Mid-morning game shows are woven into the fabric of my childhood.
Accordingly, my metaphors often come from Let's Make A Deal or The Price is Right as much as birds, bees and baby's breath.
I remember thinking the lucky winner of a donkey behind Door #3 got to keep it and I wondered how they got this exciting prize back home.
As a child, I didn't understand why it was a bad prize. It seemed to me then like pretty much the best prize ever.
My parents already had a kitchen and a car but we didn't have a donkey or goat.
Some shows referred to these so-called prizes as zonks.
There's even a mathematic principle for the probability of ending up with a zonk.
During my research, I read that some folks did indeed keep their zonk.
I think those people - the zonk-keepers - are good sports and probably pretty interesting people to get to know.
Even as I write this, I am looking for first hand accounts of domesticated zonks.
Why am I telling you this?
I'm not.
I'm reminding me.
This last quarter of the year, every door has seemed to hide a donkey or a zonk.
There have been lots of zonks. Even more donkeys.
One by one, I stuff them into my tiny toaster of a car and carry them home with me.
Slowly ... slowly, they become domesticated blessings.
It requires squinting one eye to read the tiny inscriptions of gratitude aloud.
:: some days a short mantra ... every day a litany ::
This year, an unlit, undecorated Christmas tree looks out the living room window over the remains of a large and fallen tree.
I don't know when we'll get to either one of them.
But everyday, between the boughs of pine, life waits to be unwrapped again.
Life that is busy and brimming full of things to do, things we have to do, things we get to do... I recite gratitude for all of it.
I think about the donkeys of Christmas and Easter - two different donkeys, never stage play stars but not zonks either.
Humble beasts in a holy play; always necessary for the narrative, to carry hope forward to birth or certain death...
They bear burdens. They bear hope. Just like we do.
And - hee haw - how they laugh.
Maybe we ought, too.
