Even today, Turkish delight isn’t widely available in the U.S. I had to go all the way to France to discover that Turkish delight is a nut bomb of death disguised with a heavy dusting of confectioner’s sugar. By then, I was also old enough to have learned that C.S. Lewis, the Irish author of the Narnia chronicles, had been professor of English at Oxford University, and he’d nicknamed himself after his dead dog, Jack. He was also a theologian who’d infused the entire Narnia series with a Christian agenda aimed straight at convincing sweet, innocent children to believe in the Way and the Truth and the Life after Death for a large talking lion named Aslan. In case you’ve never noticed, “Aslan” is an anagram of “nasal,” which is another way of saying “nose,” which is to say, He who “knows” all. Oh . . . my . . . GOD. It’s a conspiracy! C.S. Lewis wrote a bunch of other books too, but those were for grownups. I’ll bet you can’t name one. Which just proves that the conspiracy theorists are correct, and God favors those who write fantasy books in His name.
“Aslan” is the Turkish word for “lion.” There is no lion meat in Turkish delight. There is no Turkish delight in the Aslan.
I read and re-read the Narnia books about a hundred times, because a set was in the library of just about every church my dad served. It was a lot. In small towns in Maine, churches are like Dunkin’ Donuts: there’s one on every corner, and they each have a membership of about a dozen. Because many of these churches were too small to support a full-time minister, some of my dad’s assignments turned him into a circuit preacher. I literally grew up in the church, but in my head, “church” was a collective set of white clapboard buildings that would have pitchers of red Kool-Aid and stale vanilla finger cookies in the kitchen refrigerators. As a little kid, I’d run around the vestry, hide in the pulpit, and stretch out and nap in the pews. Of course I knew I wasn’t supposed to, but God never reached down and smote me, even though I dared Him to. I took this as a sign He approved. The church was God’s house, but it was also my dad’s office and a building with a reliably flushing toilet. When dragged to visit the Catholics, usually because my dad had meetings with them, I’d grab a book and settle into an empty confessional. They were supposed to be locked when not in use, to prevent sinners from confessing to an empty box, but there’s that pesky road to hell separating the best of intentions from skeletons in the closet. Eventually, nuns would figure out where I was, and they always had this perplexed look on their faces, as if they couldn’t decide what I was really doing, sitting mostly in the dark with that musty old book about the Pilgrim’s progress on my lap. (Unacceptable answer: “Looking for Narnia.”)
These little escapades convinced me that nuns came with sagging stockings and wimples, which struck me as extremely appealing. I made up my mind to become one. This impulse didn’t last very long, because there was a war going on. There was also a war between the U.S. and Vietnam, and it was on the news every night.
“I’m going to become President of the United States!” I announced.
“Stop blocking the TV,” my brother complained.
“Make me,” I dared.
“Get out of the way,” my brother menaced. “Or else . . .”
“Nyah nyah!”
At which point, my baby sister would start crying, and I’d be sent to my room until my tantrum subsided. If I was the President, I reasoned darkly as I threw Barbie dolls across the room, no one could stop me from blowing up my brother. He was standing between me and my plans for world domination. To thwart me, he’d started booby-trapping the house so a loud buzzer would go off when I hit a hidden tripwire. BBBBBBBRRRRRRRGGG! Sometimes, for extra fun, the booby traps would zap me, so I’d shriek like a howler monkey and then hit the roof. He thought this was hilarious. I was not amused.
This is what happens when you have a mad scientist for an older brother. The adults admired him for being so clever, and I was ready to kill him.
It was just as well that my parents scuttled my political ambitions. I’m too short to win presidential elections. Plus, I’d never make it through vetting, because my mom’s name is wrong on the birth certificate. Being dead and all, she can’t sign a notarized affidavit stating that she’d given birth to me, no matter how many times the bureaucrats insisted that I drag her to city hall and make her deal with the paperwork. Since I don’t know any spells to raise the dead, I was left with the interesting proposition that, legally, I’m the child of a woman who didn’t exist.
With every passing year, I’m becoming more and more like her.
My father became a pastor because he’d been a Private First Class in the 9th Division of the Republic of Korea (ROK) Army, and he’d seen what the artillery fire had done to the land. The bombs ate everything green, and left nothing behind but ashes. The war was doing the same to the soldiers’ souls. My dad wasn’t a military chaplain, but he was a Christian, and soldiers who’d just lost their buddies in battle would ask him if he believed in life after death. If he did believe in the afterlife, what happens then? He responded by praying with them, and singing hymns, and studying the Bible, and resolving that he needed to deepen his understanding of God’s holy word. He followed his faith, and it brought him all the way from the Hermit Kingdom to Vacationland, USA.
Still walking on two legs, he traveled to the U.S. in order to study at a small Methodist university in Lincoln, Nebraska. Shortly after he arrived, he was invited to preach the gospel at a church in a town called Cozad. He didn’t have a car, so another student volunteered to drive him down that lonesome rural road on a frosty Sunday morning. By the time they saw the other car pulling out of an intersection that came out of nowhere, it was too late. The cars collided.
His friend escaped with a few cuts and scratches. My dad sailed out the front windshield and traveled fifty whole feet before landing. He was in a coma for a long time. When he woke up, the doctors told him he was a paraplegic, because his spinal cord was severed at the waist.
Despite the physical therapy, his legs shriveled due to muscle atrophy. He was in terrible pain. The morphine turned him into an addict. He wanted to kill himself but failed, because he couldn’t move without help. He became angry with God, protesting with rage. The hospital put him on suicide watch, and removed everything from arm’s reach that could be turned into a weapon.
He became even angrier and lost the will to live.
He was in the hospital for a year. It was a long, hard road, but eventually, for reasons that are his to tell, he made his peace with God, and now my father walks through the strength of that renewed faith. His physician said that my father’s recovery was beyond the reach of medical science, and his only explanation was some sort of divine intervention. The doctor was not a religious man. He didn’t believe in miracles, but what else was he supposed to call it? Me, I don’t think the miracle was the fact that my father regained the use of his legs, but that a young Korean man was spiritually adopted by the whitest bunch of white people that anyone could imagine in 1950s America, and they took him in, cared for him, and helped pay his medical bills. Students gave blood. Strangers pitched in. The entire community helped with his rehabilitation, as he went from mechanical bed, to wheelchair, to metal braces, to crutches, to a cane and finally to special boots that he still wears. If there was racism or bigotry in Nebraska, my father doesn’t recall it. That’s God working in mysterious ways. That, and a metal plate in his head.
He went on to study for the ministry at Boston University, where he met my mother, a Korean doctor’s daughter who’d come to BU to study nursing. She was pious, naïve, and problematically beautiful. They married in a traditional American white-dress ceremony, for she was Christian too, and carried on as stereotypical Asian graduate students. After a respectable amount of time had passed, they were blessed with my brother. He was the Only Begotten Son, a gift from the Heavenly Father, the answer to their heartfelt wishes and nightly prayers. Not only did he have all of his fingers and all of his toes, but he had an IQ so high that he was awake and aware straight out of the womb. Sort of like a cross between Chucky the Doll