1.
I know it’s ten o’clock
when the electronic church bells begin chiming Ave Maria. We
replaced an obnoxiously loud actual bell with even
louder fake ones after the belfry sustained irreparable termite damage last
year. Since then, I receive
approximately one angry letter per-week from anonymous homeowners who hate the
bells, some threatening to sue on the grounds that they violate religious
liberty. I just think they violate common decency, but who am I to make such
claims as parochial vicar? I stop at the floor mirror on the way out of the
sacristy to make sure my chasuble is on straight. The glass is bent a bit so I
look fatter than usual. I look paler than usual, too, but that’s not the mirror’s
fault. Lord, have mercy, I say as I turn off the light and walk into the nave.
Every August for the last
nine years I’ve stood before the pulpit at Good Shepherd Catholic Church to
remind the congregation of the impending Parish Festival. Third Saturday of the
month, as always. Clear your calendars, I say, even though I know there’s
nothing to clear. I usually hear a baby or two crying and elderly couples
murmuring about how they can’t believe another year has come and gone in a
jiffy, but I can believe it just fine. My grandfather used to say that time
flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. I’m not sure what he meant,
but occasions like these make me think he was right.
This year is the Festival’s
25th anniversary, which I announce with all due pomp and reverence. I
wear my excited smile and make exaggerated gestures with my hands and tell
everyone that we managed to secure a dunk-tank and that this year’s games and
concessions proceeds will go towards the resurfacing of the counter in the
refectory or the filling of the sink-hole near the St. Anthony’s
Grotto—whichever is direst.
If there are no building projects to throw our
money at, I let the church council dump finances into a charity of their
choosing. Last year, Kat Jennings, the leader of the bunch, wanted to donate to
PETA. I told her that I couldn’t justify that choice to a population made up of
folks who spent most of their lives casually polluting the Monongahela, and
then watched as her face sank behind her fat rouged cheeks. She asked me if I
even cared about polar bears and I told her that I did but that was neither
here nor there.
2.
Once in a while someone
will ask me if I think God still punishes people like he did in the Old
Testament. I want to say that I don’t think he does, but then again I have no
other explanation as to why the third
Saturday in August has been over ninety degrees for almost a decade, or why my
first assignment as a priest is in a ghost-town of Stephen King proportions. So
I just say something theologically responsible about God’s love and mercy and
direct all future questions to Monsignor Jakubowski, who’s more than happy to
spit Aquinas and Augustine through the gap in his teeth.
The day of the Parish
Festival arrives and the Monsignor and I stand in the rectory lawn under an old
elm; it’s marked with a wooden plaque commemorating a priest from the 50’s who
I can only assume never had to hire a grown man to make balloon animals. We
watch as the parking lot black-top is transformed into an enormous griddle.
I’ve spent the last
twenty minutes chasing a possibly-poisonous water snake out of the dunk-tank
with a garbage picker. Pat McMann, the little Irish groundskeeper, put the
thing in a shoebox and carried it off-site to the rapturous applause of
everyone present. Only moments later I found him behind the face-painting tent,
slashing around in the thistle with a knife in one hand and an empty box in the
other. Then, with embarrassed reluctance he tells me that the operation has been
a failure and that it’s in everyone’s best interest to permanently evacuate the
dunk-tank. I tell him that I spent big bucks on it so keeping it open is a
chance I’m willing to take. I return to my spot in the shade all-the-while
waiting to hear the screams of Rick, the parish organist, as he is dunked on
top of a copperhead.
But for now all I can
hear is “Don’t stop thinking about
tomorrow; don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,” playing from the DJ booth. Truth
be told, I haven’t stopped thinking about tomorrow since I woke up this morning
and remembered it was the day of the Parish Festival.
3.
Monsignor Jacubowski
informs me that we’re approaching record temperatures today. He’s become quite
the weather enthusiast ever since the local station replaced the geeky looking
college kid who wears the horn-rimmed glasses with Sage Everly, the
delightfully peppy brunette who wears black skirts that would have scandalized
every generation but my own. Monsignor
says he likes her green eyes and her “proper haircut.” I tell him that he’s much
nobler than I and he agrees.
I’ve lived with the
Monsignor for nine years and he’s every bit as much an enigma to me now as he
was when I first took this assignment. I affectionately call him Jack—a play
off his last name—as his first name, Konrad, fails to evoke such a rapport. My
development of a nickname for him is about the highest level of fraternity
he’ll accept. He’s the son of first-generation Polish immigrants, and never
desired to be anything other than a priest. I tell him that I desired to be
plenty of other things but let’s be honest, when it came time to spin the wheel,
this is where I landed. Jack doesn’t appreciate
me equating the spiritual life to a game show. But he often reminds me that it
doesn’t matter how I got here so long as I try to be a holy priest. That’s good
enough advice, so I promise him that I’ll do my best.
On this day, Sage Everly
turns out to be right; it’s unbearably hot and I’m still sweating from the
snake incident. Jack lets me know that I should be thankful I’m not his age: at
least I don’t have to worry about having a stroke. I tell him I’d rather be
dead than here; at least heaven doesn’t have a moon-bounce.
I tug my Roman collar away from my sweaty neck
and wonder if it might be better to just tuck it into my breast pocket and be
done with it. But then I remember the old ladies with their silver-blue hair
and their olive-wood rosaries pinched between skeletal fingers who would be
more scandalized by a priest without his collar than one who had shown up to
the festival in leather pants and a Def Leppard tee-shirt.
4.
After about an hour of
standing under the elm and thinking about all the conversations I don’t want to
have with parishioners, Jack speaks up: “If you’re just going to stand under
this tree all day, I can find a more-than-capable replacement for you.” He
motions with his bald head towards the St. Joseph the Worker statue that is
missing both hands and a sizeable chunk of plaster from a cracked thigh. It
occurs to me that Jack’s probably been working on that line all day.
I give him a look that
says I’m not going anywhere unless you come with me; I can’t face these
vultures alone. He breathes heavily into his thick gray mustache and tells me
that he’s almost eighty years-old and that he’s
not going anywhere except maybe the concession stand to grab a cold ginger ale
and one of those overpriced pretzels.
So I decide to humor Jack
by walking down to where we’ve set up the games in the handicapped spots. There’s
a tall shirtless man with his skin wrapped too tightly around his bones wearing
pony-tailed blond hair down to his camouflage belt and with the cast of Diff’rent Strokes tattooed in grayscale beneath
a chintzy beard. He’s just popped three straight balloons at the Work of Dart tent.
He screams WAHAHAHA HELL YEAH and stuffs an Olive Garden gift certificate into
his back pocket. I ask Maria McMann, Pat’s wife, if this guy even belongs to
the Parish; I feel like I would have remembered giving communion to someone
with Gary Coleman on his Adam’s apple. She says she doesn’t know but he’s
already won three gift certificates for Outback Steakhouse and now one for
Olive Garden. I say screw this I’m going inside to watch baseball.
And that’s exactly what
I’m about to do when I get the acute sense that all warmth and happiness have
left the world. I turn around expecting to see Satan himself, but the reality
is worse.
Meredith Frye has a
purple face and teeth like a vampire. She melts out of her floral-patterned
dress and her swollen feet are stuffed into a pair of white Sketchers. Tucked under
her arm flap is a straw hat adorned with a bouquet of plastic roses and
daffodils. Meredith is a retired bank teller who went thirty-two years without
missing a day of work. Now she splits her free time evenly between knitting
baby clothes and making my life a living hell. She excels in both of these
hobbies.
She’s got her husband by
the arm as if he’s an eight-year-old boy she’s kidnapped away from the cotton
candy booth. Tim Frye slants to one side on his bad left leg and his Dungarees
are a step away from resting around his ankles. He wears a grey crew neck that
says “Damn the Torpedoes; Full Speed
Ahead” and a trucker’s cap with some Naval insignia. He smells like cigars
and Old Spice. I wonder if he dressed himself or if his wife picked an outfit
for him. When he married Meredith he was nearly twice her age. The Monsignor often
says that Tim’s mind is starting to slip a little bit and asks if I’ve noticed
the same.
I say
to him: I’ve never been much for diagnosing medical conditions; it’s why I’m a
priest and not a doctor.
And he says to me:
There’s a special place in hell for smartasses.
Tim Frye adjusts his hat
to cover his age spots and asks me what happened to the Chuck-a-Luck wheel. I
tell him that the state has outlawed it as a minor form of gambling and he says
that’s a damn shame. I tell him that I agree it’s a damn shame, but that we
have plenty of other games like Slam Dunk Champion and the Terry Bradshaw Pigskin
Experience. He tells me that those games are for jags who like wasting money
instead of winning money and I don’t know if he’s intentionally patronizing me
or if it’s just his dementia talking.
Meredith is the only
person who hates the Parish Festival more than I do. Ever since I was assigned
to Good Shepherd, she’s been trying to convince me that a Chinese Auction or a gourmet
cookie sale or even a fancy dinner party where we sip apéritifs from look-alike
Waterford glasses would raise more money than the Parish Festival.
I tell her: You have no
idea how much I wish that were true, but I’ve had Kat Jennings check and
recheck the math and nothing turns out a profit like the Festival. Sorry.
And I really am sorry.
Then she gargles some
vulgarities in that old smoker’s throat and goes to tell her cronies that I’ve
been sent here by the devil to destroy this parish. Personally, I don’t think
he’d waste his time.
“Gooday, Father
Cranberry.” she says to my neck. She’s got her beady eyes honed on my collar; I
bet she wonders why I’m even allowed to wear it.
Meredith’s the only
person in the Parish who consistently refers to me by my last name. When I see
those reptile lips curl into a faint smile as she growls out the CRAAAAAAAAN in
CRAAAAAAANberry, I half-expect to see her contorted body lift off the ground
and start spewing liquefied evil all over my Dockers.
“Meredith, please,” I
say. “Call me Father Stu.”
She’ll never call me
Father Stu.
“Are you enjoying the Festival?” I ask. Of course she’s not. I know the only
thing she’s enjoying is the hope that this whole enterprise might tank. And
she’s double-mad this year because I told her she couldn’t sell her
home-knitted baby clothes on Church property. She insists upon using her
collection of Reborn dolls as mannequins, which I tell her is creepy as hell,
not to mention confusing for all the older folks who think we’ve placed
unattended infants out in the hot sun all day to model onesies.
“It’s lovely,” she says.
“Just lovely.”
5.
Silver clouds with black
underbellies begin to spill over the shallow Allegheny ridgeline and into the
mid-afternoon sky: the vengeful hand of God extending towards a modern-day
Nineveh—one filled with funnel cakes and cheap door-prizes. Jack sighs and says
that Sage Everly didn’t say anything about this. I tell him that I doubt she
was hired on account of her meteorological prowess.
In the slowly waning
sunlight, the whole parking lot sinks into melancholy. The dismal inflated
clown atop the moon-bounce flashes a sorrowful smirk. His big red hat flops
back and forth in the intensifying breeze and whimsically long arms flail
wildly while tykes hop about his gut. Over at the Lucky Duck pool, dozens of
brightly-colored creatures with hideous grins and lifeless eyes float in unison
like a demonic armada patrolling the rivers of hell. I believe I once read a
similar account of the underworld from a medieval Christian mystic, or at least
saw something like it in a nightmare.
Everywhere, kids holding
wads of orange tickets are being ushered from booth-to-booth by grandparents in
table-cloth shirts and fit overs. The children throw rubber balls at a fat cat
here and take a mallet to a plastic rodent there while grandma and grandpa say
things like “Goodness, I think I felt a drop,” and “Helen, do you think these tickets are
refundable?”
I scan the horizon—that
shadowy mass that hangs over the termite-damaged steeple like a cartoon anvil—and
begin to think there’s no way we’re avoiding this one. I can see it already:
lightning, hail, and flash-flooding that will surely take down some of the more
tenuous structures. Refunds galore. Huge expenses, minimal income. I ponder how
many pairs of knitted booties I’ll have to allow Meredith Frye to sell so that
we can at least break even. Fifty? One hundred?
God, I whisper, help me!
And that’s when it
happens. I’m looking over at the Lucky Duck pool trying to figure out why
there’s a dead squirrel floating
nonchalantly atop the tepid water as if it were part of the game, when Meredith
Frye slithers into view. She doesn’t see me, and neither do the kids crowded
around the blue plastic kiddie pool poking at the squirrel carcass with a
stick. She has her straw hat tucked under one arm and whatever’s left of her
husband’s dignity restrained with the other. There’s a little cardboard box
next to the pool that says FIRST AID but the teenage volunteer who’s been
selling the tickets has probably at least three-hundred dollars in small bills
stuffed in amongst the gauze and Captain
America band aids. Then, without any sort of diversion or
sleight-of-hand—really, without looking
around at all—Meredith Frye plunges her fat little paw with her fingernails
painted pink into the box, scrambles around a bit, and removes as much money as
her pudgy fingers can manage. She crushes it all into a silver-and-green clump,
places it in the fold of her straw hat, and walks away.
What…the…HELL? WHAT WAS
THAT? I’m kind of just standing there in bewilderment, my synapses misfiring
into an empty shell of a body like a computer that has been given too many
commands at once. The Monsignor is a few feet away chatting with Maria McMann.
He’s sharing a recipe for something called Babka. I interrupt.
I say: Jack, this is
urgent.
He says: It better be.
We move apart from the
crowd.
I ask:
On a scale of one to ten, how likely would it be for Meredith Frye to steal
money from the Parish?
He says:
If I wanted to play guessing games I would have spent my day plucking rubber
ducks from the kiddie pool like everybody else.
I tell him that I love him for the old grump that he is,
but I’m in no mood for his bone-dry sarcasm; we’ve got a situation on our
hands. He’s not used to me showing emotion outside of watching the Pirates, so
he starts listening.
I say that I’m almost certain I just saw Meredith Frye grab
a whole bunch of money from the Lucky Duck ticket-booth; in seminary, they
never taught me how to deal with lunacy of this magnitude.
Jack, with his narrow face angled toward the dim spot where
the sun used to be, bites the end of his glasses and looks especially pensive.
I speculate that he’s thinking of a polite way to inform me that in forty-nine
years of priesthood, he’s never heard anything so stupid. So I fire preemptively
and explain to him that in nine years of priesthood I’ve never said anything so stupid. But I know what
I saw. And what I saw was a deranged old woman taking money from a children’s
game at a Church fund-raiser.
For the first time,
the thought crosses my mind that Meredith Frye could have been responsible for
the snake in the dunk tank—the dead squirrel in the kiddie pool, too. What
else? Has she laced the kettle corn? Placed glass on the slip-and-slide?
“You know,” Jack says.
“There’s a way we can figure this out.”
“Let’s hear it,” I say.
“Just go over to the ticket booth and see if there’s money
missing.” He says. “That space cadet you hired to sell tickets must have some
semblance of an idea how much money should be in the box.”
That space cadet is
Ryan Krug, and he was supposed to be an actual cadet in the army until he got plastered
drunk one night and stood on top of a Sheetz station throwing donut holes at
unsuspecting customers. Now he’s a member of the Community Cares initiative
which provides minor criminals a safe place to complete required community
service hours. Interrogating Ryan won’t prove anything. Even if he hasn’t
already pocketed half the money for himself, I don’t expect he’s been keeping
diligent financial records.
I tell Jack that I don’t want to make a scene. Then I
remember: that’s what this whole festival is anyway—a big scene. I picture myself
confronting Meredith Frye. I’m catching her by a frilly shoulder scrunch as she
attempts her escape. Then, as I should have expected, she proves my delusion to
the entire Parish by publically showing that she hasn’t stolen any money after
all. I’ve imagined the whole thing, she says, because I subconsciously desire
to see her defamed. Then she calls me the devil and spits on my Birkenstocks.
Suddenly, I’m not so confident. Surely nobody—not even
Meredith Frye—would have the audacity to pull off such a bone-headed heist. But
at the same time, isn’t that the genius of it? What kind of ignoramus would
steal money in broad daylight? And with no attempt to hide it?
I play the series-of-events again and again in my head;
they’re in a grainy motion-picture sequence like an alternate-universe Zapruder
film. I construct elaborate defenses for
what I think I’ve seen, such as: perhaps she just dropped something in the
money box and was simply picking it out. And the thing that she was picking out
of the box—who knows what it was— happened to, in the right lighting, look a
little bit like a crumpled ball of cash. Simple mistake. Or, even more likely:
she thought the box was filled with first aid supplies. After all, doesn’t it
say FIRST AID right on it? It does. Well, maybe she needed a band aid or some
of those baby Aspirin. Or maybe a cough drop to clear the phlegm from that
craggy old…
Clarity. I say out loud: Who am I kidding? Certainly not
myself. No, sir.
Jack asks: Who the
hell are you talking to?
I can’t tell him who the hell I’m talking to, because I’m
not talking to anyone. All I can tell him is that I now feel like I’m on a
personal mission from God, enlightened by divine wisdom and armed with smiteful
rage.
He says: Whatever. Just don’t disgrace the priesthood.
I say: I won’t.
And I go to find Meredith.
6.
Through the parking lot I
run. Do I care that I look like an idiot? No I do not. I willingly left my
pride next to the Lucky Duck pool. I’m sweating like crazy—partly from anger, but
mostly from heat exhaustion—and I’m imagining that I live in a world where I
can hold a church festival without worrying about a little lizard-of-a-woman in
a tidy dress stealing hundreds of dollars from a children’s game in broad
daylight. I’m also imagining how happy I would be if the Parish Festival didn’t
exist at all, and I had spent my day watching the Buccos with a cooler of Iron
City Light resting somewhere between my recliner and the Lil’ Tornado portable fan I just bought at Dollar General.
Some may say that I’m a
man of small dreams, and they’re probably right.
Over at the performance
stage—which is really just the rectory patio decorated with some tiki torches—Kat
Jennings is doing a kind of in-place shuffle dance as a few white-faced women in
green corduroy overalls sing “On Top of Spaghetti” and wave ribbons at terrified
children.
I ask Kat if she’s seen
Meredith Frye. She says that on one hand she hasn’t seen her, but on the other
hand she has seen some out-of-this-world
ribbon dancing.
I say: Wow. Stupendous.
But what I want to say
is: Kat, look at me and look at me close. My life is unraveling around me. I’m
an unhappy priest at a pathetic little church and I’m chasing a purple-faced
woman through a parking lot so I can finally, for the first time in nine years,
put one in the win column. I’m a perpetual loser, and I need a victory right
now. Can you not see that? How can you not see that?
She doesn’t see that.
Nobody does.
Lord, have mercy on me, I
say. If I ever get to heaven, I suspect God might ask me why I’ve decided to
spend my whole life as one dead among the living—a miserable and ungrateful man
hiding behind shallow cordialities. And I’ll have no good answer.
7.
Just then I hear a loud scream
coming from the parking lot of the Ain’t
It Better the Second Time Round’? Consignment Shop, which is where
everybody’s parked because we filled our own parking lot with low-quality amusements,
local vendors, etc. etc. Antonina Baranowski, the parish cantor who once
achieved small-scale success by singing background vocals in one of those
stop-motion Christmas classics, is running in my direction, waving violently as
if to flag-down a rescue chopper.
“FATHER STU! FATHER STU!
GRAHHHGHHHHHAAAHHH! COME QUICK” she says.
I tell her that I hope
someone is dying because I literally cannot take one more trivial inconvenience
in a day that has been plagued by trivial inconveniences.
She takes me over to the
parking lot of Ain’t It Better the Second
Time Round’? and it appears that someone might actually be dying, and that
someone is Meredith Frye. She’s sprawled on the ground, and by now, there’s at
least fifteen other parishioners gathered around her in a morbid little circle.
I ask what
happened: heat stroke? Heart attack? Somebody talk to me.
“Well, I had just come over to my car,” Antonina says,
“And I was going to get some ones so Danny could play that game—the one with
the cute little ducks? You know the one?”
I nod. At this point I’m very familiar with the ducks.
“Then, wow, yeah. Sheesh,” Antonina says. “Meredith just
kind of stumbled forward and collapsed into that pothole.” She points at the
pothole where Meredith’s face is squished into some cinders.
This is all too much for me, really. I have to wonder:
did God, you know, smite her? Did truth
and justice finally prevail? Did God say to himself: enough is enough—it’s time
to cut out the middle man and take matters into my own all-powerful hands? I
always figured smiting would be a more dramatic event, what with localized earthquakes
and pillars of salt and pyroclastic fireballs and all that good stuff. This is
sort of anticlimactic, if I’m being honest.
People are looking at me
kind of like: you’re the priest, isn’t it time for you to do your priest stuff
and take charge? Shouldn’t you be remedying this situation? Deep down I know
that that’s exactly what it’s time for, but I’ve never been good with things
like this. My feeling is, once I know this woman is dead I’d be more than happy
to stand in front of a Church-full of men in nice suits and women in nice
blouses saying nice things about her until the cows come home. But as long as
she’s breathing, I don’t know what to say to anyone.
8.
Sometimes late at night I
used to sit in the corner of the church by myself, quiet and still. All I could
hear was the air conditioning unit clicking on and hissing off, but I had
convinced myself that if I was quiet enough, I might one day hear God. That, at
least, was the idea. In the silence, I stared at the darkened stained glass
windows: men and women in robes and sandals holding crosiers or staffs or quill
pens. These, I knew, were good men and women, who did good deeds with their
crosiers and staffs and quill pens. In the zeal of my youth, I desired to be
like them. I prayed that God would make me holy—that he would turn me into
someone who might one day be immortalized in a technicolored glass collage,
perhaps even with my own quill pen writing something nice that people across the
world would read and maybe even tell their friends to read. Those nights when I
used to look at the stained-glass windows were the ones that allowed me to
sleep in peace. I knew who people wanted me to be and I knew who I wanted to be,
and the two were in perfect synch.
Nowadays, I don’t really
know who people want me to be, nor do I know who I want to be. The two are
certainly not in synch. Have I lost my faith? My love? My basic humanity? I
can’t say. All I can say for certain is that right now, some part of me wants
to grab that straw hat out from under Meredith’s wrinkly arms, take the stolen
money and wave it around so everyone can see it, shaming Meredith and making
her into the same forlorn outcast into which she’s made me. But for one reason
or another, I cannot bring myself to do it. So close to proving I’m right, yet
I’m frozen. In the window of Ain’t it
Better the Second Time Round’? three mannequins with purple silk pocket
squares sticking out of pinstripe suits stare at me with their smooth indented
eye sockets. I’m no more alive than they are.
Back when I was a
seminarian, I had a dream of what it might be like to go to my high-school
reunion. In the reverie, my principal, who was for some reason Danny Glover,
was announcing everyone present by name and saying what his or her occupation
was. When he declared “Stu Cranberry: Priest!” everyone applauded and whistled
and hollered, and then, to celebrate, I went out for beer and wings with two
ex-girlfriends and the bad guy from Lethal
Weapon 3.
I see the scenario playing out differently
nowadays. All my old classmates would be there—some having grown from scrawny
duds into stately and successful professionals with briefcases and jackets with
elbow pads, and others, once beautiful and popular, now being overweight and despondent
from years of marital woes and whatnot. In my Roman collar and freshly ironed
short-sleeved dress shirt, I would not fit into either group. A long-lost
friend might come up to me and say: Damn
Stu! A priest? Thought you’d be dead by now! Then he’d give me a noogie or
a shoulder slap or something that friends do to show affection and ask me what
I’ve been up to. Saving souls? Feeding the hungry? Becoming a saint? And I’d
get a lump in my throat thinking about all that I wasn’t—all that I’d failed to
become in five, ten, twenty years.
Would I tell that friend
about Meredith Frye? About the day I finally defeated her? Humiliated her in
front of her friends as she lay on the ground like a corpse?
No. In this dream, there
would be nothing to celebrate.
9.
Rain begins to
fall—reservedly, at first, but then in steady sheets. All gathered are still.
No umbrellas, no one running for cover. Just the patter of the now driving rain
upon the asphalt and the somewhat sour smell of saturated earth. Tim Frye
starts repeating over and over my
darling…my darling. He’s sobbing quietly, but his tears are lost in the
deluge.
Pat McMann is on one knee feeling for a pulse. He’s looking
at his watch and counting just loud enough for us to hear. Jack shows up and
asks did somebody call the ambulance. Someone says yes; EMT should be here
shortly. Even in the misty air, all I can taste are splinters. We all wait. One
minute. Two minutes. Sirens pierce through the storm and everything flashes
blue and red.
I look at Meredith,
raindrops splashing off her face. The purple makeup washes away and her skin
shimmers like a porcelain doll. She looks so pitiable there on the ground, with
her floral-patterned dress bunched up too high and her straw hat still tucked
under her arm. I can’t help but imagine that this downpour is not just a normal
downpour, but God looking upon her and weeping—like a father would—seeing his own
daughter in such misery.
As a boy, my dad would sit at the foot of my bed and read
me Curious George books until I
forgot about how terrified I was of the spindly tree shadows that danced across
my wall once the lights were out. We laughed and laughed as Curious George went
to the circus and to the amusement park and even to the zoo, where you figure
he should have known the rules. Then one day we ran out of Curious George books
to read, and my dad reached onto my bookshelf and grabbed a thick red book with
a rough cover like an egg-shell. It was called Extraordinary Lives of Extraordinary People, but the most
extraordinary part was that neither of us could figure out where that book had
come from. The pictures were black and white and the first letter on each page
was done up in wild calligraphy.
One of my favorite stories in that book was about a hermit
woman—I can’t remember her name—who had a vision that she was holding something
small, perhaps the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of her hand. She didn’t know
what it was, so she consulted God.
“God, what may this be?” She asked.
“All that is made,” God replied.
The woman became terrified by the responsibility of holding
something so important, but God reassured her: That which you hold in your hand
will always last, because God loves it, and all that exists only does so
because God loves it into being.
Aren’t we all just little things in the hand of God?
Meredith? Myself?
Sometimes I wonder: how does God see us when we are at our
lowest? When we’re sick? When we’re miserable? When we lack the ability to believe
that our lives are worth anything? When we’re called, at least in some way, to
die? Does he see us differently than we see ourselves? Each other? I hope he
does. I can’t be sure, but I’d like to think that perhaps he lifts us up in his
hands, brings us to his face, and weeps over us. And then, as we lay groggy and
helpless, his tears wash away all the bad that we are—all the evil we’ve worn
upon our skin like dirt upon a child. And just as we are about to drown, just
as we can’t take anymore, we emerge as from a bath. We’re clean and refreshed
and happy. And God smiles at us and says in his big God voice: Ha! Don’t you
feel better now?
And we say: Yes! As a matter of fact, that feels much
better. Thank you!
10.
The ambulance guys show up and slide Meredith onto a
gurney. One of them, with a big brown beard and the type of face you can trust,
says that she’s going to be fine. “Mild heat stroke n’at,” he says. “Day like
today? Lucky it wuhnt worse.” I nod. Tim
Frye looks lost so the crew lets him ride up front. He and Meredith are carried
away as the obnoxiously loud, fake church bells toll a melodic farewell.
The rain eventually stops. Somebody says that’s all she
wrote and somebody else grunts. When the commotion clears it’s just me who
remains. I see that Meredith’s straw hat has been left in a muddy little puddle
on the ground, so I crouch down and pull it up by the tip of a soggy pink bow. The
hat is folded over, just like when it was stuffed under Meredith’s arm. I
unfold it and pull out a soft-ball sized clump of soggy paper bills, as I
expected. Sorting through them, I shake the rain water from the folds and
creases, and after I have crossed the street back to festival, I drop
everything in Ryan Krug’s FIRST AID box. Three-hundred and forty-eight dollars
in all. He doesn’t even notice.
Maybe the best things we do in this life are those done
when no one notices, when our pride is dismantled, when we come to know the
purifying burn of losing. It is then that we stand in the flames like unknown
martyrs, carrying our insignificant causes with us into the ashes.
Still holding the straw hat, I take my spot with the
Monsignor under the old elm. A few narrow and lonely rays of light pierce the
gray canopy which shrouds the late evening, and mist, spectral and dark, begins
to lift from the earth. Jack snickers and asks if I ever found the cash I was
after. But I was never really after the cash.
I tell him no, I never found it. I must have been wrong. And
each word lingers on my tongue and blazes through my body like fire.
I cannot lie: I’ve never been much for gaming culture, comic
books, or anime. I cannot say a single intelligent thing about the Atari 2600,
and nary can I tell the difference between a member of the X-Men and a WWE
wrestler. My video game library—when I still had one—consisted of such classic
titles as MLB Slugfest and ATV Offroad Fury 2 for the Playstation
2, and my favorite morning cartoon was Arthur on PBS. In short, I’m about the
last person who should have enjoyed Ernest Cline’s ode to nerd culture, the
cult-classic 2011 novel, Ready Player
One.
