Mexico
When I told her I wanted to go to Mexico she said, “Mexico? Mexico? What you wanna go there for? Mexico—oh God, it’s so gross. You been to Sacramento? You been to Vegas?”
Dentist 1
He stumbled into the room, leaning heavily against the wall. His speech was slurred and he had to strain to keep his eyes open when I explained the details of my daughter’s accident. She had been running outside with her friends at a Mexican restaurant in Laguna Beach. There was a steel handrail. She didn’t see it. She ran right into it. One tooth out. Both front teeth broken. He made me repeat the part about the Mexican restaurant. I explained that we had wanted fish tacos. He slouched out of the room, bumping into the doorframe and murmuring to himself as he wandered off down the hall. It was nine in the morning, and he was either very drunk or (I surmised) had for some years been helping himself to the opiates from the medicine cabinet. Their website boasts that they have their own qualified anesthesiologist; they can provide sedation upon request. When I walked out and told the receptionist that we would not be coming back because the doctor was not sober, she feigned mild surprise—“Really? Not sober?”—and then whispered confidentially, “You could try coming back tomorrow.”
Dentist 2
Our next dentist was a pretty Iranian woman who pursed her lips sympathetically when my daughter explained how she had broken her teeth. We read the comic books and children’s magazines in the waiting room and we got her teeth repaired. She never groaned or flinched, not even once, until it was all over and the dentist gave her a mirror so she could admire her perfect teeth. Only then did she burst into tears, because she had already grown used to those ghastly tomboy fangs. Their jagged edges had become familiar, and she resented her new unblemished American teeth.
Reality
In Balboa Park in San Diego we saw the man with no arms singing country songs and playing guitar with his toes. My son whispered, “Does that man got no arms?” I nodded. He said, “Is he playing with his feet?” I nodded. Then he said doubtfully, “Is that man real?” The boy had been to Disneyland, he had been to Malibu, he had seen the film crews at Santa Monica and Altadena. He knew that in California you can never be quite certain whether or not a thing is really real.
Dentist 3
A few days later I heard her telling one of her friends: “When I grow up, I’m going to be a dentist.”
Catechesis
The day my mother turned seventeen, she went to the local Canberra police station to apply for a driver’s license. When she walked through the door in a short summer dress with a ribbon in her hair, the driving instructor looked up with interest. When she flashed him a smile and said she would like to take the driving test, he thought she was very pretty. When she batted her long lashes and said it was her birthday, he beamed at her and fumbled madly for the police camera, then took her photo and, without further ado, issued her an Australian driver’s license. It was, he told her with a sly wink, a birthday present.
And so, without so much as turning a key or operating a windscreen wiper, my mother was authorized to pilot the most dangerous piece of high-speed weaponry ever devised by the crooked mind of man: the automobile.
My mother’s older sister had saved up and bought a brand new Mini Minor, the kind all the cool kids were driving in those days. To celebrate my mother’s seventeenth birthday, they went on a road trip together to Melbourne. Now the highway from Canberra to Melbourne, if you have never made that journey, is an easy eight-hour drive that takes you through sprawling dairy country, down along the languid Murray River, and up through the hills of the Great Dividing Range. My mother being a licensed driver, her sister gave her a turn at the wheel. On a long, perfectly straight road, without another vehicle in sight, my gleeful mother held the wheel and plunged down her accelerator foot. In the passenger seat beside her, her sister closed her eyes and began to dream. The Mini Minor gathered speed. It began, ever so slightly, to wobble. My mother pushed harder on the accelerator, smiling at the charming dairy fields. When the poor little car began to shake, my mother did as any person driving for the first time might do: she accelerated a little more, and then, to compensate for all that wobbling, began to nudge the wheel from side to side—gently at first, then harder, with a certain jubilant vigor. Side to side, side to side: no doubt about it, it had been a splendid birthday. Dreamily she watched a flock of birds go by. The car was wobbling wildly now. She swerved the wheel harder and felt the accelerator go—at last!—flat to the floor.
That was how it happened that, on a long straight stretch of road, with no vehicles or obstacles of any kind for miles around, the brilliant new hundred-mile-an-hour Mini Minor found itself toppling and rolling like a rugby ball, over and over, until at last it came to rest in a wide ditch, crushed and crumpled, while my mother, breathless with exhilaration beneath a shower of glass confetti, still clasped the wheel with both hands—in fact, still rocked it back and forth with dazed but undiminished glee.
Though they now had no car and little money, the two sisters somehow made their way to Melbourne. A few nights later, at a party in the suburbs, my mother drank wine, talking loudly and laughingly about her marvelous birthday. Then, wandering alone through the house, she noticed some keys on a table and idly picked them up. She twirled the keys around her finger. She went out the front door and twirled them beneath the encouraging winks of the stars. She found the car that fit the key, a lovely red sedan, and climbed into the driver’s seat.
It was such a cool clear evening, such a perfect night for driving, my mother thought, as she turned the next corner, windows down and engine blazing. By the time she made it back to the party twenty minutes later, she had reduced her second automobile to a steaming wreck on the corner of a quiet backstreet three blocks away. She brought the keys back, discreetly placed them on the table.
I often think of that good, sweet-natured Canberra policeman who gave my mother her license for a birthday present. On the night of her birthday, I imagine the policeman lounging happily in his favorite chair at home, thinking of the girl with the dimpled smile, congratulating himself on his chivalry, never for a second imagining that he himself was, that night, the most dangerous person in the Commonwealth of Australia. For it was he who had made my mother a Driver, he who had single-handedly turned every other citizen and every vehicle for hundreds of miles into a potential victim of my mother’s birthday joy.
In the church today, are we not very much like the innocent-hearted policeman? We would like to make it as easy as possible for people to become Christians. Catechesis is too demanding; education is a bore; disciplined instruction in the Christian faith will only put them off. And so with a knowing wink we waive the requirements and sign the baptism certificate. We are charming, gallant, spiritually magnanimous. In our eagerness to make sure everybody is included, to reassure inquirers that the Christian faith is an easygoing undemanding thing, we are looking only at the dimples and the batted lashes. We forget the longer view, the screech of tires and the shriek of twisted steel and the long split-second when a windscreen becomes a million tiny diamonds in the sky. We even have the nerve to blame new converts if, some time down the road, they make a wreck of their faith.
After considering the matter carefully and objectively, I find I cannot blame my mother for the magnificent trail of automobiles left smoking in her wake: I blame the generous heart of a magnanimous policeman.
Childhood
The tiny, not the immense,
Will teach our groping eyes.
—Francis Webb, “Five Days Old”
1
Children ask questions. They appear innocent and naïve, but it is an elaborate ruse. They are involved in the deepest espionage, gathering intelligence and creating profiles on the dangerous foreign country where adults dwell.
2
When I was a little boy my mother took me into town on the bus, and as we came out of a store we happened to meet the Prime Minister. My mother always