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Liza always stopped to talk with the people waiting in line at the free clinic or the lunch group gathered outside to smoke or visit in the parking lot, while the kitchen volunteers bustled around cleaning up and before she left the church. She felt not curiously fulfilled in her role as scribe, and steeped in hope for humankind. That such a place, such a day, existed never failed to put her in awe of it. Bud had made of his life a string of thankless services, preaching to three Methodist congregations weekly, an almost impossible gig. Clergy were expected to spread thin their wisdom, to spend their lives caring for the poor. But Liza always thanked him on her way out the door, wishing somehow that she could do more. She recalled that her father on birthdays and at Christmas while presenting his gifts would always say, "I wish it could be more."

But it is not more that we need, she reflected, it is less stuff and an endless supply of...well,love. And yet if she could be honest with herself, she perennially found something missing. Not that she needed more of anything. Unless she needed more nothingness, or emptiness as it was called in Zen. She needed the kind of nothing that always led to something. Nothing was her Zen ethic: why wouldn't her devotion to nothingness eventually lead to a something which would be a male, not to feed her ego, but to watch her back?

The city streets rattled her: of late her blood pressure had been edging up. Noise increasingly bothered her. The depth of silence at her country home was profound. One could swim in it. Liza would always take her blood pressure at the pharmacy, having bragged her life long that she was the only person in all of her extended family not on high blood pressure meds, she was beginning at age 75 to get her come-uppance. Before oral surgery last week, (and oh yes, she was slowly losing all her teeth) they had reported she was 180 over 85. Impossible, she said out loud, but there were the numbers issuing from the nurse's mouth. Are you sure? Quite sure. You have yourself worked up, said the nurse, officiously. How unsouthern of her to say so, thought Liza, who was certainly not native to the South. Afterwards she saw herself in the mirror. Who is that old woman rising up like some terrible fish? she wanted to know.