Alma

“I’ll go get Alma ready to receive a visitor,” the orderly said and left me in the hallway of the assisted living center for seniors. Looking around at the various old people inexplicably left in the hallway propped up in their walkers or parked in their wheelchairs I knew, as most of them did, that this wasn’t a center for living but rather one for dying. I was thirty years old, and nine months into a healthy pregnancy that had made my waist-length hair flourish into a shampoo-commercial mane of shiny locks. I stood there, the poster child for fecundity, listening to the grunts and squeaks as the residents sidled closer and closer to me. This always happened. No one said anything, but these souls trapped in withered bodies would crowd around me and silently reach out and touch my belly and smile. The new life I was carrying attracted them like moths to a flame.

“Y’all leave the nice church lady alone now!” the orderly said, shooing old people away like they were overly affectionate cats. To me he said, “Alma’s glad you’re here, you just go on in.” Alma had been some sort of civil service employee, married and divorced, and now in her old age she had no family left and only a few friends. Years ago she had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and now she was dying of lung cancer. She had rediscovered a faith in God she had known as a child and a friend of hers had asked the church to send somebody who could talk to her about “heavenly things.” I was the trained Stephen Minister that had been assigned as Alma’s care giver.

At our first meeting she asked me, “Do you smoke? Have you ever smoked?” I shook my head, taking in the numerous tubes and the gurgling oxygen tank that was keeping Alma alive. “Don’t you ever take a single puff. That’s the message of my life. If you care about your friends and family, you make sure they never smoke. You tell anybody with a lit cigarette about me. I know everybody dies. But this –“ and she paused both to gesture to her tank and to struggle for breath, “is a horrible . . . way to . . . die.”

I visited Alma once a week for months. In a typical church body the demand for counsel and visitations exceeds what a pastor can keep up with so the Stephen Ministry program was created to train lay members of the church to assist people through the changes in life that create crises. I’d cared for people who had been injured or were recovering from a surgery, I’d visited families with a new baby trying to sort out what life was life without sleep, and I’d been there for people who were grieving the loss of a spouse or a child. Alma was my first assignment in “walking someone home.” There wasn’t anything I could do to make breathing any easier for her. I was just there for her to have someone to talk with about what really matters in life. We talked about God, and faith, and heaven. We talked about hopes and regrets. As the months passed, though, we seemed to talk more and more about the baby.

As Alma’s body trembled as she fought for oxygen between sentences, she would plot how I could bring the baby to see her. She didn’t want me to bring the baby “into a place like this.” But there was a little courtyard outside her room and she would get the orderly to unlock the gate. I could bring the baby up to the window. She would get the attendants to roll her bed up to the glass. We talked about baby names and Lamaze class and I showed her things that were going into the baby’s nursery. Our visits grew shorter because Alma would grow too fatigued to talk.

I went into labor on a Sunday night and by Monday morning I had delivered at the birthing center. My daughter was 7 pounds, 21 inches and “perfect” according to every criteria of infancy. I, however, had complications with the delivery and had it been a century or two earlier I would have probably died. Since it was 1990, I simply had to have outpatient surgery. It meant that my little family did not get home until mid-day Tuesday. My best friend was there to make sure mother and child were resting comfortably and when the doorbell rang she signed for the delivery. It was a beautiful flower and balloon arrangement in a little bassinet vase. I was surprised when the card said it was from Alma. How did she know the baby had been born? I had a phone number Alma had told me to call when the baby was born but up until now I had not had the chance. I did so to thank her for the flowers but was only able to leave a message on a machine.

The next day I got a call from Alma’s friend who had first referred her to our church. Because my husband had called the church to announce our daughter’s birth, the friend had found out I had delivered. Alma had passed away sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning but she had left money and instructions with her friend that when my baby was born, a gift would be sent in Alma’s name. I looked over at the bassinet and at the cat playing with the balloons and realized that Alma had taken her last breath around the same time my daughter had been struggling to take her first. I started to cry, realizing that I would not need to break into Alma’s courtyard in order for her to see the baby. In the twenty years since I knew Alma, I have tried to pass on her message: don’t smoke – ever.

What's with the pigs?

When someone comes into my house it doesn’t take long for them to ask, “Who’s the pig fanatic?” or “What’s with all the pigs?” I estimate that there’s 200 different pig-themed items around the house. I have pig-themed art, tools, books, clothing, kitchen utensils, mugs, table settings, banks, flower planters, wind-chimes, refrigerator magnets, and figurines. If you reach for a flashlight, it’s shaped like a pig. If you lift off the shower cap from the wall it was hanging on a pig head. I have pig slippers and a costume rubber pig nose. I have dozens of pig-themed bracelets and pins. I have pig-shaped corn cob holders. If you are in a public area of my house, there are pig things watching you.

I never intended to collect pigs. In my early teens my family went on a vacation to London. We visited the British Museum, we went to the tower of London, we watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but we also went to a county fair on the outskirts of the city. I loved the fair because it was so green, and the horses were so beautiful, and they had these pink piglets of the breed later featured in the movie “Babe.” These tiny porkers were reminiscent of my childhood favorites, Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” and Piglet from the “Winnie-the-Pooh” series. When we returned to California my brother asked me what I liked best about London. I mentioned that I liked the country fair and I showed him photographs of the pigs and he said sarcastically, “You went to London, England and what you liked were the pigs?!”

For my next birthday he gave me a pig candle with a card that said, “Since you like pigs so much!” There were about thirteen of my high school friends watching me open presents and read cards and they all burst out with, “Oh! You like pigs! You should have told us.” At my next birthday party, everything I got for a present was shaped like or decorated with pigs. The following Christmas, people had noticed I had a shelf of “pig things” and I started to get more presents for my “pig collection.” By the time I went to college, the collection was out of control and since I showed up in my dorm room with pig pens and a Miss Piggy calendar and a pig keychain, I had no hope of coming off as anything but a swinophile, an oinkologist, or a pigmaniac.

For a long time I wasn’t sure I wanted to be associated with a creature typically thought of as dirty, gluttonous, and destined for slaughter. But along with collecting pigs, I started to learn about them. Pigs are the fourth smartest non-human animals on earth after primates, dolphins, and elephants. Pigs can be obsessive about rooting things out using their extremely sensitive noses whether the object of their search is a truffle or a landmine. Pigs can swim. Pigs enjoy music. Pigs are curious and play with toys. Pigs are sensitive and expressive – if they’re happy their tails curl tight; if they are sad or sick, their tails go limp and straight. Pigs are typically covered with mud not because they lack a sense of hygiene but because they wallow in mud to cool their sensitive skin and protect themselves from parasites, much as we might slather on sunscreen or bug repellant. You cannot be “sweating like a pig” because pigs don’t sweat. Pigs, unlike a lot of animals, prefer to defecate away from where they eat and live. Pigs are omnivores but they do not overeat. They are simply “made to be meaty” when they are healthy. The more I knew about pigs, the more akin to them I felt.

But it was at the Kern County Fair one year that I truly bonded with the nature of swine. It was pig judging time and I was sitting in the stands watching 4-H kids move their hogs around before the judge. Vision and cooperation are not a hog’s strong points so to get the beasts to turn the swineherds had to use wide boards with a handle. The pig would plod along and then the youth would plant this board down directly in their path, and make a corner out of it with another board, putting up impassable walls in front of the boar or sow and leaving them only one direction to turn (swine do not go in reverse well). So, resignedly, the porcine creature would turn and waddle in the direction indicated, while its handler ran around it and set up the barriers to turn it in the next direction they wanted their prize porker to go. And then it dawned on me: that’s how God sometimes has to direct me. I get so fixated on going forward that the only way for Him to divert me in a different direction is to put up these barriers, these hardships, these disasters, these losses in my life so that when faced with “dead ends” ahead and to the side I blunder on in the only direction left open to me. I’m one of God’s pigs. Smart, social, curious but built for practicality, not for style. I require spiritual whacking with a cane (“thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me”) or “direction by limited options” to get me where God wants me to be.

Pig anatomy is similar to humans in the arrangement of their internal organs. Nearly every part of a pig can be used for some pharmaceutical purpose which is why we have pig insulin, pig thyroxin, and pig heart valves inside lots of humans today. Not to mention the delicious array of pork products (the other white meat) digesting inside a large portion of the population. I had the most delicious bacon-wrapped dates at my niece’s wedding and was told by the caterers they were called “baby fingers.” Is it any wonder that the oldest known domesticated farm animal was the pig?

What perversity on our part has allowed us to make the term “pig” an insult? Sir Winston Churchill once said, “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Harry Truman was quoted as saying, “No man should be allowed to be President who does not understand hogs.” So whether God knew I was a piggy at heart and allowed the pig collection to develop around me or whether being surrounded by pigs has influenced my approach to life is hard to say. But I do hope the Mama Pig Cookie Jar holding two piglets survives me. It’s where I’ve told the kids to stash my ashes.