Sea or his friend calls every Sunday morning.  I wonder at this, like the time I told them we would be traveling and there were still 26 messages on our machine when we got back.  Sunday morning should belong to God, but it seems that their schedule and the shape of their lives is off-kilter, like ours.

When everything came out I bought a book about the desert fathers, a group of Christians who left the dying embers of a corrupt christianized Roman empire to live in caves in the desert.

The accounts of these men are strangely mystical and I am a bit sceptical about how good they were.  I naturally distrust people and their biographers now.

But I figured that if we were going to wander in the desert of social stigma, I should at least learn about others who had lived there before me.

Now when I see the starkness of our life, I remind myself that it may be the desert, but I am here with my favorite people.