Julie Roth

There is a woman walking her dog. Well, I guess it would be more accurate to say that she is parking her dog, because neither one of them is going anywhere.

OK. So there is a woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk for minutes on end, gazing at her companion at the other end of the leash — who anyway at this moment is completely absorbed in a certain 6-by-6-inch square of sidewalk he is thinking of as Darling. With eyes closed intensely, he is lovingly licking this patch of pavement. Licking it over and over. Licking it until it’s wet from his ministrations. And then licking it some more — caressing it, really, with his tongue.

Which for some reason makes me think of the Pope.

I imagine the Pope descending from his plane, kneeling on the tarmac and french-kissing the ground for a change. His gleaming vestments splayed all around him, he licks with abandon — like a cat licks its kitten: his eyes closed, his aging pink tongue collecting the dirt and pebbles of this (now wet) spot of Earth.

(Minutes pass; cameras whir, flashbulbs go off, helicopters hack through the sky to get a better view. The next day, the front page of the New York Post runs the headline "All Day Sucker." Almost immediately, that peculiarly honored square of pavement is dug up for enshrinement at a local cathedral — yellow stripe and all — leaving a hole in the runway that soon draws thousands of pilgrims and vendors of rosary beads and little American flags. Theologians discuss the ramifications of the holy kiss, scrupulously avoiding the obvious parallel between Onan spilling his seed on the ground and the Pope spilling his kisses there. Then the chunk of tarmac, sealed in glass and protected by sophisticated motion-sensing technology as it is, is stolen one night after vespers, launching an underground trade in Pope-Pavement relics that are said to ward off ailments of the mouth, mishaps in the air, and — inexplicably — dandruff. Scientists are brought in every few years to debunk the holiness of one fragment or another, testing the piece for Papal saliva DNA, whose pattern is said to resemble the keys to the kingdom of God — or David Hasselhoff if viewed from the side. Not one fragment is deemed authentic, but demand continues to grow. Catholics begin sticking out their tongues whenever they pass a church; non-Catholics join in. As time goes by, spitting becomes an act of devotion; around the world, men stop doing it...)

But I digress.

Babies put everything in their mouths. For them it is part of the introduction process. Once a baby’s had a thing in his mouth, he is able to pick out that thing from a lineup by sight alone--although, presumably, he doesn’t have to go down to the police station to do it.

Maybe God rolled the Earth around in his mouth when he was an infant--until someone caught him doing it and fished the planet out with a giant finger, fearing God would choke. Maybe the Pope is channeling God when he kisses the tarmac. Or maybe God looks down at the Pope with his mouth on the world and feels a wee bit jealous.

Either way, I think the lady’s dog has the right idea: a little tongue is in order.

~Julie