Notes - Grandma 11 completed

        Your Honda will not be ready until tomorrow. Alas, a new steering pump is needed. Supper at Smashburgers as the regional manager, Henry, gave you the three coupons that expire tomorrow from your last visit, so you had a good supper for two (two sandwiches, a side of sweet potato fries and a side of veggie frites and two drinks) for six dollars and thirty-six cents. You watched a couple of shows, Tuesday night's "Vegas" and "NCIS". Otherwise you spent time researching costs on the Camry XLE Hybrid and the Accord EX, Four Cylinder.

         2142 hours. I am ready to work on Grandma 11.

         2245 hours. I completed Grandma's 11, but I will have to change the quotation from the story in Brother's 11 because I changed the quotation in tonight's revision.

         Add and post. - Amorella

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Grandma 11, ©2013, rho, nfd

We return to three thousand years or so before the present, to a King and Queen in his palace, and he noticed a woman with dark hair and dark features in a bath on a roof over what would be almost a city block away. Perhaps this perfection is a gift from G-d, he thought. I am king in his name. I have done good works. I am of the loins of Abraham and Sarah. Perhaps she is a gift.

            He quickly found who the woman was. Bathsheba, wife of his good and loyal general, Uriah the Hittite, who loved soldiering and war more than anything else in the world. David reflected, she is heaven sent for a king.

            When she arrived as ordered. Once the two were alone in a private chamber David touched and surprisingly, Bathsheba returned touch. He was king and she was not perfect. He began debating his original intuition.

            Being alone and being king lust trickled then rushed and it speared in his mind. David became instantly terror struck thinking, lust is not a present from G-d. He sat with Bathsheba and confessed his desire and his faulty reasoning.

Bathsheba sat surprised at his unpretentious manner and understood. She held him in her arms as he cried for G-d's mercy like a child. Then he stood army-like and dismissed her so they both might have some privacy.

When they met again, this time is secret, they made love in a passion that neither expected. They bathed in a mist of passion so fine that both believed they saw the same rainbow in their heart of hearts.

Weeks later, Bathsheba called on King David privately. “I am pregnant with your child, David,” she said. “I will be stoned to death for adultery.”

“Have you not slept with your husband?” he questioned.

“No. He is busy soldiering and will not be bothered.”

King David replied confidently, “I will not have you stoned."

Without thinking Bathsheba whispered, “I love you."

He also responded without thinking. “I love you, too." The soldier king then considered the immediate situation. How can this be? She is my general’s wife. I have many wives, but he has only one. I cannot take her from him, and I will not. It was then that he thought on how Bathsheba might still be God’s gift to him. He concluded, only if the general dies a good death in battle will I wed her.

Very soon, almost too soon, there was a battle afoot and brave Uriah, the general was up front with his men as always. Uriah was a good and loyal general through his last battle.

Thus, it came to be that Bathsheba married King David. Their son died young. Nathan the Prophet, always knowing, told the king his son’s death was partial payment for the king’s adultery.

David asked, “if this is so, why did G-d take my son and not myself?”

“For further punishment,” hailed Nathan the righteous and the wise.

“How do you know this?” commanded King David, “That G-d should speak to you before he would speak in private to me.”

Nathan quickly reassessed the situation and somberly replied, “I do not know, my king."

“We shall have another child,” snapped David the King.

David dismissed Nathan after a verbal bruising. Once alone the king realized that G-d may have been talking to Nathan because he was a powerful prophet. David came to feel that G-d may also have been talking to him.

Years later, Bathsheba asked a much older David, “Will our son be king?”

“Yes,” without hesitation the king rejoined, “Solomon will become king while I am still alive to see it.”

Bathsheba smiled while musing I am content, and David is content that I am content.

Solomon came to realize this joint contentment in his parents and to silently rejoice to the wisdom within it.

"This is the David and Bathsheba story the way some of the Dead have heard it," noted Grandma with a knowing wink.

In a great bend in the river between the slave and the free,

There is a marked separation where you may want to be.

Being born human can be a chain of much strife,

A free human may unshackle this slave in life

Accepting what one is, a piece of humankind --

Are common and humble roots to grow in the mind.

Be forewarned and yet mellowed by Grandma's earlier wink,

These letters make a fiction to swim or to sink

These words flow free by Merlyn’s own hand

A flowing full fiction between the Shoreline and Strand.

785 words

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