St. John declares that words make us human.  That words, even, make us exist.  It is words, and not pictograms or tools or logic or emotions.  And so St. John is the patron saint of writers.

I mean St. John the Evangelist, theoretical author of what is known as John’s gospel.  I don’t know or care who wrote the thing.  The prologue is one of my favorite pieces of literature.  (St. John also theoretically wrote Revelation, but Martin Luther and I don’t approve of Revelation.)

“In the beginning was the word.”  And part of Jewish, and Christian, creation tradition has held that the world was made with words.  This “God” or “Lord” character speaks to make things be.

At the art museum here, we have a stained glass window that was made in medieval Europe, showing St. John holding a cup with a snake in it.  The story is, St. John and his buddies were captured by some bad guy, and the bad guy forces St. John and his buddies drink poison.  This bad guy must be building the grand tradition of unnecessarily elaborate execution techniques honored in “Austin Powers” with my favorite “sharks with lasers.”

St. John is so uber powerful that he drinks his poison, and then his buddies’ poison, and he’s fine.  Well, maybe he has a little food-poisoning type digestive discomfort, but  the point of the story is that poison cannot kill him.  He is a badass.

Some people find St. John’s gospel a little airy.  Some people say that Jesus’ feet never touch the ground.  I don’t see that.  What I see is a writer who had an experience of the Christ, rather than Jesus the man, and painted a more abstract picture.  The author struggled to find any language that would put the power of a Christ figure into focus.  Any language that would contain the experience at all.  St. John’s gospel explodes the Jesus notion into the Christ idea.  It says, you have no idea what this Christ thing means.  You have no idea how big this is.  You have no idea the force of love over ambivalence, confusion, or loss.

When I was in Rome last summer, I searched all over the Vatican City for a St. Giovanni Evangelista medal.  I’m not Catholic, and I have never bought or owned a medal, except, perhaps, the Libra medal that my step-grandma bought me when I was little.  I don’t think that counts.  In each little shop, I walked past the counters of rosaries and small towns of statues to bins of medals.  ”St. Giovanni,” I told the salesclerks.  They nodded.  ”Evangelista,” I added.  Their lips pursed pessimistically.

Only at one spot, directly across the street from St. Peter’s, did I find a silver St. Giovanni Evangelista.  He wears the usual Bible-person type robes, and he has a book in his lap.  His buddy animal (the patronage goes on and on) is the eagle, so an eagle perches on the book.  St. John and the eagle are both too tiny to have real facial expressions, but I think the eagle looks like he’s thinking, “Whassup?”  I bought the medal, and put it on immediately.

At my church, St. John is the right-hand side of the triptych.  Christ in the middle, St. Peter on the left.  St. Peter holds his keys, which always makes him look like an annoying older brother.  Jesus left me with the keys, y’all, so, watch it! St. John, as usual, has his snake cup. He take the poison for himself, and for anyone else who’s feeling weak.  That’s what makes him such a good man to have around, not just for writers, but anybody who runs into a bad guy now and then.

I drove out to the nursing home listening to Barry Manilow, lending some theatricality to what was probably a false alarm.  My parents often played a Barry Manilow record when I was in preschool.  So it isn’t my fault.  I was listening to “This One’s For You,” which has a bold, swelling orchesteral sky, and the sun was setting brilliantly along the interstate.  I had been out for this final visit with Grandma several times already.  Her dying happened with a lot of fits and starts.

I waltzed into Grandma’s room, and my family was all standing around her bed, and not talking much.  After I’d been there a minute, I said softly, “How is she?”  And my darling aunt whispered, “Oh, honey, she passed about ten minutes ago.”  Which wasn’t funny right then, but became funny to me very shortly afterward.

I decided, the next day, that I was going to go to Target and spend my troubles away.  I have a $100 Trouble with a Capital T allowance that I occasionally permit myself.  They have everything at Target, of course, and $100 will go a little ways.

Housewares was usually the area where I could bribe myself most effectively.  Lo and behold… the lamp of my dreams, which I had decided was too expensive, was on sale.  Forty percent off.  It’s ceramic, rectangular, and painted with black and white Chinese patterns, and if you don’t think that’s a good-looking lamp, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.  I scooped it up and gazed at it, goo-goo eyed, as I set it in my red cart.

I was feeling much enlivened as I carried it up the front stairs of my apartment building.  The circle of life and to everything a season, and I had a new lamp.  I set down my shopping bag to get out my keys.  Then I opened the door, knocked over my shopping bag, and there was a terrible crash.

I think I could tell a story like this about every time I have grieved a loss.  Every time, there’s some crude event in the physical world that funnels the problem of loss into one contained spot.

I carried the bag of ceramic fragments up to my apartment and was talking to myself a lot: “We’re going to glue it back together.  We have glue.  I’m sure we can glue it back together.”  I was not at all sure I could glue it back together.  One thing that seriously held me back was my lack of spatial reasoning skills.  This was the part of the IQ test and the SAT and the ACT and the GRE that I had consistently flunked.  Putting a 3-D puzzle together is very hard for me.  It’s shocking that I share so much DNA with so many engineers.

The lamp was repairable.  It looks just fine now, with cracks that you wouldn’t notice, and they do not represent how I have healed from my grief and have grown stronger or anything Hallmark like that.

It was just something I could do, struggle with those pieces and matching the blacks and whites of the pattern, while I was thinking about how sharp and helpless loss can feel, and proving to myself that some things are repairable.

Partly because my parents divorced, I had Emerald City dreams.  I wanted the shiniest brightest marriage and the glowingest cheerfulest children and possibly a horse that changed colors, since we would be living there in the fabulous 21st century.

I set out from my Kansas (which, coincidentally, was actually Kansas)– exploring, meeting people.  For all my wandering, my romantic life still resembled tornado season.  Spring is lovely.  And stormy, and dangerous.  Joyful new surprises, intoxicating fragrances, sudden suspicious skies, then hiding in a dark cellar while something loud and scary and unknowable rearranges your house.

I love The Wizard of Oz– book and movie.  How many books of that era have a female protagonist?  And she’s not looking for a man.  She just wants to look around and get out, and then she wants to go back home.  She messes some shit up, like she actually kills this one lady, and then another lady, and she’s like: well, whatever.  My bad.  Accident.  Self defense.

She is brave and kind and generous on the quest, and when it turns out the whole thing was a sham, she’s like: well, I tried.  Cries a little.  And then her old buddy that pink lady comes back and solves it all in this sweet, nonviolent way.

All the male characters in the story are fakes and half-people and weirdo sidekicks, which just makes the story a healthy balance for most of the stories in the world, not that I am bitter about that because honestly I’m not, especially because it’s just awesome that this book was written by a man!  What the deuce?  (L. Frank Baum, by the way, was a nut, which I mean lovingly.  He failed in many endeavors before writing this popular book and milking it raw.)

So maybe it’s not that I haven’t been to Oz.  I know I don’t have the Emerald City citizenship– I don’t feel safe behind sparkling walls.  I have been some interesting places, though, and I have seen some weird things, like me letting go of a self-protective checklists, for example, or me backing down when I’ve gone too far.  Maybe I haven’t been stuck in Kansas.

I know that the Wizard of Oz is a true story that tries to tell you that you are enough already, and that everyone you meet is broken and in a panic about it, and that nothing can actually be fixed, and that you always feel like you have to go somewhere in life, but there’s no place to actually get.  I know that.

And I know it is also a story about a girl who is trying to grow up, as I am.