Name That Planet

It was Ruby in the bright red dress.  Her arms were wrapped around her knees.  Her face was buried in her thighs.  Her shoulders were shaking as the sobs increased in volume and frequency.

“Ruby, honey,” Phil cooed, “come on down here.  It’s all right.”

She stood slowly.  She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.  The women’s toilet had lovely scented and decorative tissues.  She wobbled slowly down the old steps.  Open-toed shoes with five inch heels did not agree with the engineering nightmare they called a stairway.

When she got to the bottom, she straightened up and blew her nose three more times—loud honks punctuated by snorts in between.

“My name isn’t Ruby.  My name is Lillian Elizabeth Tomaczek.  When I was a girl, they called me Lilly-Beth.  Now my family just calls me Lil—at least the ones who are still talking to me.

Bill, Phil and now Lil, the pastor thought.  He was afraid of what the next rhyming progression might bring.

Phil was staggered by this revelation.  “You mean you lied to me about your name?  How could you do that?  The web site said that all the information was one hundred percent accurate!  How could you deceive me like that?  What else did you lie about?”

Ruby—that is, Lil—heaved a sigh of disgust.  “Oh, come on, Phil!  Don’t be such a naive idiot.  Everyone on those sites lies.  This isn’t exactly the Ritz Carlton you’ve got here you know.  You didn’t mention that our beautiful, romantic dinner was going to be alongside a boiler that was built before the turn of the century, now did you?”

Phil turned away, stunned and hurt.  The pastor took his opening.  “Lil, I am wondering along with Phil why you needed to hide your identity.  You don’t have to share anything about that if you don’t want to, but I can’t help but be curious.”

She sagged down on to the bottom step.  “I just didn’t want him to know right away.  I didn’t want him to know that until a month ago I was in the women’s prison.  I’m an ex-con, a felon, a number in the system.  I was hoping I might get a chance to make an impression for all of that came out.  It’s public information, you know.  Anyone could look it up.”

“That never occurred to me,” Phil whispered.  “I was just so glad that I didn’t have to be alone.”

The pastor stayed the course.  “Lil, I wonder if you’d be willing to share why you started crying just now.  We were dealing with Phil’s mess.  You could have kept the secret to yourself.  I wonder if you could help me understand what happened.”

“You said, ‘I just want to hear your story.’  No one has said that to me in years.  On the inside, you don’t tell anyone anything.  Sure as shootin’ they’ll use it against you as a way to manipulate you or intimidate you.  On the outside, nobody wants to know your story, except when you apply for a job.  Then there’s that line that asks about a criminal record.  All of a sudden the job is filled and they show you the door.  My story has been nothing but a noose around my neck for fifteen years.”

The number wasn’t lost on the pastor, but he stuck with his strategy.  “Lil, we’re here to listen and learn now.  Nobody in this room will look down on you.  I can tell you for sure that the only difference between you and me is that you got caught and I didn’t.  We all have things in our life we’re not proud of.  It’s not a clean record that makes a good story.  It’s what you do with the record you’ve got—that’s what makes a good story, and a good person.”

Lil’s eyes glazed a bit.  “What planet are you from?” she asked.

What might you have answered Lil?  What is the name of the planet the pastor is trying to inhabit?  Perhaps it’s “Been There, Done That World.”  What name might you suggest?