Exactly four years ago, Jonathan and I were wrapping up our eighth month of marriage.  We were newlyweds. Our kitchen appliances still had that just-unwrapped, straight-from-the-registry shine.  Without enough furniture to fill our three-bedroom rental house, we could do occasional cartwheels in the hallways, sommersaults in the living room. 

Once, we set up a badminton net downstairs and bopped the birdie back and forth. The cats sat sentinel on the kitchen counter, their twin tails twitching, their heads bobbing in time with each volley. 

I was still attending school, making the mind-numbing commute to and from UC Davis twice a week.  We owned only one car, the Audi, and had to shuttle one another to and from work... Jon at the lab, me at Banana Republic in Stoneridge Mall.  In the evenings, we played board games, played video games, played with our cats.  Every day brought something new, an insight about eternity and sharing four walls, a shower, and a car with only one other person.

Hours in the car, hours of folding sweaters and stacking them in perfect, fluffy towers on tables, hours of homework, hours of life... the time would snake by me, so fast I couldn't always keep up. We traveled and camped and attended church and spent time with our families. Somewhere in the midst of all of that, I was overwhelmed. Where were my pretty words?  Where were my imaginings?  I was numb, unable to create something poetic for my own sake, and it scared me. I was like an amputee staring at the void where my long lost limb ought to have been. Had I missed my chance to be the author I'd long dreamed I would be?

Exactly four years ago, Jonathan built a blog for me. 

Jonathan took careful aim and leveled a firm blow with his hammer at the circumference of the hairy, brown coconut in his hand.

The crack resounded in our kitchen and made Cindy and I giggle with wonder. Jon gave the coconut a quarter turn and whacked it again.  This time, we could hear the beginnings of accomplishment in the echo. With a twinkle in his eye, Jon hoisted the coconut up to our eye level so that we could see the crack that was crawling around the equator. He set his jaw and raised the hammer one last time.

As hammer connected with shell, thin streams of clear coconut milk began to drain into the pan we'd set on the counter. Finally, the coconut split... revealing two pristine, white, concave faces.

Cindy and I had decided that a Saturday evening would the perfect time to bake a cake, and fortunately, two dear friends had gifted Jon and me with a cake-specific cookbook at Christmastime to aid in this endeavor.  But it was Jon, eager to indulge his inner Survivalist, who chose the Coconut Cake. Never mind that it was the cake on the cover of the book, enticing in its pure, fluffy white glory. Never mind that we'd not baked a thing (besides biscuits) from scratch in our lives. The chance to split open a coconut was too exciting for Jon to pass up.

So, the four of us gathered in my recently-more-frequently-cooked-in kitchen to conquer the Great White Cake. The task before us was daunting. Cindy poured the wine.

Last Sunday, my friends, my husband, and I attended our home church. We arrived in time for the lesson being taught in our Sunday School class about Old Testament prophesy. Questions arose, but went unanswered. Problems were acknowledged, but went unresolved. Then, out of nowhere, the topic of gay marriage was introduced to the room of college-age students. This could have been an uncomfortable moment for some folks anyway, but the instructor then proceeded to call for a vote... "This is a safe place to give your opinion. How many of you do not consider homosexuality to be a sin?"
 
I found the teacher's lack of foresight in initiating that conversation to be appalling.  You don't just jump into a debate on gay marriage in a room where the average age is 19, and all are assumed to be Christians, without some preparation.  And you definitely don't put people on the spot the way the teacher did to my friend, Eric and, in a secondary capacity, to my husband, Jonathan.  Jon was outraged by the whole thing and raised his hand to support Eric on that issue. Whether Jon has his own doubts about the sinfulness of homosexuality is beside the point; he would have raised his hand at that moment in support of our friend, one who had just been publically isolated, regardless.  I was proud of both of them for sticking their necks out.
 
From there, the best case scenario would have been to launch an even-handed debate on the topic, complete with prepared remarks from Eric and Jonathan and their opponents, and rounded out by the instructor's Biblical insights on the topic. Unfortunately, no one was prepared for that scenario, and so the matter was tossed haphazard into the Sunday School ring to be kicked around by the students. Those who were brave enough to state their opinions did so half-heartedly. Nothing was resolved.  What's worse, the instructor continuously referred to homosexual persons as "them," including the air quotes. He may have been kidding, but that doesn't matter. More than 20 young people left the room after that lesson confused and irritated.
 
So, I'd like to take this chance to postulate on the sensitive issue of gay marriage. If I'd had any clue that the Sunday School instructor was planning to light this match last weekend, I would have come with all of this prepared.

Seven years ago, two black boxes of souls standing sentinel over New York City were felled by cowards in commandeered planes, and America staggered.

Go ahead and scream and holler for an end to this war... 

Please, run out in the streets and chant and pump your fists in the air.... 

It's your right! 

I'll not stop you. 

Even when you ignite my country's flag in protest, something I find to be heinous and absolutely offensive, I'll step aside. 

But keep in mind that in your protest you are living proof that our guaranteed American freedoms are necessary and valuable and should be held up as a standard, nay a beacon, for the oppressed peoples of the world. 

The rabble who hijacked airliners full of men and women and children on September 11, 2001 hated me and they hated you... but more than that, they hated us.  You and me.  Your viewpoint and mine, side by side, different perhaps, but operating in parallel and out of respect.

What is this tightness at my throat?  If I was a man in a gray flannel suit, I'd wait for a particularly intense boardroom meeting and then grasp the knot of the tie at my throat and yank down, wrenching it away from me. 

But I'm no man, there's no tie, no noose.  And life, really, is grand.

Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize winner, penned a memoir entitled All Over But The Shoutin'.  Man, I loved that book.  Read it to pieces.  Cover to cover until the covers came off, tattered the way teenagers believe real love should leave you.

The stories he weaves are imperfect but impeccable.  They are songs of the South, throaty odes to football, fried chicken, even poverty.  My favorite part though, is the crimson undercurrent.  Bitterness, pride, valor, blood.  And the red bird.

As a boy, Bragg watched a red bird fling itself at the rearview mirror of a car.  Again and again, smashing its face and body into the glass until a spiderweb of cracks bloomed from the center of the mirror.  I can hear the strained sound of splitting glass, feel the heat pulsing above the blacktop like waves of water.   

Bragg turned to an old man and asked why the bird acted that way.  The old man replied, "I guess it's just its nature."

Nature is a powerful force, heavy handed.  Is there any arguing with Nature, her hands on her hips and stomping straight at you? 

I imagine the bird finally fell to the asphault, exhausted by the mission it felt was inevitable, bent on its own destruction because it knew no other way.  I hope that, after it could no longer see its reflection, it spread its bloody wings and flew away.

Sometimes I dream that bird.  I dream it, scarlet feathers and all.  I dream its passion and its fury.  And I wake from those dreams ready to sprint as far and as fast as possible from any mirror in the world. 

At first you may recoil at the sight, succumbing to the childlike fear of ghosts and ghouls and zombies, a reluctant-to-depart spirit haunting the blank, dark pockets which once housed eyes. Then you give yourself a shake. There is nothing to fear, you think, and the thought whirls in your brain, setting the synapses firing and triggering memory and emotion.

It's hard not to remember that the cranium of the object on the table once shielded a brain, too.

This is ridiculous! The thing in front of you is white, lifeless.  Ruthless and sharp, perhaps. But dead.  Very much dead. And available for study.

So, you move around the skull, taking calculated steps and copious notes. You are overwhelmed by the bones, the sheer number and intricacy of them. Parietal, Occipital, Temporal, Zygomatic.  (Zygomatic, you think, is a funny, hardcore word for "cheeks.") Or perhaps the erratic sutures that fuse the back of the skull, winding canyons in the bone, like miniature Amazons and Niles, give you a thrill.  Lamdoidal, Saggital. 

There is poetry in the orb of the skull. It is the moon rising, the round howl of the Werewolf, simplicity, the egg of conception and birth.

It's amazing what I cannot think of when my head is filled with the noise of the modern world.  Names and places and dates and descriptions which would come so easily to me on an ordinary day, cannot be coaxed or conjured between sirens and loud voices... they cower in the corners, shaking. 

It's the technology they fear.  The brightness of my LCD laptop screen, the forensic science, the elegant blood spatter, the alcohol, the senseless banter of an afternoon sitcom.  Can you blame my thoughts for curling up in the fetal position on the damp, gray floor of my brain?  The world is too much with us these days.

Edward Abbey escaped to the desert.  He watched cloud formations for days, let himself melt into the sand and the slabs of red rock until he was one of the crows, the lizards, the cacti.  When he sat down to write himself a letter (in preparation for writing his elegy to the Arches of Utah, Desert Solitaire), the simple hum of the generator was enough to disturb his thoughts.  Silence was his most effective fuel.

In a cluster of doubtful cedars, branches laden with despair, is an ink-black pool of water surrounded by obsidian stones.  When a girl on a journey stops to rest, wandering into the woods, she thanks her god for shelter and moves to take a seat.  She pauses at the poolside, the loneliest spot in the land, and looks for her reflection. 

There it is, her face, the one she hasn't seen in so long.  After all, she hasn't stopped for rest in days. 

Ground has been covered, battles have been fought and won, mysteries have been solved, questions have been answered... but her face has been left unattended, unvisited.

Leaning over the pool, she is astonished to see that her hair is knotted and tangled, has become a thicket of burs and grease.  Dirt is caked in the crevasses at the base of her neck and, yes, there behind her ears.  Her nose is sunburned and her lips are chapped.  She raises her hands to poke and prod at the sallow cheeks and thick eyebrows, grimacing at herself, but drops her arms in defeat when she sees the black residue beneath her ragged fingernails.

A friend of mine, intrigued by a minor glimpse into my complicated system of religious beliefs, recently posed some questions for me via email.  He called his questions both "quick" and "rhetorical."  They turned out to be neither.

So, I thought it would be more efficient to post my response here (rather than sending my friend a perilously long response via email and potentially having to explain all of this again someday to other interested parties).

Context:

Last night, I mentioned that I had all but blasphemed at a recent meeting of my bible study group, by saying I choose to read the Old Testament (OT) of the Christian Bible as a metaphor.  I also cited a few of my specific issues with the OT.  My friend challenged my statements in a variety of ways... and this is the response I came up with:

I do not doubt history insofar as I recognize that it has long been transcribed by the winners. The underbelly of past politics, past wars, past revolutions, ugly or not, is often exposed despite historical accounts once taken as absolute truth. That being said, I do not doubt the historical context of the Bible. Slavery, oppression, famine, and ethnic cleansing... it all happened. And it continues to happen.

What is important to remember is that the Bible is not a complete history. The focus of its content is centered on a very narrow portion of the world. While we have archeological evidence that human beings existed all over the globe during Biblical times, there are no stories outside of the Middle Eastern zone. Our culture today is global, and the well educated have no choice but to view Life through a much wider lens.

curve of tongue around the ell
dipping tone beneath the oh
sultry vibration of lips on vee
faith in the silence of invisible ee

-Audrey Camp, 2008-

There is something about school children running through dead leaves, weaving circles between trees and each other.  So much growing and so much leaving things behind.  They have no idea how quickly it will be gone, this rush of every minute being new.  They are not tired.  They do not know how to look back.  The do not feel the necessity of clinging to these beautiful, extra-long seconds.  I want to tell them.

Listen up, I would say in my most authoritative tone.  Soon you will have choices to make.  Soon your hearts will be vulnerable to rejection.  Soon you will allow your dreams to be nudged and molded by the expectations of others.  So for the moment, stop!  Stop and glimpse your own unique perfection.  Memorize the sting of a scratch on your knee, the excitement of pain, when you think that's the most you'll ever possibly hurt.  Enjoy the pulsating hollow in your chest after you careen down a grassy hill and hang, wheezing over a bench at the bottom.  Stretch.  Splash.  Scream.  But never let a sound or an emotion escape you without first cupping its flawless face in your hands and planting a kiss on its forehead.  All of this splendor cannot last, and the worst part will be forsaking it.

They would stop their spinning long enough to look me in the face, pondering what this odd, tall creature, this adult, could possibly know about life.  But then someone would snort and someone would laugh and someone else would kick the first one in the shin.  Then the noise level would escalate and the undertow of curiosity and all that is carefree would suck them back out to that airy place, that heaven of simplicity which is all they know.

spilled pearls patter on the floor
the broken strand which was once whole
trails from between her childish fingers
and the burn of shame crawls up her throat
fans out on her cheeks.

shall she drop on desperate knees
and flail her arms like one desperate and drowning
pulling the opalescent escapees into her lap
corralled to be restrung and hung
around her innocent neck?

or shall she instead
wait for the thrum of rolling beads to cease
kick the final bead or two beneath the couch
then pocket the thread and walk away
in search of something priceless to cherish?

this is circumstance
and choice and free will
dropped into the unwitting hands of a child
who only wants the pretty thing
as long as it is perfect and whole

she knows not her own power
to render that which was priceless
worthless

Tonight, my grandmother is sleeping in a hospital bed in a retirement complex where she has lived for many years.  She barely knows the names and faces of her children.  Her memories have been scrambled so that she cannot tell yesterday from her wedding day.  And every once in a while she comes up with stories of imagined love affairs and visits from relatives and friends who have long since passed on.

My Grandma Dot is one of the most interesting and intelligent women I will ever know.  Tragically, all of her knowledge, that glittering vocabulary and sharp wit, are wrapped up inside a mind which only intermittently opens to the outside world. 

What if she has more to say?

I wonder where her stories are, now that the outlet is lost.  Or perhaps the outlet is there, but her stories are affected by her juxtaposition with reality, brought on by disease, and cannot be told.  But I know she has stories, thousands of them.  When we played cards or when I painted her toenails, she was always talking.  I knew about her jewelry and her trips to Europe and her childhood friends.  She shared about the way she met and married my grandfather, a man I never had the chance to meet.  She talked about college and Catholicism and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Often I wondered how any one person could possibly earn the right to be so singularly fascinating.

How can I tell you what the hard leather felt like in my hands?  It was something I lived. 

Sucking the cold air deep into myself, holding it inside until it was warm, watching the exhale hang before my face.  And then the doors creaking open.  That hollow sound of potential energy as we filed into the gym.  Shoes squeaking on the hardwood.

I knew the ball.  The deep brown-orange, pebbled leather.  The thick veins.  It pulsed in my hand upon arrival, and I pumped it between my palms, bringing it into my body, to my chest, elbows out.  This place, this radius was mine, and I could keep it. 

Shooting guard.  Pancoast.  Number 33.  My game high was 29 points (against Cal High School, Halloween night, 1999).  I'll never forget the stretch in my tricep, the extension, the spin off my pointer finger.

But beyond the satisfaction of the shots, the swishes, was the beauty of the sport itself.

Glistening girls charging and streaking up and down the court, circling and spinning around the key.  Color.  Melodious voices, sopranos and altos, calling plays and calling to each other.  Harmony.  Hands and fingers slapping and snapping together.  Rhythm.  Whistles and applause.  Music.

The game was beautiful enough to warrant the harsh practices and the incessant running up and down the metal bleachers.

Tomorrow morning, Jonathan and I leave for the quickest of trips to Disneyland.  We're celebrating our anniversary.  Three years ago (August 14, 2004) we wound up at the alter of our church and vowed to love and support and cherish one another forever.  I cannot believe it has been three years.  And a jam-packed three years at that.  We've done so many things together and grown tremendously as people.
 

He continues to be my best friend, my biggest fan, my supporter, my confidante, my defender, my lover, my playmate, my everything.  Thankfully, our first 1000+ days have been filled with laughter and flirting and planning for a future we're striving to make great. 

However, as is always the case, the serious things that come with growing up are forever prying into our relationship and twisting through the day-to-day like the undaunted, impervious roots of weeds in our little garden.  Jobs take up 40 hours each week.  Bills come in at the beginning of each month.  Car trouble.  Cat trouble.  Scheduling conflicts.  Family commitments.  It isn't always easy to smile. 

I suppose the way we work through it is by carrying that analogy of weeds a bit further.  Every day we manage to laugh and learn and love anyway.  The lessons we take to heart are packed in and around and between the roots like dirt.  A real relationship is both of those things.  The positive and the negative.  Without dirt, no weeds can grow; but without weeds, the soil is fragile and subject to inevitable erosion and depletion. 

Jonathan and I truly want to make our marriage a success.  So, when something new or difficult comes along, we remember that it is relative to all that is fantastic in our life.  (Sometimes it takes Jonathan literally reminding me of this...)  Then, even without realizing it, the trials strengthen our bond as husband and wife.  And every joy, even the littlest one, is magnified because not everything has been easy. 

In this way we find that all things work for the good of God and His purpose.  At the end of the day, we curl up in our bed together and, in the darkness, we can easily recall and rejuvenate our childlike faith in love and our own personal fairy tale.

I am one lucky girl. 

Sunlight on brick is hottest at four in the afternoon. It bakes between the boxy shadows of the buildings on Main Street. Boys sip coke from slender-necked bottles. One of them shakes his fist, rattling the dice and tossing them down to clatter up against the wall. Two sixes. As there are no rules to this game yet, he'll come up with them later, he smiles and takes them up to roll again.

Women move slower in the heat, but they allow their hips a bit more swing. This is to catch the only breeze with their pastel skirts; catch it and let it flutter between their knees, cooling their muscular ankles. From beneath the brims of their day hats they talk the way only women can. Words like soft bubbles float between them, many at a time. To the words they nod. It could be gossip. It could be education. It could be nothing at all.

I wonder at these people, the ones who move by me without looking back. They would only see a little girl with her hair snarled into something like a braid. They might see my freckles or my chocolate brown eyes. But I doubt very much they would see me. I do not translate well into words the way they do.

One man hefts a crate of newspapers. He is the owner of the market, and those newspapers no longer possess the news. What happened this morning is long gone. In the heat of the afternoon, people do not care about anything but the baseball scores, and they'll catch those on the radio this evening. Or they can stand in the doorway of the barber shop and listen in as he gives free haircuts to the only three White Sox fans left in our town.

Mr. Charles and his wife live above the market in an apartment with only three windows. Behind the store in a planter box, Mrs. Charles keeps a very small Victory garden. When she took the train to Springfield to visit her mother for a week, I stopped by and watered the tomatoes after school. On my last day I tied a red, white and blue ribbon to the top of each plant. The plants have outgrown the ribbon now, and it's tattered, but Mrs. Charles won't untie them. She says that patriotism must be able to withstand wear.

If I take careful steps, the long kind, so I feel a pull just behind my knee but both feet are flat on the ground, it takes only thirty-two to reach the corner where my house is. The two blue stars hang in our kitchen window above Mom's white porcelain duck. One star is for my brother, Henry, and the other is for Uncle Thad. When we're sitting around the table at dinner now, since last December, Dad tells us to hold hands and then he says simple words to God. He never asks for a thing, but instead speaks what he hopes he knows. Henry is safe. Thad will be home soon. Those goddamned Nazis will lose this war.

Sometimes I don't keep my eyes closed all the way, and I see Mom wince a little when he swears. But I also see her mouthing her own prayer. She asks things, so I do, too.

Our table cloth is sky blue with little eyelet flowers. When dinner is over and everyone is gone, I help to clear the table. But I get the napkins last. The crumpled white napkins look like clouds on the blue tablecloth sky. It makes me think of Henry and his plane, the way the engine sounds like a thousand snaps being pushed closed and ripped back open all at once. His uniform looks like that sound, all snaps and razor sharp creases down his long pant legs. His picture is on the piano and his cap is cocked to one side. He is next to his plane, which looks like it is baring its teeth; and I think he looks so dashing.

But that is all I think of this war. If I think much more about it I'm afraid I'll become bitter. I could even start to stoop a little, like Mrs. Macklin does because she's always leaning in to hear the war news on the radio. Instead I skip rope and walk along the curbs like they're tightropes. On Tuesdays we go to the community center pool.

I love to swim, and Mom made me a red bathing suit that looks just like the one Betty Grable wears in her most recent movie, but I don't look at all like her. Too small in so many different ways. The boys at the pool don't look at me, but like I said before, they wouldn't see me anyway. Until last month the boys went to the pool to watch Hannah Stuart. She's the only one in our town who owns a bikini. But then she went off to be a nurse in the navy. Both of the Levi brothers enlisted that same week, but that was probably a coincidence.

Today, though, I am merely sitting on Main Street. A lady in a pink dress and a yellow hat is buying a water melon, but she seems to be having trouble picking exactly the right one. When I am older I hope I learn how to do those grown-up women things, like applying mascara or picking out melons or placing strips of cucumber by the door so the ants won't want to come in. I can't do any of that now.

What I can do is watch. I see things and know things so fast that the words just come from nowhere, from that secret spot in my brain where I never sleep. And I remember all of it. I remember the way the chalk clicked and broke in half in Ms. Silver's hand just before she dismissed our Sunday school class on that weekend before Christmas. Dad was waiting for all of us in front of the church, even though he never goes. He'd walked over and he was out of breath. He was holding Mom's hand and squeezing, and then they led us down the street like ducklings. I shuffled my feet along to make scratchy, soft-shoe music. I remember Dad sitting us down on the sofa and explaining the word infamy.

My peppermint ice cream has melted into a pink puddle in my glass. It is time to take the thirty-two steps home. But today it takes forty-seven because Able Bowers was washing his truck in the street and he tried to spray me, but even when I ran out of his reach I kept count. I try to be impeccably honest. I also try to avoid Able Bowers.

Dad is whistling 'Ain't We Got Fun' from the bathroom where he is washing his hands. When he hugs me I can smell the soap. The plate in the middle of the table is piled high with corn on the cob. It has a damp, sweet smell. I wish we could afford air conditioning. But when we take our seats and settle into the evening time, a coolness comes over us. Around our table we are safe. Dad is a rock. Mom is impenetrable. I hold hands with my little brothers, Jacob and Matt. They are so small and fair. I feel love for them pouring from my heart, all of a sudden, a reaction to the dark, fluffy tops of their heads bowed as Dad speaks. I am supposed to be praying.

Tonight I do not ask God for anything, I do not tell him what I hope is true. Tonight I say thanks. Here there simply is no war.