30 January 2008

It's a Religious Apologetic, Charlie Brown

I love Charlie Brown holiday specials. Maybe more than I love you, so don't make me choose. I like the Halloween one especially because its message is so unclear. Linus spends all his time and effort on an unrewarded act of faith. He misses all the Halloween fun and receives much mocking. When the Great Pumpkin fails to show, he is unfased and plans to wait again next year, in an even more sincere pumpkin patch. Is his faith beautiful or absurd?

For a class in college, I wrote an Intro to Philosophy cirriculum based on feminist pedagogy. For unknown reasons it was not immediately embraced by faculty. Hmm. The course I created used most of the texts original to the class, including Sire's so-so Universe Next Door, as well as a number of outside readings and films. For Sire's treatment of Christian Existentialism, my imaginary students were forced to watch me weep copiously during It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and then discuss. The show, not my tendency to cry over certain cartoon characters.

A modernist argument for faith I've never quite bought is Pascal's Wager, the argument that what can be lost if one chooses faith is insignificant compared to what can be won if one's faith proves well-founded. In Linus'example, his loss of trick or treating--or as the Peanuts childrens insist on saying "tricks or treats"--and a Halloween party ought to prove insignificant if the Great Pumpkin arrives and brings toys and candy to the sincere boy waiting in the sincere pumpkin patch. Pascal's system, at least from what I remember from college and that episode of Dougie Houser, MD, seems to suggest that nothing much is lost or that what was lost is insignificant. Initially this proposition seems to suggest that the faithful ought to wager as little as possible in order to, say, hedge their bets. I'd like to give up as little of myself and my habits as possible and still gain the Kingdom. This hesitancy seems somewhat intellectually and spiritually disengenuous and all too human. I like to hope for something better, for some great, glittering faith that transforms me into a better human being with higher standards, a friendlier disposition, and clearer skin.

Perhaps a more stoic approach was Pascal's intent. Physical pleasures are fleeting. Riches can be stolen or lost in a bad turn of the stock market. So what if you give up your life for your faith? You had to die sometime anyway. In the example of the Great Pumpkin, Linus gives up only a little of his pride--probably not the most philosophically appropriate virtue anyway--and the opportunity for candy and social interaction with mean-spirited children with outsized heads for the chance of meeting with the Great Pumpkin. He might not've gotten candy anyway: Charlie Brown got a bag of rocks. His losses were of fleeting, insignificant things, weren't they? That line of reasoning takes us to a rather bleak spot I think is more in line with Pascal's argument as a whole.

But the Great Pumpkin never shows up. Nobody but Linus thinks he even exists. I think it's herein we encounter a uniquely postmodern set of difficulties with Pascal. Charlie Brown believes in Santa Claus as fervently as Linus does the Great Pumpkin and claims they're suffering from "denominational differences," but their disagreement is based much more on a question of ecumenicism. Are they both right? Is one of them wrong and going to get no presents at all? In the economy of their respective faiths, Linus emerges the clear loser. Charlie Brown needs only embrace the culturally approved and rather nebulously described choice of nice over naughty. If the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus offer roughly equivalent rewards to their faithful, perhaps it's wiser to make the wager of faith that causes us to give up the least. Without particular garauntee of being right or wrong, it makes great sense to select the religious option that allows us minimal inconvenience and discomfort, in case, this world is all there is--or in case there is no mystical giver of holiday gifts.

Let's add an additional dimension: the Easter Bunny. Imagine for a moment that Peppermint Patty and Marci reject both the Great Pumpkin and Santa Claus in favor of the Easter Bunny. My initial response would be one of cost benefit analysis: what does the Easter Bunny bring me? Hardboiled eggs, which I hate, various candies, and, once, pink and white plastic pearls. I love Easter candy more than all other holiday candy. Cadbury cream eggs. But no one gets a bicycle or tap shoes or a, dare I say, a pony for Easter. If we assign the world's religious and spiritual systems analogous holiday gift givers, can we pick the "best bet?" for ourselves and thereby arrive at an authentic, appropriate faith? For that matter, can I privelege my love of that strange, egg-colored filling inside chocolate eggs above rollerskates and eggnog and ignore the hardboiled eggs or throw them away or give them to my sister who for reasons clear only to her and God eats tons of them and so find a religious system that works? Shall I stick with Santa because the Christmases of my childhood were mostly ok and because I don't feel much like addressing the issue? Can I work it somehow to get gifts all year long, or shall I hold out for my birthday?

The problems Christianity encounters in the face of postmodernism are instant and obvious. Christians are right: Christ is God incarnate. Humans are irrevocably broken save for the messy and confusing work of that God-Man on the cross and in the tomb. You're wrong if you think otherwise. You might have pleasing manners and a history of kind deeds. You might be smarter or taller than I am. But you're wrong. Postmodernism, of course, de-emphasizes authority both textual and otherwise, emphasizes personal experience, and claims the intellectual necessity of relativism.

There are a number of responses to this encounter. An obvious one is a particular breed of Caucasian, middle class niceness in which my denomination specializes: smooth over the problem with a lot of polite assurances about culture, respect for others, and the grace of God. That particular portrayal of grace always makes God sound to me a little like some heavenly playground monitor assuring that everybody gets a chance on the slide. This issue gets a lot thornier when we apply it to questions of missions and, broadly, that most human of questions "who's in and who's out as far as heaven is concerned?" What about people who grow up in outer Mongolia with no access to the Gospel? What about dead babies who don't live long enough to get invited to Sunday School? What about Ghandi? Good questions. Good questions I don't have the time or wisdom to take on just now. The question I'm dealing with now is personal: how does my faith meet postmodernism?

Despite various conflicts, I mostly place my faith squarely within orthodox Christianity, largely because of my affirmation of the role of scripture and of the necessity of Christ's death and resurrection as the only method to restore depraved humanity to relationship with God. But why should I believe any of that stuff?

Certainly I've read a fair amount of Aquinas and even more Augustine. I can make a good, old fashioned intellectual argument for God and, to a lesser degree, for Christ. I once read the back cover of Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. I even took an entire course in Christian apologetics, a subject, it turns out, that bores me terribly. I believe I have personal experiences that affirm my belief system. I believe the testimony of others and assign a fair measure of importance to historical Christianity and the saints that have come before me. I took some classes dealing with those subjects as well.

But none of that matters, really. As previously discussed, postmodernism discards much of the intellectual legacy of previous generations based on some very viable complaints of bias as well as a simple desire to be more inclusive and less absolutist in viewpoint. Duns Scotis was many things including dull, friends, but none of them were relativistic. While these writings ought to be considered valid, there's no particular reason to consider them more valid than the writings of Najib Mahfuz or Shirley McClain. The experiential argument is an additional wrinkle: while I believe my own religious experience to be factual, I cannot deny that other people have had contradictory--and, in some cases, much more dramatic--experiences. Within that context, by what criteria can we distinguish between the voice of the Holy Spirit and a little pink light in the upper right hand corner of Phillip K. Dick's kitchen. Or should we?

Linus waits and waits for a Great Pumpkin that never comes. I think there's something there that resonates with Christian experience. Certainly God has answered my prayers, and sometimes those answers have come in beautiful and unexpected ways. The presence of God has sometimes filled me with an assurance that I am beloved and somehow held trembling but secure, like a pet mouse in a wide, warm palm.

But sometimes faith is waiting for something that never seems to come, for something that never happens. I pray for healing and the people I love stay sick. I pray for faith, for myself and for others, and we all continue on, racked with doubt. I pray for delivery and continue to struggle. And sometimes all the business of Christianity seems chiefly designed to keep my Friday nights as dull as possible. Linus waits in a pumpkin patch all night long to no avail. At the end of their lives, John the Baptist and Therese of Liseux found themselves quite unable to experience the nearness of God after a lifetime of fellowship. Do their experiences or ours discount the reality of our belief system?

Someone once wrote that the opposite of faith is not doubt but rather certainty. I believe that quote is most valuable when taken within the broader context of the author's statement: that having perfect certainty, a closed worldview in which you claim to understand the ways and means of God is something not at all like faith. But faith, the mad act of believing in a God of grace and of peace and, most importantly, of love is certainity. The certainity of things hoped for, of things not seen.

The experiential proof of faith is a difficult proposition given the very definition of faith offered by Scripture and given the experiences with doubt and disappointment in the lives of otherwise "faithful" Christians.

Perhaps we have arrived at a faithless point now, a point without any reason to believe in the Jesus or God or the Great Pumpkin at all. Perhaps all belief is an absurd proposition, or an intellectually untenable one. Of course, there's the simple fact that my beliefs are no less absurd than yours. I may as well stick with the Jesus thing one way or the other. It makes me happy enough, I guess. I mean, I'd like a religion with a little less history of oppression, more free tampons in the ladies, and occassions to eat cake. But this one is good enough.

I can never get away from absurdity in my personal life or in my philosophical life. Sometimes I think all this Waiting for Godot bullshit is one of the results of the Fall, that no matter how carefully we work out the details, the bits of human existence always itch us like a bunching, badly-made blazer from our twitching shoulders. Perhaps our knowledge, experience, and logic only carry us so far. Perhaps everything must fall to pieces.

I believe anyway. Not because all my questions were answered in my apologetics class or because Aquinas solved all my quandries. Not because I can feel God's constant and, I might add, charming presence each morning when my alarm goes off. Not because I understand the Bible perfectly or teach Sunday school or was baptized as an infant. Not because I'm smarter or dumber than you are. Certainly not because I really like all the moral restraint and waking up early on Sundays for church. When I close my eyes and ask what's real and what's sure in my world, Jesus and all of that stuff is the answer I get, in a voice as small and sharp as that of a young boy, waiting alone in the dark for something he cannot see.

14 January 2008

One Day Late

This morning I filled in for a friend who teaches a fourth grade Sunday school class. The whole experience is surreal. I don't let the kids call me Ms O---, although maybe they're supposed to. Titles make me feel weird. Kids always change Ms to Miss or, worse, Mrs. Mrs. O-- is, after all, my mother. She's very much a "Mrs. O--," the sort of schoolteacher that populates 1950s sit-coms. Vintage wardrobe notwithstanding, I am not. Plus, I hate the gender politics intertwined with name calling.

Once I had an upsetting dream about teaching in which my students were rebelling against my desire not to communicate marital status in my title. I was married in the dream and had cagily combined my last name with that of my spouse--without that dreadful hyphenation--and was using "Ms." If you're not bitter and single, they were shouting, why do you insist on "Ms?" They were all wearing berets and Colonel Sanders string ties. I have the strangest dreams sometimes.
No one much has ever asked me to work with kids in church. Or kids at all. I think I've babysat three times in my life. I may say "fuck" too much, but I haven't always said fuck this much, so that's probably not the whole reason. I don't come off as much of a nurturer maybe. But my friend asked me to cover his classes, so I did. I'm happy to do it, commitment to getting my ass out of bed on a Sunday morning notwithstanding. I like kids, believe it or not. Someone once told me that I talk to kids like I talk to other people, and I hope that's true. I remember liking to be addressed like an adult. In fact, I still enjoy it, so if you were considering calling me "honey," I'd really advise against it.

That's why I'm suspicious of Sunday School curriculum. I always hated Sunday School as a kid. I loved my teachers, but for the most part I just wasn't up for that flannel board shit or any of the saccharine language people teach small girls wearing lacy white socks.

When I was very young I called history, the past "back in horse and buggy days when Jesus and Indians were alive." I realized that these times were not concurrent, but I was trying to express some idea about the past I imagined, a sense of romance and of mystery and of longing for the things that somehow were lost to me before I was born. One Sunday my little sister piously reminded me that Jesus is alive--in our hearts. I wanted to punch in those tiny white teeth of hers. I know that.

Every Sunday morning we'd gather and sing while an old woman in a white-collared dress played an upright piano: Father Abraham had many sons. I am one of them, and so are you, so let's just praise the Lord. I may never march in the infantry, ride in the calvary, shoot the artillery. I may never soar o'er the enemy, but I'm in the Lord's Army! I'm inright outright upright downright happy all the time since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heart from sin, I'm inrightoutrightuprightdownright happy all the time!

All the pictures in the picture Bible were of kind faced people dressed for a production of Godspell. The pages were fingered and smudged by the children who'd sat in our small wooden chairs two decades before. Joshua and Moses and Sampson and Elisha and, even those pretty girls Esther and Ruth taught us little lessons about being kind to our brother and sisters and obeying our moms and dads and being a friend to the kids no one else would play with. The Littlelordjesusnocryinghemakes laid in that piled up hay and smiled out at me. His eyes were black as beads in his pink face. My tights were snagged and my hair was tousled. I crayoned "God is Love" in fat blue letters and signed my name below.

The other day I was listening to a mix tape or, rather, a mix cd someone made me. The next to the last song was a song called "One Day Late" sung by a woman who calls herself Sam Phillips. She started her career under a different name and on a Christian label, but her music quickly came into conflict with the ethos of her employers. She's something less than cheerful. Or something more, I suppose.


Help is coming one day late...
After you've given up and all seems gone,
help is coming one day late...
He'll be late.
You try to understand.
You try to fix your broken hands,
but remember there always has been good,
like stars you don't see in the day sky.
Wait for night.
Help is coming one day late--one day late.

I'm waiting for my bus and squinting under the sun and listening to this, wishing someone had played this for me while I was in womb. Someday, I told myself, I will play this in the nursery for my children. Then I laughed a little bit at myself: this is why you don't have children--you'd depress the hell out of them before they're old enough to walk. Toddlers dressed in black and full of ennui and Paxil.

I wonder if the people who write songs and stories and, dare I say, Sunday School curriculum remember being children. I do. I didn't enjoy it. My childhood wasn't particularly Oliver Twisty. My family loved me, and I had toys and friends and books and trees. But I remember being disappointed a thousand times. I remember wanting to strike my small fists against the things I didn't understand, the things that seemed so unfair about life. And there were so many of those things. I tried to be good and I was bad instead. I wanted to be a princess and a ballerina and a writer and an artist, but I had too many tangles in my hair and snot dried on my lip. My knees were scabby and my ankles were scratched. I had my picture taken with Santa one year and had to wear an ugly brown sweatshirt that had once belonged to a boy. In the picture my pink mouth is stuck out and my eyes are wet.

There were marvelous things about my childhood: dressing up in old window sheers and the wide green leaves of spring and space between the refrigerator and the wall and the way my dad tossed me in the air and caught me under my armpits.

But I was never in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time. Jesus didn't seem like he lived in my heart. He was on my shoulder, as persistant and sharp as an elbow, reminding me not to scratch bad words in the dirt under the swingset or plot to fill my sister's perfume bottles with wild onions or make my mother ask me nineteen times to come inside and unload the dishwasher.

I wish someone had played me a song then about help being far away, about feeling alone, about things only getting worse. I think I would've believed them.

In the mornings before Sunday School, the fourth graders and gather with the rest of the upper elementary classes to sing. There's no old woman and no upright piano. A middle-aged guy in a bolo tie plays the recorder, actually, and lets the kids pass around a tambourine. The kids can call out choices from a little bound book of songs, and they always want to sing spirituals or old hymns. At first I was surprised: this is a Bible church, the sort of place where people sing "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" or that dreadful song about walking around in a garden with Jesus. But I quickly realized it all makes perfect sense. Prone to wander, God I feel it, prone to leave the Lord I love. They sing in high voices. Someone of them don't yet realize they're far off key. In two or three years they'll duck their heads and mumble the words. Maybe these are the last months they'll sing so clearly or so unashamedly. There is a fountain filled with blood. The boys have their shirts hanging untucked in the back. The girls seem be glittering, as if the latest playground fashion is club kid circa 1995. What can take away my sin? They look serious, or at least the ones not kicking one another under the table do. The sins of children seem small, somehow, like we wish our own were.

Back in the classroom we sit at plastic tables and read about Joshua and Moses in order to learn about paying attention in Sunday School. I sit there and wonder what dumbass thought this was the point of the story. People are dying here, and I'm supposed to pass out the stickers next. They have cartoon of little altars on them. Moses is up on a hill, watching. Joshua is in a valley fighting the Amalekites with his bloodied fists and his ragged breaths. Moses is holding up his arms to the sky. His arms get tired. The kids in the class want to try it out, so I tell them to go ahead. Their arms get tired too.

I want to warn them that that's the least of their problems. I want to tell them about sin and doubt and failure and about having weird dreams about the ramifications of romantic love for their post-feminist worldviews. I want to warn them that someday they'll end up fighting somewhere in some red fury even though they thought all along they were too kind and too peaceful for that. I want to warn them that someday they'll hold up their arms to a sky that seems as empty as a bell and their arms will get tired and their feet will get tired and their hearts will get tired. But I think they already know all this. I think they've lived enough on the playgrounds and in the hallways and around the dinner tables of their worlds to have some idea.
I want to tell them help is coming. One day late. It's almost time to go, though, so I tell them it's time from prayer. I tell them they have to settle the heck down--I'm not thinking the word heck, but it's what I say--and close their eyes and their mouths and fold their sweaty little boy hands together to think about God. I pray that God will make us a little bit better people this week and that God will bless the people we love and the people we don't love. It's time to go, so I fold up the book and we go.

fall 2006

13 January 2008

In the American West

an essay for Ann

That morning we woke early–although later than we meant to–and checked out of the motel. It was a terrible motel, really: our room's only decoration was a paper plate thumb-tacked above the bed. The paranoid man from next door stared out his window at me with his wide, bloodshot eyes while I sat in the car waiting for Richie to take a picture of the El Rancho Motel sign. The man had taped a paper American flag to his window and its corners were beginning to curl and yellow. I sat in the car with the sun too warm on my legs and wondered about the man's patriotism. If I was a middle-aged black man and addicted to drugs or sick with some disease or both and lived in some motel forty years past its prime, I’m not sure I would clip and tape up flags. But I don’t tape up flags now.

We left Barstow and drove through more desert until, suddenly, we were in the city. Los Angeles is insulated by fat, yellow layers of suburbs. We drove past town after town a wide gray interstate choked with cars. Our trip down Rt. 66 seemed over already somehow, over because we were a thousand years removed from the narrow red ribbon of Oklahoma and the squint-eyed desert of Arizona and all the other places where we could somehow see the past flash past our open windows. Instead we were in some repeating Scooby Doo chase scene of big box stores and restaurant chains. And there were palm trees. Palm trees are never real to me. I can hardly understand that people plant palm trees in their yards like I’ve planted maple trees to grow and become part of the land familiar. Palm trees belong in someone’s movie fantasy scene. Here in California they grow in fat clumps alongside shopping centers like those "what’s wrong with this picture" game in Highlights magazines.

We planned to eat at our first chain restaurant of the trip, to ease back into modernity with a stop at the world’s first McDonalds. Richie was maybe dreaming of a Big Mac, but mostly I just wanted one of those huge, too-sweet diet Cokes I buy on shame-filled and frequent morning McDonalds runs. We had to drive around a while only to discover it was only a museum. Dusty bits of McDonalds paraphernalia–first burger flipper, first Happy Meal box, the toys we both remembered playing with as children–were cluttered together behind glass. The museum is also the national headquarters of Pollo Loco, a Mexican-American fried chicken chain. Latina girls in baby blue poplin shirts typed fast and chattered into their headsets on one side of the building while we wandered down the aisles of the museum on the other. The bathroom was horrible: loose toilet seats and long streamers of finger-dampened papertowels hanging from the roll. There was a Mexican brand of dish soap sitting under the empty hand-soap dispenser. As we left the building, a homeless man was talking to the girl at the reception desk. I think he wanted something to eat, something from McDonalds. A girl was eating Cup O’Soup at her desk.

In the parking lot we met the young Italian couple from earlier in the trip. We met them in Oklahoma and several times after. We lost one another in Texas. They’d taken a side trip to Las Vegas while we were lingering across Arizona. But we found them, getting out of their beige Japanese car and squinting into the sun. We exchanged addresses while catching up on one another’s travels. Richie and I didn’t have addresses, not proper ones, so we wrote his older brother’s. The girl was beautiful in the way that European girls always seem to be, with careless hair and immaculately tousled clothes. Her English was shy.

We drove on to San Bernadino where we stopped for Mexican food at a little spot that bore the familiar red and blue sign marking Rt. 66 landmarks. The place had been there since the fifties or so and remains a family business. Our booth was covered with cracking brown Naugahyde. A busboy massaged the shoulders of an elderly woman as she took orders from a nearby table. I think she called him grandson, in Spanish. The employees shouted back and forth to one another in loud staccato voices, like the exchange of playful slaps. Our pony-tailed waiter talked to us about motorcycles and Rt. 66 and the restaurant’s planned remodel. We ate and ate. And, then, I ate some more. I decided I could never eat Dallas’ mediocre Tex-Mex again in good conscience after so much amazing Mexican food. I sweated and coughed and swore and wiped my eyes over the salsa.

We sweated through more suburbs, including San Dimas. In San Dimas we stopped to stare at the city limits sign and shout "We! Are! Wyld Stallyns!" and stage conversations about So-crates like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Our list of attractions promised us ice cream, but we never found any. We did find, however, that California seems to invite one pop culture reference after another.

Los Angeles was a peculiar sense of deja-vu. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s never wanted to go to California, but I’ve never liked the idea of hard plastic breasts and 75 degree winters and Lego pad lawns maintained by quick men in neon tee shirts. I’ve seen it all before, haven’t I? On tv and movies and things? Haven’t we all been to our imagined California a dozen times over?

We passed through Beverly Hills and Bel-Aire, and they were smaller and less fabulous than I expected from tv. Sometimes when I’m far away from someone I love I imagine them, I see them in my mind. In real life, they always prove to be less attractive than I imagined them, and their heads seem frightenly small when we meet again because for so long I’ve seen only their faces. All the famous places were like that. The bars and rock clubs I’d seen in magazines, everything.

There were beautiful old women in shoes with rundown heels waiting at bus stops, and boys with thin chests chasing one another down streets. They tilted their heads to look at the bright sky that shows between the buildings.

We got stuck in rush hour traffic and had to make a thousand phone calls to the friends we were meeting at Santa Monica Pier. In the meantime, I called my parents and my sisters and everyone I knew to say I was in LA and looking at the Beverly Hilton or the Hollywood sign or someone potentially famous idling their Mercedes in at the light next to me.

We finally made it to the road’s end in Santa Monica. We shouted and hugged each other hard. We made it, we screamed, we made it. We drove Rt. 66 from Chicago to LA. We did it. I don’t know what I was expecting to feel, but I didn’t feel it, whatever it was. I just wanted a cold drink on this hot, hot day and to go to the bathroom. We parked the car several blocks away.
I went to the worst toilet in the Western Hemisphere: no doors on stalls, no toilet paper, no soap, and a long line of women and girls tapping their sandaled feet on a floor that was wet with piss and sea water. Outside the air was wet with the salt and sweat and fishguts smell of the beach, and I was happy to breath it in.

We took pictures of the brass plaque marking the end of Rt. 66. It was small and forgotten. A friendly woman took our picture and welcomed us to LA. She actually said "Welcome to LA," as if it were really her town. She didn’t seem to appreciate what we had accomplished, as if we’d simply driven from Chicago because we were too poor or cheap or young to fly. Richie kept trying to explain to her in his high, excited voice what an amazing thing we’d done, what amazing things we’d seen.

That night we ate with friends in a fake ‘60s diner after wandering too long in the sun and through the sanitary carnival lights of the pier.

All of that was months ago. I’m in Dallas and Richie’s in Boston. I don’t know what I was looking for as we drove Rt. 66, some glimpse of America maybe. We had a burned cd we named "Rt. 66 Jukebox," and I’d insisted we include Simon and Garfunkle singing about going to look for America while counting cars on a turnpike. I was looking that America that’s more real that sentimental artwork or flag-waving partisan politics or bad foreign policy or re-runs of all my favorite sitcoms, the America I could use to suss out my identity, to give shape to my soul. I hoped I’d find clarity for a million things and maybe a sense of closure with Richie. Or, let’s be honest, I hoped we’d get back together and decide to love each other until we were too old to remember one another’s names, and our vacations and arguments and pets and children were as faint in our minds as the Golden Books we were read as children. None of these things happened, of course.

Today I was reading a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s miscellaneous writings and found this quote about a couple of travelers:

They rode through those five years in an open car with the sun on their foreheads and their hair flying. They waved to people they knew, but seldom stopped to ask for directions or check on fuel, for every morning there was a gorgeous new horizon and it was blissfully certain that they find each other at twilight. They missed collisions by inches, wavered on the edge of precipices, and skidded across tracks to the sound of the warning bell. Their friends tired of waiting for the smash and grew to accept them as sempiternal, forever new as Michael’s last idea or the gloss on Amanda’s hair. One could almost name the day when the car began to sputter and slow up: the moment that found them sitting in a Sea Food place on the water-front in Washington; Michael was opening his letters, his long legs thrust way under the table to make a footstool for Amanda’s little slippers. It was only May but they were already brown and glowing. Their clothes were few and sort of pink in general effect like the winter cruise advertisements.

I have no particular sense of myself in space, of the dimensions my body occupies. Most days I fancy myself the tallest person in the room, but other times I shut up like a telescope. Sometimes, with someone’s arm around my stooping shoulders, I’m sure I’m as small as I was at five years old. The picture I carry now of Rt. 66's ending and the endings that traveled with us is of me and Richie against the bright wash of sea and sky. He’s smaller even than he is, and I am smaller still. Two nearly indistinguishable blots of brown skin and hair and dusty clothes, one a little bigger than the other, lost in all that blue.

Fall 2005