I appreciate the holiday weekend very much. There was a lot of silence,  reading, talking,  healing thinking. Sunday, we drove to Vermont to pick up Maria’s yarn. There was a sweet and comfortable dinner with some friends Saturday, it was a peaceful time.

This week, I have a pretty interesting agenda.

Tomorrow or Wednesday, I’ll take bike lessons to learn how to use and ride my new bike. This bike thing – I fell Thursday –  so rattled me that I called up my therapist, who I hadn’t talked to in nearly 10 years.

She said I was impatient and needed to take the time to learn how my body has changed in the many years since I last rode and get some instructions from Tyler at the bike store.

Let’s be mature about it, she said.

I got that message.

Wednesday, I begin cardio rehab in Saratoga Springs, a special supervised exercised program for heart patients recovering from surgery.

I see my cardiologist on Friday, and we’ll talk about my next surgery, tentatively scheduled for the last week in September in Albany. They have a facility I can use all winter.

Also, Friday, I’ve been invited to visit Bishop Maginn High School and see all of the safety gear and tape and masks that the Army Of Good got for the school so it can open.

This operation was somewhat more serious than the catheterization two weeks ago, so the surgeon wants to be in a larger facility just in case. I’m excited about it. If it all works out, I’ll have three perfectly functional arteries feeding into the heart.

That’s something of a miracle.

I went for a beautiful walk up on the hill this morning, no dogs, no Maria. Just me, I wanted to get to know my heart again, and just think and swim in the beautiful silence.

My knee is healing up well, still sore but not painful.

I will write this morning and this afternoon, curl up and finished reading a mesmerizing new novel, The Book Of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd, a talented Baptist turned Christian mystic.

The novel storyline is that this is a book about Jesus’s wife, not about Jesus. Kidd has no desire to offend Christians with this story, but I thought it was a wonderful idea to invent a wife for Jesus (it is unknown if he married) and make her a brilliant, unyielding feminist who pokes some dangerous eyes.

In Jesus, who she met in a market square, she finds a kindred spirit, and man generous and strong to let her be free.

Ana is the brilliant daughter of the evil ruler Herod’s head scribe.  Her father is weak, her mother is creepy. She is also Judas’s sister. (I thought my family was complicated.)

Ana is woke in ancient Israel of all places. She reads Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Her radical and impudent aunt encourages her feminist instincts, and she develops a passionate interest in the silenced stories of the Scriptures.

She is obsessed with preserving the lost histories of Eve, Bathsheba, Jezebel, and all the other forgotten “nasty” women of the Bible. She has to hide her scrolls from her mother and from her neighbors, who might very well stone her.

Much of the book centers on Ana’s fierce struggles with her parents, desperate to find someone to marry their scandalous and rebellious daughter. She lived in a world where women had little or no choice about marrying the men their fathers chose for them.

Ana was a brave activist – American style –  when respectable women were not permitted to read, write, or have anything to do with politics. Ana draws enough drama for a dozen oppressed women in the time of Roman occupation.

Jesus is treated with delicacy; he is sidelined for most of this hypnotic and beautifully told story. I  shouldn’t say any more, other than that this is a wonderful book for our times or actually any times. I did have trouble putting it down.

Kidd did an amazing job of transporting our powerful and ascending feminist culture in a story of ancient times, where many cattle were treated better and more considerately than many women.