STONE COLD

    What does a colander, kidney stones and Church have in common?  This is the question on the front of every thinking person’s frontal brain lobe, isn’t it?  If it is, here is my answer to my own question.

     They all came together one hot, summer Sunday morning at our Church.  It began when one of our Church ladies started cornering people who were still inside the Church.  She was carrying one of those short, squatty plastic glasses that a person gets from the local convenience store from the soda fountain.  The cup appeared to be filled with something cold because beads of condensation had formed on the glass and were temptingly sliding down its side.  Was it a soft drink, iced tea or just ice water?  Any one of them would have been welcomed on such a warm day as it was turning out to be.  What I had hoped for, what I had imagined in the cup was not at all what the cup actually held.

      Like the rest of the unsuspecting Church people whom the woman had trapped, I too was given the opportunity to see something only a few eyes have seen.  At least, that is the feeling the woman was trying to push-off on us.  

     “Ivan, you gotta see this”.

     I had to see it?  What if I didn’t want to?  I wished I had gone with my frontal brain lobe thought that said, “Run far and fast.  You ain’t going to wanna see that!”  Sadly, I didn’t listen to myself!

     Frozen in the clear ice of the glass, suspended in cold storage, were small, smooth, hardened clumps of what looked like peanut butter with a slight case of Jaundice.   Yellowish, beanish looking orbs. 

     After the show of’ show and tell’ came the ‘tell’ part and tell she did.  Her explanation blasted any thought of wanting an ice-cold, refreshing drink far from my mind because of what we were having deciphered to us.  Kidney stones.  Those globulations on ice were kidney stones.  To be more precise, they were her kidney stones!  She had cultivated, produced, grown and somehow harvested her own kidney stones. They were locally raised, one owner, genuine kidney stones from a lady in our Church.  What more could a person ask for?  More details? Definitely not! Not me.  I was not going to ask for any details.  I had seen enough and had managed quite well to keep my breakfast down, up to that point, though it was becoming somewhat of a struggle. 

     I didn’t need to ask.  She didn’t need to be asked.  She was the queen of show and tell!  I knew she had not recently had any operations because she had not missed any Church. Her story of explanation was deep with explanation of her taking some kind of special medication to get the stones, her stones in motion.  In order to tell if the procedure was doing any good, she had placed a kitchen colander in the toilet every time she ‘did her duty’.  That was how she had managed to catch and collected the stones.  For a woman who did a lot of fishing, why she didn’t believe in the ‘catch and release’ idea, I’ll never know.   After catching, all that was left for her to do was to add water to her specimens, freeze them to keep them fresh, just so she could show them to everyone at Church.  That included all who were not interested or had weak stomaches which basically covered every person in our Church!  The good news in all of this is that no one puked, at least not publicly. 

I have come up with this CONCLUSION: In the end, I thought that a person like her was just the one to start a chapter of KSAP or Kidney Stone Anonymous Passers.  They could meet weekly after completing a Twelve Flush Program.  One by one, they could stand and say something like, “Hi, my name is so and so and in the past, I have been kidney stoned.  Not anymore.  I have been relieved.  Let us now pass the plastic glass around.”

     By the way, that’s all I have to say on the subject,  just in passing!

     (The above sketch is another of my early attempts to sketch my thoughts with the only resources I had available at the time.)