Many years ago, when my love for Molly was blossoming, I wrote her a story. This literary effort coincided with a trip I was planning to meet her in Prague. She was a student, touring through Europe; I was a poverty lawyer living with my recently widowed mom.
The story went like this: an organ grinder's monkey, trained to secretly enter homes, businesses, churches to steal for her master, comes upon the famed Infant of Prague and falls in love with it. The monkey snatches the statue away, southward to the Baltics. The ending? A newspaper article about the statute, found years later, perched high in a pear tree, by three children playing in a war.
I wrote the story in installments, sent to my faraway traveller bride-to-be. The conclusion came days before my Atlantic flight to meet her. For Christmas, while dabbling in water paints, I painted a picture of a monkey and a statue sitting in a pear tree. It hangs in our bathroom now. I see it every day.
It reminds me of a perplexing question that arose out of the effort: which one of us is the monkey and which is the Infant? My answer for the moment is this: I am the adoring monkey, under the spell of unspeakable beauty and magic of a beautifully adorned Child of God. You are the miracle icon, a master to your willing subjugate, equally innocent and inaccessible, who considers this worship unworthy.
You may have a different answer.
The other day, my brother stepped out of bathroom and asked, "Is that a squirrel and a puppet in the tree in that painting?"
No, I replied. It's a monkey and the Infant of Prague.
