The Cubs beat the Reds tonight 7-5 for their second straight win and I fell asleep on the small couch in front of the electronic cinema for the second and third half-innings of the game. It felt like I slept hard and I was disoriented for a few moments when I woke up, but maybe half and hour had passed.

I ate some clam chowder straight from the can on the couch with the game blaring on the giant screen in front of me, my feet up on a round Ottoman, a cat licking herself clean on the floor near my feet, the sun falling slowly outside and throwing weakening light in the windows above and behind me.

I learned an acquaintance-friend of mine of 10 years diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma is crashing and not anticipated to live long. I’ve not talked to her in years, except through Facebook, where her incisive critical tone took on a heavier than usual bent over the last year, which is explainable now. She is a Christian woman who has striven to live her life authentically. She has an adult daughter, and a great, gentle, sensitive, creative soul mate husband and best friend, who is also an authentic person who I’ve never seen down. I don’t know what is going on with either of them in this shadowed time of their lives. I pray for them and remember life is a sprint.

Facebook is a showcase presently for the children of friends who are graduating- from high schools, from colleges. It is jarring to see this, I must admit.

Time is indifferent to lives and life. There is no emergency brake to stop the circling hands on the clock. The expiration date is reliable.

I take off my shirt after I drop a glob of cold chowder on it. I remove it and rinse it in the sink, cold water. I sit back down on the couch to continue watching the game, and the fat on my stomach is a wide, full mound. It is a middle-aged man’s trophy. It testifies to my nutritional interests and fitness level. It says what my words may not: I am letting things go.

I am a poor prayer, a man of weak faith and lesser connections, with others, with Him, but my acquaintance-friend and her condition remind me of days when I have been stronger, when I have been more grounded. When I have been more committed. And they remind me of a One I have always loved, when lectures and pontifications have been stripped away, when the magnificence of human adornment has been removed, and I have heard Him in the Word quietly in my heart.

I heard eternity, strength, love. A voice behind the atomic activities. The reason behind reason.

I miss those days, and I pray for my acquaintance-friend and her husband and their daughter, in the simple words of a child. Love them. Fill them up. Carry them as she lives or dies.

I look at my stomach.

Endless hours in front of the tube watching baseball in 3 hour chunks.

But I still, in the distant background, hear the clock ticking.