The People in Mongolia
We’re doing seventy down I-10 twenty miles from Texas. The car glides over the road in front of us and the trees get thinner as we go. We’ve got the windows down and the wind is blowing her hair around. She’s got her shades on and the country goes by her eyes in rounded silver with her cute nose just beneath. Her ears are beautiful. Elegant.
“You got anything from your folks?” She speaks without turning, staring out at the road, the horizon ahead.
“What you see is what you got. Just my face and name. Some things in my mind. Maybe some spiritual stuff too.”
“No keepsake?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
She pulls up her purse from underneath her feet and sets it in her lap, rummages for a while and brings out a hard eyeglass case. She opens it and shows me a glass chili pepper with a hole in the big end. “One year when we had money momma bought this set of Christmas lights. It was real expensive.” The silver shines my way. “This is all I got, except maybe what you said too.”
She hands it to me. It’s heavy, good quality. The green and the red aren’t painted on and it looks hand blown. It’s really nice, but lonely in a way. I hold it up to the light with one hand and a kaleidoscope of color dances on her leg. She smiles.
We pass a sign for a Mom and Pop hotel. Her sunglasses flash as she turns back toward the sign. “You ever sat on one of those shaking beds?”
“The ones where you put the quarters in and the whole. . .?” She’s nodding and smiling. “Yeah.”
“Momma said it was a waste of money. But daddy did it anyway. We’d all sit there and daddy would put in quarters and we’d just shake together.” She shakes her head in a slight vibration and smiles to herself. I smile too. I can’t help it. I know what she means.
“I always wanted to do it again to be sure.”
A van pulls out from behind and passes us pulling a trailer. One side of the tarp has come untied and flaps in the wind in front of us. A handle bar of a child’s bike is at the end, its streamer flowing toward us in the wind.
“I wanted to feel it the same way somebody in Mongolia would—the same way anybody would. You know, so if I ever met them I wouldn’t be behind or nothin’. You know? They’d say somethin’ like ‘that’s like being on a shaking bed.’ in Mongolian and I ‘d say ‘Yeah, I know what you mean.’ And we’d be friends.”
I nod and give her back the chili pepper. She opens the hard case and puts it back in.
“It’s important to not get behind. You get behind you get scre. . ., you get …” I don’t how to finish. I’m trying to say better things around her than what I said when it was just me.
She nods. Green trees and silver flash in the sun as she looks toward the horizon. “I’m pregnant.”
I nod. It’s not that I’m not surprised. It’s just that after a while, nothing is a surprise. I don’t say anything. That damn bike. I hate it when people pass and then slow down in front of you.
“I can… I mean we can find a way out in Dallas maybe.”
“No.”
She doesn’t say anything for a couple of miles. Then she slides over and rests her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her. That girl. She’s always pushing it. She’s sorry she tested me. But she’s glad I passed.
A couple hours later we pull into Dallas. We’re together and that’s it. I was going to ask her to marry me anyway. I just didn’t assume in advance she would. So I kept putting it off. Now I look bad –she looks bad to herself–because I didn’t ask first. It’s not that I mind looking bad, but I think that stuff will mean something to her later. I check in at the desk of a Holiday Inn and wonder if the people in Mongolia have a way of understanding that. I wonder if I said it in Mongolian—would our folks understand?
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Proverbs 22:22,23 Rob not the poor, because he is poor, neither oppress the afflicted in the gate; for Jehovah will plead their cause, and despoil the soul of those that despoil them.
Exodus 30:15 The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less …
Exodus 13:2 Hallow unto me every firstborn, whatever breaketh open the womb among the children of Israel, of man and of cattle: it is mine.
Exodus 23:2,3 Thou shalt not follow the multitude for evil; neither shalt thou answer in a cause, to go after the multitude to pervert judgment . Neither shalt thou favour a poor man in his cause.
In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen
Am I now come up without Jehovah against this place to destroy it? Jehovah said to me, Go up against this land and destroy it. 2 Kings 18:25
Anti-Christ tried the lie that God had sent him to conqueor Jerusalem through the Assyrians. But God says to the worshipers of demons who hate Jesus Christ and Israel: "But I know thine abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, And thy raging against me." 2 Kings 19:27