Mardi gras

Jesus came to the door really early this morning. And then he scammed us. First thing. We were still in our pajamas. He was wearing his young African-American woman costume. He loves that one. We heard someone yank open the screen door and ring the bell. Almost no one ever has the nerve to open that outside door and pull the little ringer that some former owner had surgically implanted into the old wooden door. We would find out later that this young lady had some extra nerve.

But I didn't know any of that yet. I was still in bed doing some quick calculations about which of us, E. or me, was more suitably dressed to get up and answer the door. E. won the prize. From the waist up, at least, he looked ready to deliver a lecture to a roomful of graduate students. I was in bright red plaid all over, and my hair was sticking out in a wild, cartoony way. I would have scared a less nervy person, but not this Jesus-woman. E. opened the door in his sleep and she stepped into the house without an invitation and started talking loudly about a slow leak in a gas tank in a car that was parked somewhere out of sight and how she just needed ten dollars to get to where she was going.

E. didn't seem to have a problem with giving her ten dollars, except that we didn't have that much cash in the house. I could hear him trying to figure out exactly what her situation was and how he could help. That's when I wandered out of the bedroom to let her have a look at me in all my ungroomed, pre-caffeinated dullness. I was looking at her at the same time and wondering if we needed to offer her a ride somewhere and thinking about how much I didn't want to go out in the snow. We couldn't seem to stop quizzing her, not so much out of suspicion, (okay, there may have been some suspicion) but more from stupidity and from a place of genuine concern. That is the kind of people we are in general, I think: well-intentioned and easily confused.

She was supplying all kinds of weird, convoluted answers that all added up to how the only way we could help her was to give her exactly ten dollars. We offered her the use of the phone so many times that she finally had to make a pretend call for us to the vice-president of the local community college, who made vague promises to call back. He never did. That's a vice-president for you. Then she explained that she was visiting a friend down the street who "didn't have a phone." And that's when I woke up.

Oh.

You are in my house during my pajama time and you are telling lies to my unwashed face while I listen politely and feel my bed growing cold.

Okay.

Now, we are getting somewhere.

We gave her all the cash we could find, including the impressive collection of quarters we had stashed for the parking meters downtown. I was sad to see them go. It wasn't much, maybe five or six dollars. She seemed disappointed in us. We were letting her down. I guess we still owe her four dollars. Why did I feel like she knew about the twenty bucks in my daughter's tin bank upstairs? We have to draw the line somewhere, don't we? Even for Jesus?

She was a pretty young woman, in a new-looking winter jacket and clean blue jeans. Maybe desperate needy people sometimes wear nice new clothes. And maybe Jesus likes to wear his hair in dozens of neat braids and ding dong us out of our middle-class, perpetual white-guilt sleep now and then to ask us to let go of ten lousy bucks that weren't supposed to be ours in the first place and to tell us not to forget about that needle's eye in the distance and to say that, you know, he really loves us, but lordy, that is one fat camel we're riding.