I returned to my childhood home for a music festival in the town square, which, as in any small town, is where anything of importance takes place, both good and bad.  Almost two hundred years both reveal and hide much history . . . there will be no public hangings today, and the whipping posts long ago disappeared from in front of the county jail and from memory.  Not as easily forgotten, the Ku Klux Klan and the lynchings and beatings not done in public view, though to the thinking of far too many still served a kind of justice.

Slowly wheeling through the crowd of people, who would be appalled to know of the ground on which they had gathered, a very large woman in a wheelchair, and riding on the footrests a little, very excited pug dog.  The woman was not beautiful, but the love and joy she had for her companion, and the dog for her, shone in the most beatific smile I have ever seen. 

The people milling about the square invariably veered away from her, not to give her space but to avoid acknowledging her existence . . . to be reminded of disability is to know that there is something worse than mere mortality, and if not as certain as death, no less to be avoided.

She paused near the bandstand, and the dog jumped down on three legs, the fourth wizened and useless under her.  Since she couldn’t squat it was quite obvious that what she had eaten had served its purpose and she seemed proud of what she dropped on the sidewalk.  Still smiling, the woman leaned as far as she could from her wheelchair and with her handkerchief tried to make a withdrawal of her dog’s deposit.  As if by an unspoken yet voluble command, the crowd withdrew even farther.

I walked over to her and said “Let me do that” . . . and as I genuflected before them, I saw not a woman and a dog, each imperfect in her way, but two friends made whole by their love and care for each other.  And in that, in them, was the one truth and the one religion I've come in my years to believe in. . . and the answer to the oldest question.