My father says I focus on the flesh because I already know what happens to the soul after death, and so, it bores me. But he also thinks that in a previous life, I was General George Patton. Even at age four, I thought Heaven seemed suspiciously like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz series. Now that I’m sprouting gray hairs on my head, I still don’t believe in reports of “Heaven” because I’ve yet to read one of these “I’ve been to Heaven!”-type books that isn’t describing a Renaissance painting full of white people riding unicorns. Logically, Heaven ought to be a place where humanoids are conspicuously absent, not flitting around on butterfly wings as their golden hair flutters in the wind. I don’t believe in reports of alien abductions for the same reason, because the aliens from Planet Enema always look like Steven Tyler with a shaved head. An omnipotent, omnipresent, infallible God ought to be able to do better than cough up the judging panel for American Idol to populate the infinite Universe.
If Hell, as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared, “is other people,” then all those authors who died on the table, went to Heaven, ran into grandma and grandpa, and got shoved out so they could return to Earth and tell us lesser mortals about it, are profoundly delusional. Hint: it’s not Heaven they visited.
After the funeral, I ran outside and lost myself in the woods while my parents tended to the mourners. I wasn’t some kind of feral child communing with the beetles. The basic point was to get away from humans. This would have suited my Uncle Loren just fine. He would have run away from all those soggy people too. Since he believed in Heaven, they should be glad, because his soul has achieved the perfect Eternal. Which means that all those weepers, sitting around snotting up their handkerchiefs, are mostly feeling sorry for themselves. Why? The guy in the coffin’s the one who got himself dead. You should be happy it’s not you.
Or maybe not.
We can’t talk about that. Let’s change the subject!
So I fled.
Here is the thing about my Uncle Loren that I wasn’t supposed to know: he’d been one of the loudest voices in the faction that got all riled up about the changes to the, ahem, liturgy. Deeply offended by the prospect of excessive hymn singing, he came to services because Auntie Ima made him. He sat, arms crossed and pouting in the pews. He stalked out after the services. He hated going to church when he could be comfortably napping. He scowled as he volunteered to shovel the church sidewalks. He frowned as he handed out programs to the new members at Sunday services. He glowered as he stood at the pulpit and read the extra scriptures he insisted upon choosing from Leviticus, the Old Testament book that fundamentalist Christians love, because it commands humans not to lie, spread malicious gossip, or wear cotton-polyester blends. More and more people started joining my dad’s congregation, and my Uncle Loren complained about that too, grumbling that maybe we needed to build a bigger church to hold all the new families, and what could he do to help?
In the end, he practically adopted us because he was, indeed, a good man, and Leviticus also commands: “The stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Yes, this verse is from Leviticus. It’s also from the New Testament Book of Matthew the Nice, because the Bible plagiarizes itself.
This is why my dad believes the Lord works in mysterious ways. It is also why my mother knew that the Devil does too.
Then we moved.
The Methodist Church moves its pastors around every few years. We ended up living all over the state, from the southernmost border to the northernmost expanses where the U.S. blurs into Canada. So when I say I’m from Maine, that’s about as specific as I can get. It’s also because I’m very bad at geography. Dyslexics can’t distinguish hither from yon. My other deficiencies include no sense of direction—a sense that, I will soapbox here, needs to be added to the other six (sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and ESP), then inspected and PASSED at the body factory before the manufacturer can make shipment. On top of everything else, I’m a statistical rarity: a female with color blindness. Color gives me real problems. For a long time, I had no idea I couldn’t see them, and neither did the grownups. They just thought I liked wearing mismatched socks. Eventually, I learned that the rest of the world didn’t see things like I do, and thought it normal to sort things according to their hue. What was wrong with me? The answer was simple. Frankenstein stuck Abby Normal’s rotten brain in my head. So I said: “Ixnay on the ottenray! Normal is overrated.” Atchoo!
Maine is full of interesting towns, such as Rome, Mexico, Oxford, Poland, Norway, Moscow—and, of course, Paris. It’s the globe in a nutshell, and it’s full of snow too! But our moves always took us to dying little towns with dreary names like “Brownville Junction,” not to be confused with “Brownville,” even though they’re two sides of the same town on the wrong side of the tracks. The state of Maine has a Greenville, but it’s brown too. Which makes it Maine’s version of Greenland: it’s not really green, but somebody insisted that it was, and the name stuck. In Greenland’s case, that “somebody” was a Viking named Erik the Red, who was probably blue but nobody is going to correct a very large man on the run for murdering a whole lot of non-colorblind people. I liked these drab towns where nothing much happened. I spent a lot of time staring intently at dirt, and this kept me plenty busy for years.
“Nothing” is still my best speed. It’s remarkable how much trouble a kid doing nothing can get into.
Around the age of eight, I ran across one of those lists that whittled down all the literature in the world into one hundred Great Books. I figured I should read them all and make up my own mind if they were any good, so off I trundled to the town library with my little red wagon, tracked down ten titles off my list, and hauled them to the front desk. “Hi Mrs. Lindner! I’d like to check these books out, please!” She opened up each book to the DUE DATE slip glued to the inside back cover, whacked down the stamper on the book, and sometimes, just for fun, she’d stamp my hand too. With my books piled in my wagon, I trundled back home, where I parked my books in the living room and started in on my chores. These included doing the laundry, making dinner, and pummeling my brother for control over the upright piano we were all three supposed to practice for at least an hour each day. Every once in a while, my mother would break up the fist fight and make us practice the dreaded four-handed piano pieces, which meant sitting next to my brother on the bench while my baby sister worked the pedals. At the sound of the music, my father would come out of his office, thrilled to the core at the sight of his prodigies draped on the piano as if it was an orca trained to give rides to Carnegie Hall. Then he’d turn around, go back into his office, and resume his conversations with God.
When I turned my gaze upwards, mine eyes did not behold His glory in the heavenly kingdom above. I saw the metronome parked on top of the piano, ticking like a time bomb next to the white floaty bustheads of Chopin, Beethoven, and Schubert. Mutely, they stared reproachfully at my square hands stamped with DUE DATE hitting all the wrong keys.
Tick . . . tick . . . tick. The metronome arm swung as stiffly as a pendulum in Wonderland.
One hour. Twenty minutes. Only ten minutes to go!
“Stop rushing!” my brother would howl in disgust. “You’re messing up the tempo!”
Then he’d shove me bodily off the bench and settle into the center, claiming the piano as his personal exercise equipment. Rubbing my offended bum, I’d hurtle upstairs and start sawing loudly on my violin just to drown out his interpretation of Chopin’s Mazurka in E Minor. Does he not understand the meaning of Lento, ma non troppo? We learned that years ago, I’d grumble to myself. Stupid brother!
Somewhat