I’ve been talking about bodies, and about the shame that so many of us feel in relation to them—about their size or appearance, their functions or lacks thereof, the experiences they have or haven’t had.  About how body wounds run deep.  I’ve been talking about an opening that seems necessary if we want our shame to go away, and how, unchristian that I am, I see this opening reflected in the Bible.  And I want to step away from the Bible for a minute to explain more fully what I think I’m trying to mean.  This is intuitive stuff here, in addition to stuff consciously thought, so I’m feeling my way along even as I write.

It seems to me that shame is about believing there is something inherently wrong with us, something we mostly can’t help (I say mostly because some shame circles around feeling like we should be able to help whatever it is that’s wrong with us, but just aren’t).  So helping shame fade is a matter of helping that belief in our messed-upness fade, and helping a new belief replace it.  One that’s something about us being fine, being actually good and loveable.  Not perfect, not in need of no growth or change or healing.  But fine.  Like in a fundamental way.  In a sense that envelops all of us, too—not just the clean parts or the nice parts or the parts we let other people see.  The sense I mean holds all of who we are.

So the question becomes, How does this happen?  How does the fading of this inherently-flawed belief happen, and the introduction and growth of a new and different one? 

This is where I think Love comes in.  I don’t think any of this can happen without it.  And this is where the opening I’m exploring comes in, too, because just like “fade” and “growth” imply, Love can’t zap shame instantly out of us.  At least as far as I can see.  It’s one of those laws of shame, I think:  must get undone slowly.

A few posts back I wrote about grace (here and here), and how maybe the experience of it is actually a stepping stone to realizing there isn’t any need of it, that the experience of grace is what helps us realize we actually do deserve kindness, actually do deserve love.  The experience of grace unravels in our minds the very reality of grace. 

So.  I think experiences of love are similar.  And I’m not capitalizing love here intentionally, because I’m meaning something other than Love, which to me means the most massive and unboundaried and flooring and simultaneously gentle stuff there is, whereas love means lesser versions of that, ones that are peppered with all the normal stuff of us:  gaminess, impatience, I’ll-love-you-if-you-love-me-back, limited understanding of the beloved and all they’ve been through, all they are, I’ll-love-you-if-you-stroke-my-ego-and-reassure-me-constantly-that-I’m-your-favorite-one, etc.  Experiences of love—this peppered-with-normal-human-stuff kind—are a stepping stone, I’m thinking, or at least can be one, to realizing and experiencing the reality of Love, and actually taking on more and more of It’s traits.  Love unravels love, if that makes sense.  It enlightens. Its light reveals love for what it is, which is less than Love, and in so doing, in the very same breath, reveals us for what we are.  And what I think it reveals is that we’re good.  Fundamentally so.  Fine, just exactly as we are.  And to repeat myself, I don’t mean in no need of healing, or growth, or change.  I mean fine in a fundamental sense, and therefore having nothing to be ashamed of.

So to be less heady about all of this, and more clear about what I mean by Love revealing us for what we are.  Let’s say I feel ashamed of being so tall, ashamed that this makes me so different from what I’ve got in my head is the standard of feminine beauty.  And let’s say I’m ashamed of the veins on my legs, too, that their ever-darkening, ever-multiplying-before-my-eyesness doesn’t strike me so well.  And maybe I wish I could dance better, too, and that I could jog, rather than only walk, because I have in my mind that jogging is more cool, and the back problems that keep me from doing so aren’t.  And that surgery on my toe?  It didn’t leave the nail looking so good.  And there’s a scar from where that mole got removed.  And where that baby was removed.  And maybe all my issues with my body—all the ones I might say in a note like this and beyond—spill over into issues with my personality and my education and my life experiences.  And maybe I try to downplay all of these things, all of the things I’m ashamed of, when I’m getting to know someone new.

Does any of this sound familiar?

But let’s say this person that I’m getting to know comes to love me.  Let’s say they’re not really paying much attention to these things I’m trying to hide.  Let’s say they’re noticing things they genuinely like about me, things they find charming.  And, let’s even say they may not like me so much—love me so much—if they knew my whole story.

But that’s the point:  they only love me.  They don’t Love me.  But you know what?  Their love alone, with a lower-case ‘l’, begins to heal me.  It speaks a different voice from the one(s) in my head and starts a new belief going:  maybe I’m loveable.

And maybe I’m lucky enough to find a friend who sees some of these parts I’m ashamed of, I mean truly sees them, and doesn’t turn away.  Maybe their love is actually big enough to hold some of those parts, maybe even big enough to demonstrate instinctually that no effort is actually required to love some them, because they’re fine.  Totally par for the human course.

So something starts to open up inside of me.  Some clenched up ball begins to loosen, and I start to realize that the love that felt so good at first, but that came on the condition that I don’t really show my whole self, wasn’t actually as big as this love I’m now being given.  Maybe this love has a bigger sort of ‘l’ at the front, is just a little less mixed up with all the stuff that’s less than Love.

So an opening starts to happen, where I start to recognize what Love is, and in It’s light, even if only a glimmer, I start to see that I’m loveable.  And when I start to feel loveable, I start to not have to hide so much, or at least so much of the time.  So a relaxedness starts to grow where worry used to be.  Fear of exposure and rejection starts to fray. 

When any of this happens, even just a tiny little bit, surely angels sing.

But here’s where I think we get in trouble, where this opening I’m talking about gets stalled up sometimes, and frozen uncomfortably close to closed:  when we mistake love for Love.  When we equate the two, and believe everything love has to say.  Which, at least in all my listening, isn’t altogether nice.  To put it mildly.  love is mixed up with all the things that make us real, which means things like shame and fear and lust and maybe a deep, deep need for control.  Its voices aren’t only about healing and making us whole.

I think this connects with the Bible.  I think the openings that are in it, the ones I described in that last post, that can deepen and widen our concept of Love, can be used to do the very opposite.  We can take what an opening reveals and equate what we see with Love, all the way, as though every veil has been lifted and the Whole Truth revealed.  We can say God = love, and obligate ourselves to reify some version of this, rather than look for ways that Love is being cracked open, pointing ever beyond our concepts of love.  I think we can do this with openings outside of the Bible, too.

The people I know who seem most deeply unashamed seem to be in a lifelong process of opening.  Love is always getting unveiled for them, veil off of veil, sometimes shockingly, sometimes disturbingly so.  Often in ways that shake up old categories.  This process seems to embolden and humble them at the same time.  They get more joyful and their voices more free.  It makes them looser, if you want to put it that way—less worried about being right and making sure they’re on the right side of boundaries and more concerned with living, and making safe space for others to do so, too—for all of us to live well.

love opens us up to Love, is what I’m trying to say.  Or has the potential to.  And I think it’s when we find ourselves inside Love’s reach, or at least start getting the hunch that that’s where we belong, when we discover ourselves to be inherently loveable, and therefore fundamentally good, our height and our weight and our shape and our smells and our bodily functions and the experiences we have and haven’t had; our sexual orientations and genders and (un)athleticism and (un)paired-upness with someone we love—everything that makes us such embodied creatures:  all of it starts being less and less grounds for fear and shame.  A new kind of core starts taking shape, I think, inside of us, and our wounds become that much less crippling.  They don’t define us any more.

Openings like these are becoming my guiding lights.  They’re what my body yearns for and my soul is drawn toward.  In the Bible, and anywhere else I can find them.

It was a wonderful two days (Friday and Saturday) that I want to write more about soon…and will, once our dear friends, who arrive in a couple of hours (that will be filled with sweeping and mopping and laundry and food prep on my end) head back home.  Much more later…

So about this opening.

Christian Scriptures talk a lot about God.  They talk a lot about people hearing God, worshipping God, speaking with and following God.  Tradition says these texts are inspired, too—are an authority for knowing what’s True.

And in this sense, I want to concur.  I want to stick with tradition.  And I want to talk about an opening that seems to me the heart of the Bible’s inspiration, the heart of Love, really, which is what will get us back to bodies, and what I think can help heal our shame.

Early biblical texts have God calling out a people.  Follow me, God says.  I want to bless you, and through you, everyone else too.  So Abram and Sarai start things off.  They leave everything familiar and follow.  From the very start you’ve got a Special People, and you’ve got a Holy will to bless everyone.

Time passes, and adventures do too, and pretty soon there’s wars being fought in God’s name.  Wars where the texts have God ordering them, ordering slaughter, destruction of entire groups to keep the Special People pure.  Mix with others and you never know what unholiness could happen.

Simultaneously, you’ve got provisions for the alien.  From the mouth of God.  Hospitality codes.  Honor codes.  The alien is not the enemy, God says.  In fact, the alien deserves kindness.  It’s a harsh world out there, a desert, if you want to put it that way.  Without your care they’ll die.

So there’s the Special People and there’s the plan to bless everyone and there’s the matter of racial purity and the sense that even aliens matter.  More than matter, they’re human.  In this, they’re just like you.  And you never know when you’ll need their care, too.

Time passes and the Special People get rich—the people who were slaves and wanderers early on.  They get rich and ignore the poor and take their Specialness for granted.  And the prophets come out scolding.  What do you think you’re doing? they say.  This inequity, this disregard for the vulnerable among you, this worshiping of idols—none of it’s God’s way!

So you’ve got the Special People and the will to bless everyone and the racial purity and the sense that aliens are part of us too.  You’ve got taking specialness for granted and abuse of wealth and power, and impassioned pleas (tirades) against such things.  You’ve got Special People nestled comfortably into their status, nestled at the “underlings’” expense, and voices crying out in the wilderness (or opulent abodes), “This is unholy!  This isn’t God’s way!”

Time passes and rich become poor.  “In” become “out” as the People lose temple and land.  There is much grief over what is lost, much confusion, much wishing for the good old days.  And angry words from prophets, saying This?  It’s actually your fault.  Forget Yahweh and He’ll chasten you.  Forget Him and He’ll send plagues!  He’ll take away everything you love and give what you barely can endure.  Forget Him long enough and you don’t want to know what He’ll do.  There are threats and there is blame and there is shape up or else.  And there is shape up and I’ll be wonderfully kind.  Bless you beyond measure.  A fearsome, fearsome God.

And more time and more stories pass.

And Jesus comes along.  A Special Person in every respect, but doing little by the book.  Or Book, rather, because different groups of Special People have determined an inspired set of laws, inspired interpretations of those laws, that make Jesus look, at least to many, more like Heretic than Holy, and the people he deems Special the very last, the very least of whom the People would expect.  To top his strangeness off, Jesus says, “I am the way.  No one gets to God except by me,” which by that point seems to mean no one gets to God except by widening the sphere of Special, widening the sphere of Holy and the sphere of the fall of grace, which ends up being a lot harder fall than the one from grace, because according to Jesus it’s God that does the falling this time, and it looks to a lot of People like God’s aim’s not too good.

And Jesus gets killed for this.  For his God talk.  For his politics, and his flattening of holy hierarchies.  He gets killed for being a man too many want to follow, and for the nature of that following, which doesn’t tip a tall enough hat to tradition, a tall enough hat to what’s expected of God’s People, let alone the people of Empire.

He gets killed.  Bang.  Or groan, rather, because he’s hung, up on a cross with criminals.  And he says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” which again is that fall of grace, is that widening sphere of Love that holds the Jews and the Gentiles and the friends who ran away, who feared for their lives and in their flight began to grieve the most horrible grief of all, which is hope dying altogether.  The death of hope.

But the stories keep coming.  Jesus is alive again, and there’s people talking about him, and people getting changed by him—still, even after he died.  And there’s churches getting formed.  Institutions getting started.  And there’s books like Galatians, where people are scolded for obsessing over rightness again, books like James, where Love is more about acting than beliefs.  You’ve got Jesus stories getting told in the very contexts, among the very boundaried groups, his words seemed meant to undo.

This—this is inspiration as I see it.  Not a book transcribed from God.  Not a book where every story told is accurate depiction of God.  But a book that documents over so much time the way things are:  The way people look to and for God.  The way we feel special or unspecial, blessed or abandoned. The ways we protect our own, fear death, abuse wealth and power, make ourselves look good, or blame someone else when we can’t.  The ways we also hear that Voice, sometimes loud, sometimes hardly past a whisper, calling us out of ourselves, or at least the parts of ourselves that are afraid and self-righteous and elitist and…ashamed.  Out of our violence, that would put our very drives, our very elitism, our very need to be special at other’s expense, into the mouth of God.  Into the heart of God, which we turn around and make our standard for how hearts should be.

But that Voice.  It keeps calling.  It keeps turning upside down who we thought God would be.  It’s called from time immemorial, and seeds the whole Book, even as other voices, many other voices, do too.  There’s an opening along the way, I think, in individual stories, but also in the Story as whole, the human Story, to a Love that undoes violence.  And to what we often do to people who talk about, let alone try to live out, such a Love.

So as I see it, in this manner, in a strange and twisted sort of way, the scope of God’s blessing, or rather, the scope that people recognize of that blessing, truly is expanding through Abraham and Sarah.  The trajectory of the stories that got told and written down of them thousands of years ago, that unfolded into the ones from the last millennium, that partnered with so much adventure through time and speak in hearts today—the direction in which they point, and even sometimes lead, is toward an opening of God’s arms. Or rather, a recognition of the infinite wideness of those arms.  Like standing in a circle marked “God’s blessed ones”, watching what we thought were walls, or fences, or boundary lines around us, dissipate like fog in ever-widening circles.

And this—this recognition—is what makes possible the unbranding of shame I think.  The process—internal, alongside dear others, and as whole groups—that I think has to happen for us to know, not intellectually, but viscerally, that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with us.  With our bodies (since that’s, after all, what I’m aiming to speak of here).  That big boobs and long dicks and smooth skin and strong libidos and curves and muscles and hair in all the right places (and none of the wrong); that lack of disease and disability and early (or ongoing) abuse; that any of the things that make models look and seem to function like they do and standards for wholeness and sexiness and desirability what we think exist inherently—that none of this has anything inherent on the broader scope of who we actually are.  Which is real. Which is not standard.  Which is aging bodies of all shapes and textures and (dis)abilities and experiences and wounds and sizes.

I’m out of time and space right now to explain adequately what I mean by all of this, by this unbranding, and by the connections I’m trying to make between the opening I see in the Bible and the opening I think is necessary for shame to go away.  I’ll try to talk more on this next time.  I didn’t realize I had so much to say.

[Inspired by conversations on some of the blogs I read about heterosexuality, homosexuality, and the Christian tradition.]

In addition to so much else, bodies are sexual things.  At least for most of us, for a majority of our lives.  And there is something about our sexualness that’s close to our core, I think, something that makes sexual wounds run deep.  Deeper than bodies, even.  To be sexualized before we’re ready, or by the wrong people, to be molested or raped, to have unfulfilled longing, to have sexual parts that don’t look or work like we’d wish, to be thought undesirable by those we want desiring us, to be called, because of our desires, less than God’s ideal, or willfully depraved:  these are wounds that hit our core.  They hit the soft, impressionable places that tell us fundamental things about ourselves, the places where marks don’t quickly fade, where words, or even looks on people’s faces, are branding irons, and the flanks of our identities, our self-appraisals, unhelpably exposed.

And shame, in one form or another, is what I think the brands all say.  And shame is such an awful, awful thing, because it keeps us hiding, and therefore lonely—hiding sometimes literally, our body or our parts, hiding sometimes figuratively, our self-thoughts, our memories, expressions of our sexual beingness.  It keeps our wounds private.  It keeps us silent when we need to talk and urges us to silence those who do.  “Don’t bring that up,” we say.  It’s too hard to think about.  Too hard to see or deal with each other’s wounds, let alone our own.

I’m not a Christian right now in the ways many might define it, but my roots are there, and so is a lot of education, and it seems like the Christian Scriptures have a lot to say about related things.  In broad strokes, the Bible is a story of opening, I think.  A story of people opening, over time, and not in any straight or orderly fashion, to fuller understandings of love.  Or Love, rather.  And it’s Love that can unbrand our shame, I think.  It’s Love that can soften that marked up place inside of us, and impress it gently, tenderly, with something new.

I want to talk about this opening. 

I have a busy next few days, but when I get a chance to think after that, I want to put more words about this here.

(Part I here)

What if each of our bodies is a word, or a paragraph (maybe more?) of an ongoing, cosmic conversation?  This makes my love and acceptance of my body feel beside the point, and therefore strangely possible.  It makes me wonder what I’m being said in response to.  It makes me wonder who will be said in response to me.

Last night N and I watched Syriana.  Syriana tells the story of Big Oil and Big America working in front of and behind the scenes to make sure America’s oil interests get met exceeded.  It humanizes the many people involved and caught up in this work, including unemployed Pakistani oil workers, CIA operatives, lawyers, business owners, consultants, kings and princes both sympathetic and opposed to America’s hopes for oil in Kazakhstan.

As often happens after movies such as these, I feel a lot of dissonance inside.  I’m troubled, to put it mildly, by the ways that people and entire countries get objectified as companies and countries pursue short-term prosperity (defined fiscally).  I’m equally troubled by the fact that there are no bad guys to pin this on when you look up close, no people that aren’t human like you or me, caught up in systems far bigger than themselves, histories they didn’t choose, but have been socialized within, indoctrinated by.  Put me in a family with history in oil, and I may just care more about my dynasty than the people I have to kill (literally or otherwise) to maintain it.  Who knows?

So I roil inside with indignation that can’t find a home.  I roil with the helplessness I feel when I read about Iraq and Beirut and kidnappings and religious conflicts.  When people blindly support one side or another in such things, one side or another when it comes to politics or war.

What can I do but try to listen to my anger?  Try to listen to whether it’s inviting me to do something different with my days, or inviting me to do what I’m already doing with that much more oomph.  Anger is fuel, I’m thinking, that can take us down many roads.  If it can take me further down my road of bearing light in inner places–a world-changing endeavor just like politics or organizing or war–then bring it on, I guess I say.  It feels terrible, a scribbly sharpness inside, but maybe that’s okay.  Maybe I need it to fuel my acts into ones more alive, more full of courage and the kind of hope that comes from acting in response to what I don’t like (and what I do!), even if my acts address the yuck in a round-about way.

Can writing my novel, my stories, my essays, my blog, raising my baby, loving family and friends, tending my soul–can these make the world more sane?  Can they change foreign policy?  Can they have anything at all to do with who needs and gets oil, how much, and at what human or monetary cost?

If any of you will be attending the Blogher conference at the end of this month (yes, I am spoiled; it’s 20 minutes from where I live), I’d love to get a chance to meet you!  I’ll be there both days.  Email me if you want to find a way to connect!

Some of you might be interested in following my friend Dave as he reflects on McLaren’s New Kind of Christian.  Dave and I were in seminary together, and he comes at the emergent church movement, Christianity in general, and being Mennonite Brethren specifically in ways the majority in all three groups might find…interesting.  A few posts before the one that starts his book reflections is a piece about his spiritual journey that you might also like to read.

I’m thinking about bodies these days.  Partly because I’m constantly carrying and feeding and wiping and changing and redirecting and cuddling a little one.  Partly because I’ve got an enormous bruise on the back of my left leg that makes me look like I got hit by a torpedo, and I can’t for the life of me think how. 

But partly because of this integration work I’m doing, and the memories I’m re-membering.  We are such bodied creatures, and how we experience life can’t be separated from that, I don’t think.

What I’m wondering these days is whether there are folks out there who love and accept their bodies wholely, and whose body experiences throughout life have by and large been good.  Do people like this exist?  And I’m wondering, of those whose body experiences have not been mostly good (and I know there are lots of these), but who have come to love their bodies anyway, how have they/you come to have such love?  Bodies have been, or at least have been experienced, as such a thorn in so many of our sides–such a source of frustration and anxiety and shame–that the question seems worth asking:  Where can we go from here?  The tall ones and the short ones and the fat ones and skinny ones and the ones with four limbs or three or none.  The ones with bad eyesight, and muscles that won’t work, and joints that ache in the morning and sometimes all day.  And the athletes and dancers, and the children whose energy won’t end, and the diseased ones with and without diagnoses, with and without anyone believing they have something wrong. The big busted and little busted and pimply and smooth, and horny and don’t-even-think-about-it-tonightness ones.  The ones shaped like pears and bean stalks and pregant ladies and bulldogs.  The ones who stoop because they have to, or stoop because of shame, which in some cases amount to pretty much the same thing.

All of us–all colors and frecklednesses and smells!–can’t forget the smells–and textures and amounts of hairiness and wherenesses of that hair:  Where can we go from here, if loving us, not who we aren’t, but who we are, is where we’d like to go?  We are bodies–yes, more than that, too–but we are bodies.  All of us.  How to love that, how to embody these bodies well, and open up space for those around us to love like that, too:  that’s what I’m pondering.

We should have suspected ill fate when we got the stereo home those many years ago, unpacked it, played with the fancy buttons, and the display said "goodbye" when we turned it off.  Unnerved by such affable plastic, we looked at each other, smiled skeptically, but in the end decided to keep it.

You must understand, it’s not like we don’t like technology.  We respect it.  We’re glad it’s in our walls and our computers, for example, and that by and large our car tends to run.  It gets us places.  We like the way those little switches make lights come on at night, and how you buy something at the store called "bulbs" when the light stops and soon enough it starts again.  We know all about this kind of stuff.

When it comes to many fancy buttons, however, we’re mostly glad to push them with the power turned off, at least when their host is new, and then hope against all hope we can discover, by color or texture, which ones make the host do the function we bought it for in the first place.

So this stereo.  Not only does it have many buttons, and by many I mean lots, but it also has a bar that takes batteries, just like our TV, which is also lined with many buttons, and come to find out (a sideways glance at the owners manual turned this one up), many of the functions of the machine can only be accomplished by use of that bar.

Lucky for us, turning the stereo on, playing CDs, and even little things called tapes, which we feel much endearment toward because they remind us of days when everything was far less complicated–all these most important functions happen without that bar, and we know how to make them go.  We’ll even show you if you like.

So a few years back when N was on a trip and I got woken up in the middle of the night to the stereo blaring, I was only confused about how it came on; I knew exactly how to make it stop.  This happened the next night, too, twice, and only once the night after that before it occurred to me the machine must be unplugged each night before sleep.  I’m sure you understand.  It was always kind enough to say goodbye when I stopped it, but never enough to ask whether I wanted it on in the first place.

The next trip N took (his work had a few during that season), I fell asleep on the couch, listening to the beautiful sounds of my friends C and L, who are musicians, and were kind enough to copy me a tape (nastalgic sigh) of some of their current stuff.  I fell asleep listening to them, only to wake up hours later to the sound of the radio.  Crap.  Didn’t unplug it.  It wasn’t loud, thank God, but it was on.  "Goodbye," I said as I yanked the chord from the wall and headed off to bed.

Well.  The next morning, I decided to finish the tape I had started the night before.  I pushed play (the button with the tipped over triangle on it, for anyone who’s interested), but lo and behold, the tape was at the end already.  Must have really slept hard, I thought.

I rewound it (two tipped over triangles, pointed to the left), and pushed play again, but the only sounds on that tape, the only ones left at all, were the staticy voices of late-night call-in shows.  From the radio.  The machine is possessed, I tell you.  Not only did it stop the tape, but it rewound it, and recorded the radio over the entire thing.

I was speechless.

Needless to say, I don’t keep tapes in that deck anymore.  Seasons changed, though, and we moved, and I don’t know, maybe something about the air in our new place, something about the angle of the moonlight or the lack of nighttime power surges has meant the radio stays plugged in 24-7.  No midnight blastings.  No illicit radio recordings.  Just darkness and quiet through each entire night.

Or so we came to expect.

We have a baby now, who loves buttons.  The more the better.  Buttons and dials–dials, especially.  We lay our fan flat on the ground, unplugged, and baby spends solid minutes, often many of them in a row, working on its dial.

So on the rare occasion that he gets a glimpse of the radio, hidden well behind the doors of our armoire, he’s transfixed.  Understandably.  So many fancy buttons.  We’ve indulged him more than half a dozen times with a good ten minute session of dial-and-push, laughing at having to turn the radio off repeatedly to avoid blasting our neighbors away.

What we didn’t bargain for, what we had no idea he could do, was operate the deeper and more complex functions of that machine without the bar.  And by deeper and complex, I mean functions no one should ever need to learn.  The child has learned, possibly in cahoots with the demon or demons that inhabit that thing, how to set it to go off every night at 11:53.  The radio.  For anyone who’s interested, that’s right in our deepest, most necessary cycle of sleep.

Whether this is merely a sign of the times, yet another clichéd example of child-knows-more-than-adults-about-technology, we don’t know.  The kid isn’t even eleven months old. 

What we do know is we have a post-it note on our table now, scrawled in the angry hand of a man half-asleep, that reads, "RADIO", which I think means something like "make it stop doing that–TODAY". 

Wish us luck.  Bedtime fast approaches and the mysteries of the box remain.  Even if we have to unplug the darn thing, we half expect a cackle to come with its goodbye.