Everybody, Always

Sweet Maria mocked up the king of all hot dogs for her to look at and
piled it high with the works. It had a whole mound of onions chopped on
top and a pickle the size of a small dog. I put on my favorite baseball cap
and got Carol’s, and we put the sample dog on a silver tray in front of her.
I fed her finely chopped hot dog a quarter of a teaspoon at a time, and I
told her to look at the sample and imagine she was downing it in huge
bites while watching a Red Sox game. Our friends do things like this for
us. They help us see the life Jesus talked about while giving it to us in
smaller pieces—sometimes just a teaspoonful at a time.
Some people have bucket lists of things they’ve always wanted to do.
I don’t have one; I want to do everything. If I had a bucket list, I could
put only two or three things I don’t want to do in it— like getting bitten
in the face by a snake. But honestly, I’m even on the bubble about that
one. I asked Carol if she had a bucket list of things she’d always wanted
to do but had never gotten around to. Carol thought about it and then said
with a twinkle in her eye, “You know, I’ve never toilet-papered anyone’s
house.”
Carol called me on the walkie-talkie at four o’clock in the afternoon a
few days later. “Let’s go!” she almost shouted. I was going to explain to
her how most toilet-papering usually happens under the cover of
darkness, but then I thought about it for a second and shot back, “I’m on
my way!” I got some fake rubber noses and glasses for us to put on, and
we ran across the street like a couple of high school kids with rolls of
toilet paper under our arms. Sweet Maria met us there and had a dozen
more rolls with her. One of our favorite neighbors has some big trees in
front of their home. Carol giggled as she threw rolls of toilet paper over
the trees and pointed out places we’d missed. She had an arm too.
Just as we were finishing up a pretty epic job on our neighbor’s trees,
the police came down the street in their cruiser. It was as if they had been
cued by a movie director to show up just as Carol was getting ready to
heave the last roll over the top branch. She had her arm cocked behind her
head as they drove up. She glanced at them, then at the tree, then back at