she let me slide my hand beneath that tank top, where it stayed for a half hour maybe.

That was it. Later on, we went to the same high school but ran in different circles. I didn't lust or chase after her. It was an adolescent one-night stand.

With a short second act. A couple years later, in college and alone, I went back to her, even made our relationship public enough to make my older sisters take me aside to tell me the word on the street was that their little brother was getting seamy, seeing that girl the way I was. Soon enough, I went back to college.

What I remember about our relationship is that it was blessedly physical. She loved making out as much as I did. Mostly, we just played. I don't believe I ever tried much more.

Today she's probably a church-going grandma who has suffered her kids' woes just as deeply I ever did. Amazingly, she's 70+ years old, probably not a Rahab, nor has ever been. She's loved by God. I wish I could tell her that, in the words of my friend’s poem, I was one who, can I say it?-- loved her.

Then again, maybe I think of her so fondly because I feel the pressures of this verse from Psalm 90. I feel my age: indigestion has been a plague all week; I don’t sleep well; my back kills me in the morning; I fade by 10:30, out like a light. Lately, I'm losing friends--the forever way of losing friends. My life as yet is not a moan, but more often than I care to admit, I feel something like a bellar welling up within me.

Maybe this girl, this memory, is a fantasy that offers me some lost innocence, the sheer thrill of old summer nights, of conquest and love. Maybe. Maybe my remembrance of things past is only an escape, a gleeful, adolescent daydream, a return to joy.

I think I know exactly what this verse means, inside and out: “All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.” I know it all too well.

Maybe I’d rather not go gently into that good night. I’m not ready to finish my years with a moan. What I’d like to do is tell that grandma, wherever she is, that, yes, some loved her, I'm sure, me among them. Some have never forgotten, and the memory right now, in these days passing away, is a sweet blessing.