God

I used to fear that I was a shallow person. Is it that I didn’t question serious things? Or that I didn’t question things seriously enough? OK, so how about God? Serious enough for you? I no longer believe in a God with a face, but still I wonder. Is he, or she, or it really dead? [ala Nietzsche] Would any of this make any sense at all if there wasn’t an overlord in some dimension? Maybe God is swirling energy, tiny as microscopic lightning bugs that band together in teams, whirling through matter, energizing us as we, with feline nonchalance, walk through it every day. And miss it. Because instead we ask: What will I wear? Why is it raining? And how do I feel? We go through life filling time with minutiae because it keeps the existential hollow from carving a crater in our neurotic guts. It also keeps us from hearing the universe’s discomforting message which maybe, just maybe, might be—there’s nobody here.

That’s why I like shopping. It’s instant joy. Immediate gratification. And all you have to do is pick up a sweater, slap down a credit card, and successfully avoid wondering if there is life after death. For the twelfth time that day. Like Barbie. Right? But still, even with a shopping cart full of Asian-produced goods, I question things that feel like they have universal import. For example, is a great thing swaying an electorate, marching to Selma, or stopping the use of plastic water bottles? Or is a great thing holding the veiny hand of an enfeebled mother, wiping the mud from a puppy’s paws, kissing the forehead of a feverish child, or remaining someone’s lifelong friend through thick and thin?

So, if I were going to write about God, I have to tell you the story of eight-year-old Kathleen knocking on my front door, face bordered by a navy-blue wool hood, hair flying out at the sides like a frayed corn broom. “Do you have any kids my age?” she asked. As casually as if she were asking the penny-store candy man if he had any lime Lik‘mAde. There she stood, my savior, wrapped up in that goofy hooded coat. She who kept me from a loneliness I had come to befriend.

Most of that was circumstantial. You see, because I was third in the family, I was never old enough to join in the summer neighborhood club which met under the streetlight at the edge of the alley in front of our house. “You have to be eight.” Wally, tall and blonde, blinked, then turned, dismissing me as though I were some two-year-old who needed her dirty diaper changed.

But I am an optimist by nature. So, I waited all year, accepting their rejection as though it were papal bull: seven-year-olds may not join the club. That was okay. There are rules one has to abide by. All that summer, I’d hear them outside the window, stars barely twinkling in a dusky sky. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…UP!” and their laughter would ring in my ears, sounding the future I would be a part of—next summer.

Well, guess what? The next summer, after I turned eight and the first warm, out-of-school, mosquito-riddled night came along, I joined them under the streetlight. “I’m eight now!” I can remember that my hands were down at my sides, rigid with expectancy, fingers spread out like fans. This time it was Wally’s brother Sandy who pronounced my fate with all the pomposity of the ambassador to Wales. “You have to be nine.”

So, when Kathleen showed up at my door seeking me, I couldn’t believe it. She taught me important things: like how in Ohio, they say raa-diator instead of Chicago’s ray-diator. Better than that, she gave me a name for farts which, best I can remember, my family never acknowledged. Hell, I don’t think I’d ever even farted before Kathleen came into my life. But once she did, I let ‘em rip with abandon, calling them “gas bombs” or, if we were feeling especially erudite, “gaskets.”

She saved me from my childhood isolation. She became company for my longing heart. And, oh, how she made me laugh! Maybe it was because of her that I first believed in that swirling energy which lit my life.

See? The face of God. Even with corn-broom hair. Which I now know is love.

Serious enough?