by Robert A. Howard
Harry Potter has captivated the world’s children. Sons and daughters who were struggling with or uninterested in books are suddenly voracious readers. Adults generally value this shift because the ability to read and comprehend is essential to success in adult life. For families grounded in Scripture, literacy is a virtue as well as a necessity. Parents and preachers use poetry, parable, and biography from history’s most popular book to instruct their charges on the differences between good and evil. Christians believe these differences have certain and profound implications for human experience.
Because the Bible can be hard to read and understand, a vast literature of commentary, children’s stories and adult non-fiction has arisen to assist understanding and instruction. Still, the results are often imperfect and incomplete. In spite of appeals to grace and inspiration, Bible scholars regularly disagree on the meaning of specific verses, chapters or books. So do regular folk who read the Bible.
Disagreements have also arisen over the content of Harry Potter saga. The wizards, witches and other magical elements of these stories have put many Christian parents at odds with their children, with each other and, if they have read and enjoyed the books too, with themselves. Doesn’t magic confuse children about how real life works? Isn’t Potter’s popularity really evidence of how cleverly Evil has blended storytelling and magic to confuse and corrupt children?
I think when many people decide whom to trust in these matters, they feel bound to accept that judgment, first because the spiritual and emotional well-being of their children are at stake, and second, because parents do not feel equipped to examine the culture for spiritual dangers. Also, confronting those who claim authority and expertise here can be daunting. Under these circumstances, believing a book is evil is due more to convenience rather than to thoughtful examination.
It seems fair to me, and prudent, to examine the manner in which seductive evil can show up in literature, film, and other cultural expressions. But by itself, this examination does not seem enough. I suggest that looking at what might be wrong with Harry Potter requires that you also consider what might be right. For both children and adults, missing something valuable in life can be as destructive as misidentifying what is dangerous. The Bible is a clear example that evil in a story does not make the story evil, nor does it make you miss in that grand story what is good and right.
My good friend Andy Hanson, Professor of Education at California State University, Chico, responded to the Potter-is-evil argument by examining the literary tradition of magic in literature. He writes, “In my opinion, and the opinions of the vast majority of children's book editors and critics, these books belong in the same fantasy genre as Homer’s Odyssey, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising books, Lloyd Alexander’s Pridane Series, and L’Engles’ A Wrinkle in Time. If we decide to ban books dealing with the supernatural, we would have to get rid of works by Shakespeare, A Christmas Carole by Charles Dickens, Walt Disney's Snow White and Cinderella, and The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis, where supernatural evil creatures are actually portrayed torturing and killing the defenseless Christ figure, Aslan.”
Hanson then quotes John Monk, editorial writer for “The State,” in Columbia, South Carolina, who writes that the Potter books ‘…combine the detective work of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the mirthful wordplay of Dr. Seuss, and the lampoon portraits of Charles Dickens.’ Hanson then suggests that “…if you claim the Potter books lure children into witchcraft, you might as well say that the Shirley Temple movies set in the nineteenth century South teach young viewers to be slave holders, or, as he quotes Monk further, ‘…Treasure Island entices children to be pirates, or Peter Pan urges children to run away from home.’ ”
Andy penetrated my intellectual snobbery about reading the Potter books by gently suggesting I might enjoy them. Then he gave me a kind smile and loaned me his hard cover copies. I started reading Potter because I trusted our friendship, and I trusted him. Andy has trained teachers for over thirty years, and has taught students from elementary age to graduate school. He and his wife Claudia have raised three children, one of them an adopted daughter, and are attentive and loving grandparents. They are deeply devoted to each other, their family, their faith, and their church community. It did not look to me like Hell had kindled in the pages of Potter and was now slowly roasting them alive. In their home, I just saw and felt love. I still do.
Andy recognizes that his literary argument may do little to convince certain parents to consider Harry Potter in terms other than evil. So I offer some additional perspectives on J. K. Rowling’s books. I have both academic and clinical training in the psychological and relational factors within individuals, between partners in committed relationships, and in families. I have lived my entire life in a Christian tradition, and I work every day to grow up my faith, my heart, and my reason. As an avid reader and writer, I see reading as much an act of the imagination, intellect and conscience as is faith or worship. It looks to me like all this happens in relationship.
What each child brings to any book depends in part on the family they live in, in part on their stage of development. Children are both open and susceptible to a story because their imagination and interpretive abilities are in the process of being formed. In order to develop an imagination that is truly theirs, they need a balance between guidance and freedom. When adults are impervious to a story’s possibilities because their imagination and ideas have become fixed, they risk being uninformed and untrustworthy guides for both their children’s moral conscience and their imagination.
Relationships drive our human experience, imagination, and the meaning we make of our lives. Faith flowers and fades in relationship. I miss the point of my relationship with Christ if I neglect or abuse my relationships with others. So I ask readers to consider the Harry Potter saga a wholesome story with important lessons for children about character development, virtue, adulthood and wisdom. I ask you to explore how these pretend and magical children bring us lessons about sacrifice and the redemptive power of love. You may discover that Harry Potter Saga has much to teach us all about friends, family and community.
In light of the virtues of this story, is Harry Potter an evil waiting outside the walls of our children’s hearts and souls, slipping in through the unguarded doors ajar in their imagination? This is an important question. I believe a thoughtful answer requires that we account for all that we can know, and connect that with the best we can imagine.
Children do not read any story in a relationship vacuum. They bring their family experience, as well as their developing imaginations, into their reading. Both aspects must be accounted for as a family navigates a story, searching out both its treasures and its dangers.
Human imagination and the supernatural are separate realms, each inhabited by good and evil. It is still largely a mystery how these two realms connect with and inform each other. Western science and culture have not been helpful guides here. What seems clear is that imagination is something like magic. Out of thin air, we make up stories about pretend kings, heroes, villains, queens, wizards and demons. We animate vegetables and animals with human qualities and dramatize their lives. Based on our values, we make up what these stories mean to us. One person of faith imagines that children are being lured by evil into The Sorcerer’s Stone. In contrast, I imagine that the hearts of children resonate with the way these characters relate with each other. I believe this inner resonance, living proof that the best in human relationships embody and evoke the Divine, is one way we are protected against evil.
This raises the question of whether evil is an appropriate literary subject for children. Real life events like 9/11, domestic violence in American homes, and the daily terrors of the Middle East show us that sometimes evil doesn’t wait for you to grow up enough to understand it. It strikes at innocence as much as through ignorance. This makes evil is a fit subject for readers of all ages. So Voldemort has important lessons for children. This dark figure, like all humans, had some tendency toward sin. Increasingly, and at key points in his life, he chose evil over good. His descent into darkness, gradual but sure, was fueled by his reliance on magic. Along the way he became inflated with his unique power and corrupted his imagination to create a vision of domination and destruction to which he devoted his entire being. He reduced all others to tools or victims. Voldemort teaches us that evil wins because something human failed and refused to admit it.
This failure is personal and relational. Evil doesn’t have to forcibly invade us. It just has to wait for us to wound, neglect, abandon, or exploit each other and ourselves. Christian concepts like grace and hope help guard us against cynicism and despair. But they are not guarantees. Except for the few mystics among us, our ideas and experiences of God will fail us if we do not live them out in human relationships.
When Rowling hints at a vague power influencing the destinies of wizards and muggles alike, she may be addressing the mysterious relationship between humans and the Divine. Humans certainly use the arts to express and probe this mystery, but they also use ritual, prayer and meditation without realizing how all these practices imaginative acts. It is the Divine that imparts revelation. We just have to imagine ourselves capable of accepting that gift.
So, in my imagination, the Harry Potter saga does not celebrate or disguise evil. It is the story of a triumph over a great evil. Magic does not save the day. When Harry and his friends battle Voldemort in their magical world, it is love, as J. K. Rowling makes clear, that defeats him.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Burning
by Rob Howard
Two days before my sixth birthday Dad walked up the basement stairs. His feet scuffed the wood steps as he rose to the top where he shut off the light. He stood against the dark, saw me in the landing’s half-lit shadows and smiled.
“Hi son,” he said, “you look like you’re waiting for someone.”
No matter how I tried, I couldn’t fool him. So I just kicked the old linoleum floor with my toe.
“Or maybe it’s some thing,” he said, his smile broadening, his blue eyes cutting through the murk to mine. I see now how gently he teased me. But back then when he caught onto me I felt endangered by the huge hands hanging down by his sides like un-cocked guns. Although he never used them against me, in that moment they felt too close for comfort. So I lied.
“I just wanted to see you Dad.”
That wasn’t a complete lie. I wanted my dangerous Dad. I wanted him to come home from work, to sling me at the ceiling or sky then catch me just above the floor or ground. I loved how he made me gasp like that and then sat down and taught me to read. I wanted to know what he knew, to do the things he did. He fixed wires in the light fixtures, unplugged the drains and re-plumbed the pipes. He climbed ladders and patched the leaky shingles and then patched the ceilings and walls where the rainwater fractured the blackened plaster. He leaned beneath the hood of our ‘56 Chevy Bel Air and, as he said, made it purr. He tinkered with the basement’s oil furnace until it sounded like the Chevy. He gently looked at broken things; he touched them and they worked. He never let me see him impatient, and although sometimes I heard him shout from another room, by the time I got there he’d be humming or chuckling to himself. And whenever I became frustrated, like the day I learned to ride a borrowed bike, he’d soothe me just enough so I’d keep trying. Today I marvel at the father who descended into me to find the broken, the half made and the good. But that day on the landing, I didn’t want Dad poking around inside me. I wanted my birthday gift early, the bike in the basement.
Our basement sat beneath us like a magic gold mine. After some banging and singing down there, up he’d come with treasure. I remember him once hauling up hand-crafted sections of oak furniture to the landing, and then packing them up the narrow twisting stairwell to my parents’ freshly painted bedroom. He packed bureaus gaping for their drawers, then the drawers themselves, and night stands, a headboard, pieces of the mattress frame, and the legs he’d sculpted on a lathe so they’d look pretty holding up the bed. Somehow he’d curved one piece of oak into an oval around a beveled mirror. I followed him up and down the stairs, and stood in the bedroom doorway while he littered the floor with pieces of a puzzle that made no sense to me. Finally, when he looked at me and nodded, I came and kneeled behind him so that I could reach into his tool box and hand him what he wanted. I listened to him drilling, to the muted squeaks of turning screws, to the sighs and chuckles leaking from him. He fit pieces together until a whole bedroom of hand-made furniture stood in disarray before us. Better than store bought, the neighbors said later. When Dad showed me how he’d flushed the edges and hidden the screws, I wanted to keep him a secret lest someone steal him away. This stingy son didn’t yet understand how much everyone needed his dad.
Then Mom came in and helped dad arrange the furniture. The room grew large and beautiful as every piece found its place. Mom packed in treasures too, the ones she’d conjured in the spare bedroom. She made the bed with flannel sheets, brightly colored cotton blankets and a creamy bedspread filled with holes that she called eyelets. She fluffed the matching pillows and hung flowered curtains on oak rods. She set down circles of lace on the twin night stands and on her dressing table. Dad remarked how everything she placed on the tanned wood drew out its darker grain. She nodded and dressed the stained and polished floorboards with her hand-braided rugs. Finally she plugged in a nicked up brass lamp that Dad found abandoned in the basement by the previous owners. She touched it with the kind of light that in the late afternoon, as she said, pulled the room together. At last my parents stopped to look at their work. Then Dad put on the finishing touches as he fit the back of Mom’s body against the front of his, and me into the space between their hips. We rested there a long time, my parents touching each other, touching me too.
I wanted all the basement treasures Dad made to be ours, but he gave so many of them away. It seemed as if some days he woke determined to anger me with his generosity toward others. He’d work for hours or days on something and then just hand it over as if it were nothing; to the priests and nuns, to the cop who lived down the street, to the grumpy gray-haired teacher around the corner, the one who never smiled at me. I didn’t like my Dad being that nice to those people. As far as I could see, they did nothing to deserve his gifts.
Like that jaw grinder of a next door neighbor Mr. Jones who I refused to call mister. He complained about our noisy front yard football games, claimed the shade of our trees killed his trees that our weeds choked his grass. In truth dead limbs throttled his trees and his weedy uncut grass oozed clouds of pollen that made our whole neighborhood sneeze. For some crazy reason he took to walking home from the market with nothing but an empty brown shopping bag. Paint peeled from his house in long thin scabs until one weekend Dad and some neighbors cut the weeds and grass and scraped and painted the whole house. Jones thanked everyone by complaining about the color of the trim and wondering out loud if Dad hadn’t thinned the paint to save a buck.
That Jones, so many times I watched him stand in his brown yard, a bastard troll who wet himself, pointing his finger over the low fence, calling my Dad names. I wanted to yell, point back Dad, make your fists and hit him! But Dad just listened as if the old fart had a point, and then he’d smile and promise Jones to keep our yard weed and make sure us kids didn’t bother him. I shook with rage as Jones stalked then into his house, slamming his door like a big shot as if Dad didn’t still stand there. I felt ashamed following my defeated Dad inside our house where Mom was already busy baking up a chicken, sausage or baked bean casserole. After the timer went off, she’d fuss with her hair then walk the steaming dish over to the Jones’s covered front porch.
Her pretty smile only brightened when Jones threw open the door demanding to know what she wanted. What a fake. He smelled the food coming. And just like Dad, Mom always gave in. She’d hold up the casserole dish where Jones poked at it before jerking it out of her hands. He always told her he hoped it didn’t make him or the missus ill, and as far as he was concerned it was the effort that counted and they’d make the best of it. Then he’d yell over his shoulder isn’t that right hon to a wife too good to come to the door.
I wanted to throw rocks at Jones. Break his windows. Make his bald head bleed, see him stumble with the stoning. Make his stuck up wife come out to wring her hands, and turn some helpless circles around her fallen man. I hated her for hiding, and him for talking to my parents like they were bums or bad kids, or people who just didn’t give a damn. When it was the Jones’s who didn’t care. They never returned my mother’s casserole dishes. Must have had fifty or a hundred of them piled inside their kitchen in dirty rickety columns like in a Dr. Seuss book. Never did they cook my Mom and Dad a dinner and walk it over.
I woke on my birthday fed up with the unfairness of my family and neighbors. I sulked all day, even while, thanks to Mom, I ate my favorite dinner. Then with candles burning on a frosted cake named for me, I shouted at my parents for letting Jones bully them. Every so often for emphasis I shouted, what’s wrong with you? While I ranted my parents treated me like they treated Jones, listening until the candles burned out and I stopped shouting. As six smoky spirals rose from my melted name, Mom and Dad rested their foreheads together like embers sharing heat. Then they grinned, I thought back then, to make fun of me. Their little loving smiles, I see now. Then Mom, her long lashes fluttering in time with her movie star mouth, spoke to me in fragmented sentences...how hard things were for Mr. Jones, how much he needed people to be kind to him; how much the rest of us needed to practice kindness; what a gift to our family, to everyone on the block! Then Dad chimed in with, “We all need each other son, this one to lighten that one’s load, that one to test another’s strength.” Then Mom said how important it might be at times to know that others cared for you even when you weren’t at your best. And to share, she went on to say, even when no one says thank you because sometimes receiving a gift is all some people can manage.
Mom’s words reminded me I had a bike coming. Dang my Dad, I thought, for making me wait two more days when I had scores to settle. Now he stood and led me down into the basement where he slipped the sheet off an old Schwinn he’d found somewhere and fixed up. The scratched chrome fenders gleamed in the light of the lone bulb, the butterfly handlebars rose high like a ship’s wheel, the brand new whitewall tires matched my white high top tennis shoes. He lifted the rear wheel off the floor and I turned the pedals and together we listened to the chain purr around the sprockets. He let me push the bike up the stairs by myself, helping only when in my haste I slipped. Out the backdoor I flew, bouncing down the concrete steps, running beside the bike and swinging up into the seat like a cowboy onto his horse, leaving everyone in my dust. How quickly I’d grown above saying thank you.
I spent the next six days finding new ways to heckle Jones with my bike. I began by cutting brodies in his dying lawn. The next afternoon I raced up and down his crumbly concrete driveway until he stumbled drunkenly onto his porch roaring. The following day, while he walked to morning mass, I turned silent narrow circles around him. The day after I spun out so gravel flew against his old Ford Fairlane, and the day after that I darted from an alley to make fun of his pee-stained pants. On day six as he trudged home from the market with one of those stupid empty sacks, I balanced on my pedals beside him calling him every name I knew. And on the seventh day, before I could get him again, Jones died.
I watched from my bike as some men in a Catholic ambulance came and packed something out of his house wrapped in a sheet. Everybody said that Jones lay inside but to me the small white lump looked like a dead dog. Then my parents and their neighbors began packing garbage from Jones’s house. Dad made me put my bike away and come help. The whole house stunk like a dirty bathroom. I stomped streams of roaches until Dad touched my shoulder, handed me a broom and said, “I’d rather you help us son by sweeping up the floor here.”
No one found a Mrs. Jones. I didn’t know how or when she’d left. At the end of the second day of cleaning, just before sunset, someone found the key to a long row of locked metal kitchen cabinets. Inside sat rows of paper sacks each stuffed with something and taped shut. A woman gasped as a man tore the taped edge off one bag and peeked inside.
It’s a casserole dish, he announced. Everyone looked at the rest of the sacks.
Why? another man asked.
To keep them clean, a woman answered.
Women wiped the counter tops and began pulling bags out to set them there. Before another man could rip open another bag, a woman appeared with scissors. She cut carefully, gently brought forth a dish. Oh my, she whispered as she took off the lid. People gathered around and looked down at an envelope addressed to my Mom. She held it up so I could see. And here, another woman hushed over the first dish. Everyone looked at Mom, and when she nodded women passed the scissors, opening each bag to free that dish’s envelope. A pile of Shirleys rose on the counter. Some women washed the table and others set the envelopes there. Dad, the neighbors, they disappeared while mom sat down and fiddled with the pile. When she noticed me watching from the arched doorway she waved me over and wrapped me in a warm arm.
What’s in the letters mom? I asked. She opened an envelope and showed me how inside the card Jones had written her name again, and just below scribbled four lines. I pointed at his smeared words. Tears, my mother said. I read the smudges to myself. What do they mean Mom? I asked. Thank you, she said, and she asked me to read another one out loud with her.
A wife for me no more
A wife like you right next door
This work, these words, late I know
The last I do before I go
In every card the same poem, every one unsigned. We read them all together. The more we read the more Mom’s pretty voice deepened like when Dad did something nice for her. I didn’t understand how that mean old man could make my mom feel good.
Finally Mom handed me the last envelope, this one addressed to me. I don’t want it, I said. Open it, Mom replied. So I read: I’m sorry I yelled at you son. You’re a good boy. Be a good man, like your dad.
Then I saw he’d signed a mangled name; oh God the same as Dad’s, the same as mine. I tried to hide my stinging tears but Mom pulled my hands around her neck, leaned into me and pressed her lips against my eyes. Then she cried these scary sounds, so long and high I thought she might die too. Her hands gripped me, those warm arms crushed me so, and her slender fingers turned in the curls of my long blond little boy hair. Then one by one Dad and the neighbors came and stood around the table holding hands, a whole neighborhood swaying and humming, weeping with one heart. Our tears fell on something holy, a man saying I’m Sorry in every single Thank You.
The day after Mr. Jones’s funeral my parents took a trip into the country, just them, up the sharp canyon edges of Greens Springs Drive. I watched the Chevy disappear down the road then, helped by my memories of them, imagined my parents inside. Dad relaxed at the wheel, his arm out the window. Mom’s back leaning into Dad’s side, her bare left foot on the seat, her other foot on the sill of the open passenger window where she touched the wind with her toes. Dad’s free arm draped down the front of Mom’s bosom, his hand patting and rubbing and resting on her hip. Mom held and stroked and squeezed Dad’s arm, her fingers slipping up his rolled sleeve to tickle and pinch him. For miles and miles they laughed and teased and talked. Together they climbed high.
That night I dreamt a dream that still comes. A wheel falls off on a high curving road. Dad crushes Mom to him as he brings his right arm up to turn the wheel. But the curve turns faster and the air can’t hold them. Dragged down by the draft of the plunging car I’m just a bird falling in frantic circles, seeing through the Chevy’s windows my parents’ faces kaleidoscope through fear, surrender, to love looking at each other. Then the canyon floor’s afire; Dad and Mom stand in flames, smiling there with Mr. Jones.
Who knows the language of dreams? I just know they come when with our habits silenced by sleep we might see something new. I woke the next morning wanting for the first time in my life to give my neighbors gifts. So I started running errands on my bike for everyone on the block. Yes, I felt guilty about how I treated Mr. Jones. But greater than guilt I felt a bit of selfish boy burning up in me, and a better boy burning on.
Two days before my sixth birthday Dad walked up the basement stairs. His feet scuffed the wood steps as he rose to the top where he shut off the light. He stood against the dark, saw me in the landing’s half-lit shadows and smiled.
“Hi son,” he said, “you look like you’re waiting for someone.”
No matter how I tried, I couldn’t fool him. So I just kicked the old linoleum floor with my toe.
“Or maybe it’s some thing,” he said, his smile broadening, his blue eyes cutting through the murk to mine. I see now how gently he teased me. But back then when he caught onto me I felt endangered by the huge hands hanging down by his sides like un-cocked guns. Although he never used them against me, in that moment they felt too close for comfort. So I lied.
“I just wanted to see you Dad.”
That wasn’t a complete lie. I wanted my dangerous Dad. I wanted him to come home from work, to sling me at the ceiling or sky then catch me just above the floor or ground. I loved how he made me gasp like that and then sat down and taught me to read. I wanted to know what he knew, to do the things he did. He fixed wires in the light fixtures, unplugged the drains and re-plumbed the pipes. He climbed ladders and patched the leaky shingles and then patched the ceilings and walls where the rainwater fractured the blackened plaster. He leaned beneath the hood of our ‘56 Chevy Bel Air and, as he said, made it purr. He tinkered with the basement’s oil furnace until it sounded like the Chevy. He gently looked at broken things; he touched them and they worked. He never let me see him impatient, and although sometimes I heard him shout from another room, by the time I got there he’d be humming or chuckling to himself. And whenever I became frustrated, like the day I learned to ride a borrowed bike, he’d soothe me just enough so I’d keep trying. Today I marvel at the father who descended into me to find the broken, the half made and the good. But that day on the landing, I didn’t want Dad poking around inside me. I wanted my birthday gift early, the bike in the basement.
Our basement sat beneath us like a magic gold mine. After some banging and singing down there, up he’d come with treasure. I remember him once hauling up hand-crafted sections of oak furniture to the landing, and then packing them up the narrow twisting stairwell to my parents’ freshly painted bedroom. He packed bureaus gaping for their drawers, then the drawers themselves, and night stands, a headboard, pieces of the mattress frame, and the legs he’d sculpted on a lathe so they’d look pretty holding up the bed. Somehow he’d curved one piece of oak into an oval around a beveled mirror. I followed him up and down the stairs, and stood in the bedroom doorway while he littered the floor with pieces of a puzzle that made no sense to me. Finally, when he looked at me and nodded, I came and kneeled behind him so that I could reach into his tool box and hand him what he wanted. I listened to him drilling, to the muted squeaks of turning screws, to the sighs and chuckles leaking from him. He fit pieces together until a whole bedroom of hand-made furniture stood in disarray before us. Better than store bought, the neighbors said later. When Dad showed me how he’d flushed the edges and hidden the screws, I wanted to keep him a secret lest someone steal him away. This stingy son didn’t yet understand how much everyone needed his dad.
Then Mom came in and helped dad arrange the furniture. The room grew large and beautiful as every piece found its place. Mom packed in treasures too, the ones she’d conjured in the spare bedroom. She made the bed with flannel sheets, brightly colored cotton blankets and a creamy bedspread filled with holes that she called eyelets. She fluffed the matching pillows and hung flowered curtains on oak rods. She set down circles of lace on the twin night stands and on her dressing table. Dad remarked how everything she placed on the tanned wood drew out its darker grain. She nodded and dressed the stained and polished floorboards with her hand-braided rugs. Finally she plugged in a nicked up brass lamp that Dad found abandoned in the basement by the previous owners. She touched it with the kind of light that in the late afternoon, as she said, pulled the room together. At last my parents stopped to look at their work. Then Dad put on the finishing touches as he fit the back of Mom’s body against the front of his, and me into the space between their hips. We rested there a long time, my parents touching each other, touching me too.
I wanted all the basement treasures Dad made to be ours, but he gave so many of them away. It seemed as if some days he woke determined to anger me with his generosity toward others. He’d work for hours or days on something and then just hand it over as if it were nothing; to the priests and nuns, to the cop who lived down the street, to the grumpy gray-haired teacher around the corner, the one who never smiled at me. I didn’t like my Dad being that nice to those people. As far as I could see, they did nothing to deserve his gifts.
Like that jaw grinder of a next door neighbor Mr. Jones who I refused to call mister. He complained about our noisy front yard football games, claimed the shade of our trees killed his trees that our weeds choked his grass. In truth dead limbs throttled his trees and his weedy uncut grass oozed clouds of pollen that made our whole neighborhood sneeze. For some crazy reason he took to walking home from the market with nothing but an empty brown shopping bag. Paint peeled from his house in long thin scabs until one weekend Dad and some neighbors cut the weeds and grass and scraped and painted the whole house. Jones thanked everyone by complaining about the color of the trim and wondering out loud if Dad hadn’t thinned the paint to save a buck.
That Jones, so many times I watched him stand in his brown yard, a bastard troll who wet himself, pointing his finger over the low fence, calling my Dad names. I wanted to yell, point back Dad, make your fists and hit him! But Dad just listened as if the old fart had a point, and then he’d smile and promise Jones to keep our yard weed and make sure us kids didn’t bother him. I shook with rage as Jones stalked then into his house, slamming his door like a big shot as if Dad didn’t still stand there. I felt ashamed following my defeated Dad inside our house where Mom was already busy baking up a chicken, sausage or baked bean casserole. After the timer went off, she’d fuss with her hair then walk the steaming dish over to the Jones’s covered front porch.
Her pretty smile only brightened when Jones threw open the door demanding to know what she wanted. What a fake. He smelled the food coming. And just like Dad, Mom always gave in. She’d hold up the casserole dish where Jones poked at it before jerking it out of her hands. He always told her he hoped it didn’t make him or the missus ill, and as far as he was concerned it was the effort that counted and they’d make the best of it. Then he’d yell over his shoulder isn’t that right hon to a wife too good to come to the door.
I wanted to throw rocks at Jones. Break his windows. Make his bald head bleed, see him stumble with the stoning. Make his stuck up wife come out to wring her hands, and turn some helpless circles around her fallen man. I hated her for hiding, and him for talking to my parents like they were bums or bad kids, or people who just didn’t give a damn. When it was the Jones’s who didn’t care. They never returned my mother’s casserole dishes. Must have had fifty or a hundred of them piled inside their kitchen in dirty rickety columns like in a Dr. Seuss book. Never did they cook my Mom and Dad a dinner and walk it over.
I woke on my birthday fed up with the unfairness of my family and neighbors. I sulked all day, even while, thanks to Mom, I ate my favorite dinner. Then with candles burning on a frosted cake named for me, I shouted at my parents for letting Jones bully them. Every so often for emphasis I shouted, what’s wrong with you? While I ranted my parents treated me like they treated Jones, listening until the candles burned out and I stopped shouting. As six smoky spirals rose from my melted name, Mom and Dad rested their foreheads together like embers sharing heat. Then they grinned, I thought back then, to make fun of me. Their little loving smiles, I see now. Then Mom, her long lashes fluttering in time with her movie star mouth, spoke to me in fragmented sentences...how hard things were for Mr. Jones, how much he needed people to be kind to him; how much the rest of us needed to practice kindness; what a gift to our family, to everyone on the block! Then Dad chimed in with, “We all need each other son, this one to lighten that one’s load, that one to test another’s strength.” Then Mom said how important it might be at times to know that others cared for you even when you weren’t at your best. And to share, she went on to say, even when no one says thank you because sometimes receiving a gift is all some people can manage.
Mom’s words reminded me I had a bike coming. Dang my Dad, I thought, for making me wait two more days when I had scores to settle. Now he stood and led me down into the basement where he slipped the sheet off an old Schwinn he’d found somewhere and fixed up. The scratched chrome fenders gleamed in the light of the lone bulb, the butterfly handlebars rose high like a ship’s wheel, the brand new whitewall tires matched my white high top tennis shoes. He lifted the rear wheel off the floor and I turned the pedals and together we listened to the chain purr around the sprockets. He let me push the bike up the stairs by myself, helping only when in my haste I slipped. Out the backdoor I flew, bouncing down the concrete steps, running beside the bike and swinging up into the seat like a cowboy onto his horse, leaving everyone in my dust. How quickly I’d grown above saying thank you.
I spent the next six days finding new ways to heckle Jones with my bike. I began by cutting brodies in his dying lawn. The next afternoon I raced up and down his crumbly concrete driveway until he stumbled drunkenly onto his porch roaring. The following day, while he walked to morning mass, I turned silent narrow circles around him. The day after I spun out so gravel flew against his old Ford Fairlane, and the day after that I darted from an alley to make fun of his pee-stained pants. On day six as he trudged home from the market with one of those stupid empty sacks, I balanced on my pedals beside him calling him every name I knew. And on the seventh day, before I could get him again, Jones died.
I watched from my bike as some men in a Catholic ambulance came and packed something out of his house wrapped in a sheet. Everybody said that Jones lay inside but to me the small white lump looked like a dead dog. Then my parents and their neighbors began packing garbage from Jones’s house. Dad made me put my bike away and come help. The whole house stunk like a dirty bathroom. I stomped streams of roaches until Dad touched my shoulder, handed me a broom and said, “I’d rather you help us son by sweeping up the floor here.”
No one found a Mrs. Jones. I didn’t know how or when she’d left. At the end of the second day of cleaning, just before sunset, someone found the key to a long row of locked metal kitchen cabinets. Inside sat rows of paper sacks each stuffed with something and taped shut. A woman gasped as a man tore the taped edge off one bag and peeked inside.
It’s a casserole dish, he announced. Everyone looked at the rest of the sacks.
Why? another man asked.
To keep them clean, a woman answered.
Women wiped the counter tops and began pulling bags out to set them there. Before another man could rip open another bag, a woman appeared with scissors. She cut carefully, gently brought forth a dish. Oh my, she whispered as she took off the lid. People gathered around and looked down at an envelope addressed to my Mom. She held it up so I could see. And here, another woman hushed over the first dish. Everyone looked at Mom, and when she nodded women passed the scissors, opening each bag to free that dish’s envelope. A pile of Shirleys rose on the counter. Some women washed the table and others set the envelopes there. Dad, the neighbors, they disappeared while mom sat down and fiddled with the pile. When she noticed me watching from the arched doorway she waved me over and wrapped me in a warm arm.
What’s in the letters mom? I asked. She opened an envelope and showed me how inside the card Jones had written her name again, and just below scribbled four lines. I pointed at his smeared words. Tears, my mother said. I read the smudges to myself. What do they mean Mom? I asked. Thank you, she said, and she asked me to read another one out loud with her.
A wife for me no more
A wife like you right next door
This work, these words, late I know
The last I do before I go
In every card the same poem, every one unsigned. We read them all together. The more we read the more Mom’s pretty voice deepened like when Dad did something nice for her. I didn’t understand how that mean old man could make my mom feel good.
Finally Mom handed me the last envelope, this one addressed to me. I don’t want it, I said. Open it, Mom replied. So I read: I’m sorry I yelled at you son. You’re a good boy. Be a good man, like your dad.
Then I saw he’d signed a mangled name; oh God the same as Dad’s, the same as mine. I tried to hide my stinging tears but Mom pulled my hands around her neck, leaned into me and pressed her lips against my eyes. Then she cried these scary sounds, so long and high I thought she might die too. Her hands gripped me, those warm arms crushed me so, and her slender fingers turned in the curls of my long blond little boy hair. Then one by one Dad and the neighbors came and stood around the table holding hands, a whole neighborhood swaying and humming, weeping with one heart. Our tears fell on something holy, a man saying I’m Sorry in every single Thank You.
The day after Mr. Jones’s funeral my parents took a trip into the country, just them, up the sharp canyon edges of Greens Springs Drive. I watched the Chevy disappear down the road then, helped by my memories of them, imagined my parents inside. Dad relaxed at the wheel, his arm out the window. Mom’s back leaning into Dad’s side, her bare left foot on the seat, her other foot on the sill of the open passenger window where she touched the wind with her toes. Dad’s free arm draped down the front of Mom’s bosom, his hand patting and rubbing and resting on her hip. Mom held and stroked and squeezed Dad’s arm, her fingers slipping up his rolled sleeve to tickle and pinch him. For miles and miles they laughed and teased and talked. Together they climbed high.
That night I dreamt a dream that still comes. A wheel falls off on a high curving road. Dad crushes Mom to him as he brings his right arm up to turn the wheel. But the curve turns faster and the air can’t hold them. Dragged down by the draft of the plunging car I’m just a bird falling in frantic circles, seeing through the Chevy’s windows my parents’ faces kaleidoscope through fear, surrender, to love looking at each other. Then the canyon floor’s afire; Dad and Mom stand in flames, smiling there with Mr. Jones.
Who knows the language of dreams? I just know they come when with our habits silenced by sleep we might see something new. I woke the next morning wanting for the first time in my life to give my neighbors gifts. So I started running errands on my bike for everyone on the block. Yes, I felt guilty about how I treated Mr. Jones. But greater than guilt I felt a bit of selfish boy burning up in me, and a better boy burning on.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Noah Didn't Read Genesis
"The snake was more clever than all the wild animals the LORD God had made."
Genesis 3:1
From the book Rubes Bible Cartoons, by Leigh Rubin.
(click for enlarged image)
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Reviewing Spectrum
Spectrum / Fall 2006
This issue is worth reading. The editorial dialogue made the basic doctrinal conflicts of the Adventist Church clear. Charles Scriven was in top form and comes very close to expressing my position on biblical authority
Alexander Carpenter does a great job of editing important blog conversations.
Mary K. McLeod's poem, “Dreaming”, speaks directly to the silliness of the church's position regarding women and ordination. It's disheartening to see “Women as the Daughters of God” as the title of an article in Spectrum.
“Living on Empty” by Andrea Trusty King was a disappointment. She turned Ruth, the oasis of the Old Testament, into just another Bible story.
Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart's, “Authority and Identity”, is a beautifully written, timely history of the Adventist Church. It is fortunate indeed that the Adventist Church has attracted the attention of such outstanding historians.
As a graduate of Pacific Union College, I “got” the title, “Ten Miles from the Nearest Sin”. What would bother me most about the book is the author’s use of the words, End Time Church, instead of Adventist Church. What does Margie Sabah Schutte think is going to happen to her if she names names? She doesn’t work for the Church!
I don't know what to make of “Two Baptisms” by Gary Gilbert. I kept waiting for something to happen.
I woke up this morning with the notion of what I wanted to say to John McDowell.
Commandment
thou shall not explain
a rose
poetry
or rain
The poems that follow John's essay, “Creating the Image of God”, which includes his own poem, speak eloquently for themselves.
“The Diary of a Ministerial Intern” by Kevin Osborn is depressing in the extreme. I agree with William Noel when he answers in the affirmative, “Is Evangelism Preventing Church Growth”.
I belong to Grace Connection , a small group of Seventh-day Adventists and other Christians who meet on Sabbath afternoon in a Congregational Church. I agree with Kellner and Rowe that small groups should be the focus of “Evangelism and Witness”.
Posted by Andy Hanson at 10:53 PM 1 comments
This issue is worth reading. The editorial dialogue made the basic doctrinal conflicts of the Adventist Church clear. Charles Scriven was in top form and comes very close to expressing my position on biblical authority
Alexander Carpenter does a great job of editing important blog conversations.
Mary K. McLeod's poem, “Dreaming”, speaks directly to the silliness of the church's position regarding women and ordination. It's disheartening to see “Women as the Daughters of God” as the title of an article in Spectrum.
“Living on Empty” by Andrea Trusty King was a disappointment. She turned Ruth, the oasis of the Old Testament, into just another Bible story.
Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart's, “Authority and Identity”, is a beautifully written, timely history of the Adventist Church. It is fortunate indeed that the Adventist Church has attracted the attention of such outstanding historians.
As a graduate of Pacific Union College, I “got” the title, “Ten Miles from the Nearest Sin”. What would bother me most about the book is the author’s use of the words, End Time Church, instead of Adventist Church. What does Margie Sabah Schutte think is going to happen to her if she names names? She doesn’t work for the Church!
I don't know what to make of “Two Baptisms” by Gary Gilbert. I kept waiting for something to happen.
I woke up this morning with the notion of what I wanted to say to John McDowell.
Commandment
thou shall not explain
a rose
poetry
or rain
The poems that follow John's essay, “Creating the Image of God”, which includes his own poem, speak eloquently for themselves.
“The Diary of a Ministerial Intern” by Kevin Osborn is depressing in the extreme. I agree with William Noel when he answers in the affirmative, “Is Evangelism Preventing Church Growth”.
I belong to Grace Connection , a small group of Seventh-day Adventists and other Christians who meet on Sabbath afternoon in a Congregational Church. I agree with Kellner and Rowe that small groups should be the focus of “Evangelism and Witness”.
Posted by Andy Hanson at 10:53 PM 1 comments
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