Spring Hill Cemetery - Charleston, WV

To get to the old cemetery, you have to pull off the highway sharply and with gut. From the middle lane, you must reach and leap for the exit, traffic be damned. As your car dives, midway, you wonder whether you’ve missed an oncoming Walmart truck that any reasonable adult should have seen and whether, in another half second, you will realize your carelessness as you are mashed into the pavement, your personness wiped out of your body. Or maybe you’ll land and go about the rest of your afternoon with your usual nonchalance, which is, after all, how you generally spend afternoons. Suddenly, the spin of the ramp says that you’ve made it, and you hold onto that turn with every available tendon until you’ve passed through it: a revolving door into a quiet, wild place.

The road coils and climbs, steeper than you remember hills to be. Little squat houses jab into the sides like hastily placed pins that hold up a woman’s chignon for an evening. While she dances and laughs, she feels the danger that they will give a sigh and give up, letting her slippery black hair splash onto her neck.

You find a row of porched houses, hunkering together by the road -- afraid of the mountain's empty space. You peer into the windows, wondering who built them and who lives there now. This is the unfashionable side of town with a view of the city's vacant warehouses. A young man in a dirty t-shirt opens a screen door to get something out of his parked car. A satellite dish balances on the side of a porch roof. The house on the end belongs to a whimsical woman with a well-loved cat. She has wicker porch furniture and lavendar cushions and a glass and iron wind chime that she got from her friend who is an artist. You can see your mother living in a house like this.

You drive through gates and up to an office with a terracotta roof. Nobody answers the sound of you coming in, and you hear people in the back arguing over the details of a burial package.

"So, you're telling me that the only ones we can get together in the family area are between Aunt Gertie and Aunt Mildred?"

"Looks like it."

"I would die."

"I don't think that'll be a problem."

"You're impossible. This is serious. I knew I should've come myself."

"I just meant that you won't care where you are. You'll be dead. Why don't we take the papers and look them over at home. We're taking up too much of her time."

"Fine."

A well-dressed couple in their 60's come through the office. You smile a vague nice-weather-we're-having smile, and they leave quickly.

On the shelves are bound and stamped books called, “Death Book,” “Mausoleum I, II, and IV,” and “Pending Sales.” You think about asking for a map but don’t want to mark yourself as a tourist; the kind of person who seeks out her own ancestors and joins internet sites for this purpose and enshrines her findings in a scrapbook and politely tolerates the living locals.

Before you can leave, a woman comes out of the back and sizes you up as exactly this. “Can I help you, honey?” she asks.

“Well. Um. Yes. Could you tell me how old the cemetery is?”

“Well, we’ve got records dating back to 1900 or so.” She waits for you to make another demand and then asks, “You looking for someone in particular?”

“No. I was just curious.”

The woman looks at you, trying to place the kind of person who wanders around an out-of-the-way cemetery on a Monday afternoon, alone, with no people to seek out. She points to the mausoleum, which pretends to be Italian with its dome and matching terracotta roof. Above the door, a stone reads, “A.D. 1910.” She says, “The mausoleum has been here since about 1910.”

“OK.”

You stare at each other. You consider offering her an invented ancestor -- a ne'er do well who ran off with a three ring circus.

Instead, you say, “Thank you,” as if this were the very fact you needed to know.

You start up one of the asphalt roads. The oldest part comes first. It grows uphill, working its way though Christian names from 1815, when people were careful to write that they had come from England and to engrave the stones with bits of scripture in snaking script. It was important to be from somewhere, to be someone’s wife or daughter, and to leave the world with something to think about. Maybe these things are still important. You notice Civil War death dates and the font become crisp and modern in the '20s. You wander up through the steady flow of lives and deaths, though two World Wars, working your way up through the 20th Century, remembering dates and events from your history textbook, trying to place them next to these small lives.

At the top, the Catholics added their own section. An iron and bronze sign tells who assisted with the consecration of the land and which seminary students won out on the vying for this honor. At the bottom, it says the land had been "blessed and dedicated to the memory of loved ones on one of the warmest days of the year." The phrase strikes you as foolish and earnest. It mattered to someone that the day be remembered. Someone wanted to wrap the dead in the cottony air of late summer. And inside the line, you sense a joke played on the priests and their protégés as they suffered in their wool though ninety-five-degree sunshine to honor the absent and indifferent dead.

The road winds down around to the oldest part. Five men run tractors through the grass aisles, chopping through the daisies and dandelion puffs that grow ragged over the bulwarks between family plots. As fast as they cut, the weeds rebound and reclaim their places. The wild place elbows for more room.

You remember the clean-shaven ground of the cemetery back home. There, people carve places for the dead between but apart from the places for living. The dead just move across town and become drive-by sites on your commute -- wandering places for eccentrics and havens for drug-seeking kids. People come and talk to the stones and leave flowers, and a custodian keeps things. We keep our losses close, dropping by when we need to feel sad or afraid.

Here, death has been sent out and away to the hill to keep an eye on things. But before your eyes, the careless wild is taking over. The edges of the yard soften as the woods chew at them. Flat plates of leaves reach toward the fresh-mowed lanes. Weeds and seedlings sprout between headstones, pushing up past where the obelisks can reach, dwarfing them and mocking these puny man-towers.

Grasses throw themselves across the waist of a small headstone for an unnamed infant son whose life is listed in months and days the way a mother tells her baby’s age to a friendly stranger in the produce section of the grocery store. It hurts. The rain and sun suck the engraved verses out of the stones so that you can barely read them. They do not matter.

Crows and blue jays call out for their rightful piece of wood. A beaver wanders out of the bushes, evaluates the scene, and sleepy, sighs as she turns back and wraps herself in the living green to wait. She is patient. Soon, we will melt back into the hillside and be carried in earthworm gut into the nearest stream or tree or dandelion weed. Some child will pick us up, blow on our feathered seeds, and watch us fly, amazed, imagining where we will land.

You watch the men ravage the dandelion weeds with motors, knives, and poison cans. The city pays them well to fight back this life. To keep it neat, trimmed, and polite. Protecting a death that’s up and away, out of sight, keeping an eye on things. One of the men smiles. "It's a hot one today," he says. You nod. The blue jays laugh.

March Tuesday

I remember dismembering
spiral paper flakes
with a yellow pencil blade --
in secret,
flicking them
into stale air
to twist down
until they disappear
or endure
torture
into the night
shift’s plastic blue bin,
while through the window
into the morning
I plan my escape.

Are Baby Vampires Poisonous?

If you have contact with the world of 13-year-old girls and don't have some kind of debilitating nervous disorder that prevents you from absorbing information from your environment, then you must have noticed the Twilight books. For months, teen and tween girls have been giving themselves shoulder problems, carrying around these 800-page novels, ferreting them off to bedrooms to be devoured and then savored in an immediate rereading. They tape pictures of Edward, the vampire hearthrob, in their lockers, they giggle knowingly about Edward's bad-boy edge and sigh over his sweet and selfless protectiveness.

Twilight and the fan clubs surrounding it are part of a private teen girl world in which parents are awkward transgressors. Most parents don't read along with their children. They read book reviews, piece together the advice of friends and teachers, and do their best. "A teenage girl falling in love with a vampire boy and then they have vampire sex and a vampire baby who isn't really a vampire but tries against her will to kill her mother anyway? Well, at least they're reading."

I first became aware of the books when a mother of twin 12-year-old girls asked my opinion of their appropriateness. The mom's friend had recommended the books as a summer read, and then, a few weeks later, had left a frantic voicemail for the mother. "Don't let them read any more! In the 4th book, they have vampire sex! And she gets pregnant!!" What did I think? Well, I've been known to enjoy horrible teen girl entertainment. I've seen The Princess Diaries (1 and 2), Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (1 and 2), High School Musical (just 1), etc. So, committing to 2,000 pages of vampire lit didn't sound too painful.

Twilight is addicting. It's a drug that you know is beneath you. It's like crack or cheap chocolate or watching The Hills at the gym. I stayed home on a Friday night to finish New Moon then called my friend (a grown woman) to commiserate about how much more we both liked Jacob the werewolf than Edward the vampire. Jacob was kind of human and his clothes kept coming off when he morphed and, as an American Indian, he was in touch with nature and spirituality, and he was snarky and funny, and he could give her a kind of normal life with kids and a house and everything, except for the prowling the woods as a wolf thing. Way better than Edward, a cheesy piano-playing stalker who shows up unannounced and secretly watches you while you sleep and actually wants to eat you. Later that week, I overheard a fierce debate between two seventh-grade girls about just this question. It made me wonder why all of us were so wrapped up in this story. Even as we laughed at ourselves for caring, we stayed up late with the books, read them over our cereal, and cared genuinely how they would end.

Twilight stars Bella, an abnormally bland girl, who has next to no personality of her own. She's pale and quiet and a good cook but doesn't care about cooking. Her most defining feature is that she is a new student at her school who doesn't want to participate in the teen world before her. She seems to be beyond that. Bella only becomes interesting when she meets and attracts Edward, an overtly brooding and irresistible boy in her class. They fall in love. Luckily for Bella, it turns out that Edward is a sweet, perfect boyfriend... you know, underneath the vampire stuff. Bella seems to be the aggressor in their relationship, begging him to turn her into a vampire and then striking a bargain that will allow her to experience sex as a human before she changes. He's the one who insists on marriage first.

Critics have focused on the sexual messages implicit in vampire stories and figured in the author's Mormon beliefs to conclude that the books are a morality tale about premarital sex. Waiting makes it better. Some parents are troubled by the whole subject, but the truth is that all vampire stories carry implicit messages about sex. Dracula seduces his female prey, and their attraction to him kills them. So, young women, stay away from worldy, charming men.

Here's the problem with Twilight: classic vampires like Nosferatu and Dracula are sexy and dangerous. In Twilight, the danger part gets buried because Edward's love for Bella makes him able to resist his dark nature. So Bella (and we readers) ignore the danger and root for Edward to take away her life so that they can be together. Yeah, he's a vampire, but he's a vegetarian and basically a good guy, so it's OK that he does things worthy of restraining orders: sneaking into Bella's room to watch her sleep without her knowledge, asking his sister to watch Bella and then kidnap her when he has to go out of town, brooding about his lack of self-control, which beat Bella to a pulp on their wedding night. Bella forgives him for these things because it's clear that he has her best interst at heart. Yeah, I saw that Lifetime special too.

What scares me is how easy it is for us to fall for Edward and to dismiss Bella's human life. Her crippling need for Edward is more exciting than anything else in her character. At several points in the books, I was struck by phrases like, "I remembered when I'd met him -- when my life had truly begun." She can't believe that someone as wonderful as Edward would be interested in her, and neither can we. Why are we so willing to accept and even identify with a thinly disguised helpless waif of a heroine?

In Eclipse, when Edward abandons Bella (in order to protect her from life as a vampire), Bella tumbles into depression. What little spark she had brought to the story disappears, and she becomes an empty shell, going through the motions of her life. Without Edward, she doesn't matter. That is, until she meets another guy to lean on. Jacob, Bella's werewolf best friend, falls in love with her and becomes the "sun" in her otherwise dark universe. And we sigh with relief -- at least she has someone.

In the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, Bella finally puts her foot down. After the wedding, before she becomes a vampire, she becomes pregnant with Edward's half-vampire baby. The baby is taking Bella's life as it grows, starving her, breaking her bones, and eventually causing internal hemmhoraging. It's a slightly exaggerated version of real pregnancy. When Edward and his family see what's happening to Bella, they want to "get it out of her," but Bella nobly refuses, preparing to sacrifice herself for the half-vampire baby. This tendency to sacrifice self has been part of Bella all along, but it's been directed toward Edward. In the fourth book, she grows from a self-sacrificing girlfriend to a self-sacrificing wife and mother. It's the main thing that she does. Frankly, I'm disappointed. Even if Edward is willing to settle for Bella, should we? And should it bother us that tween girls do?

In The Atlantic's December issue, Caitlin Flanagan describes the private quality and developmental importance of reading to girls of this age. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires As Flanagan writes, we (girls) explore romance and sexuality by reading about them, trying on the lives of the characters that we read about and identify with. We dive into books -- all kinds of books -- with abandon and vulnerability. We still haven't caught on that the sweetest, most innocent characters will be killed off, and we're truly, honestly angry if the heroine rejects her rightful hero. I remember growling at my copy of Little Women from my airplane seat when Jo turned down Laurie. I still haven't forgiven her.

When I ask 13-year-old girls about the appeal of the Twilight books, they blush. I suppose they know that many adults don't approve of them reading about vampire sex and half-vampire babies. But then, as they describe Edward and compare him to Jacob, they come alive. They describe the rules of the vampire world with finesse and precision. When you become a vampire, you become a more beautiful and perfect version of yourself. Talents that you have as a human are magnified. Werewolves and vampires have been enemies for centuries, but they can learn how to live in peace. Half-vampire babies are really cute and powerful but not poisonous. Well, the girls aren't. The boys are.

But if you ask them to evaluate Bella's character and her relationship with Edward, they retreat with a shrug. "It's just a fantasy. It's not real."

How real is our fantasy life in our teens? What do we absorb, and what do we ignore? Are these books just froth, or do they hold some kind of poison that becomes part of us? And what does our attraction to them say about us?

Movie Review: Australia

A friend agreed to see the new Baz Lurhmann epic, Australia, with me even though she’d seen it once already. “Is it a good movie? No. Is it enjoyable? Yes,” she said. I considered her point. What makes bad movies enjoyable? What makes a movie good or bad, and which kind have I enjoyed most?

I thought back to lunchroom conversations about favorite movies. There are two ways you can go in these situations. The first strategy is to choose a well-crafted, respectable “good” film. If you choose this option, then you’re opening yourself up to the judgment of the group. Are you sitting with film noir aficionados or Tarantino fans or Scorsese snobs? Are you with a bunch of men who have annual Godfather fests? When I take the serious tack, I either go with The Wizard of Oz (it’s old enough and groundbreaking enough for its time that people usually excuse the sad truth that I’m just kind of obsessed with Dorothy’s breathy innocence) or His Girl Friday (people respect its age and its Gilmoreish banter. Plus, it lets me show off the Women Gender Studies Film Theory Fusion class I took in college, and then I seem smart). This is option one; I usually take it when I’m with people whom I assume underestimate me because of the fabulously cut top I’m wearing.

Your second option is to choose a movie that says, “My worldliness and education and wit about film give me license to go lowbrow even though we both know I can’t possible be serious because we’re both such brilliant film buffs that we ought to know better, but isn’t being childish fun on occasion?” This is kind of like a philosophy professor using a poop joke to illustrate utilitarianism. We both know better, so we wink at each other. An imaginary wink; we don’t want any of them to see.

When I choose a movie like this, I have to either smirk self-deprecatingly or describe it with grotesque enthusiasm. Legally Blonde, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Pippi Longstocking (the charmingly hideous Swedish dubbed 1969 version), The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (a made-for-TV movie starring Diane Lane as the young wife of Donald Sutherland’s sweetly deranged Confederate veteran), The Wedding Planner (I went through an inexplicable phase in high school when I watched this one every day after school while doing my French homework), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (my friends and I never tire of saying, “It’s meeeeeeeeeee”)…

The dirty secret of this category of movies that are “so bad, they’re good” is that everyone, even the most pedestrian, shimmerless personality, can play. We all know that Pippi isn’t going to win any awards, so we can all feel comfortable in our superiority over it. The even dirtier secret is that these are the films that I own on dvd and watch when I feel homesick for them. Something about their brightness and wit stays with me and needs to be relived every few years. I quote them to my best friends, and we giggle and feel safe. I don’t know of any “good” movies that do this. It’s always the movies of ill repute, the prostitute movies, confined to the chick flick ghetto. (Sorry, the Women Gender Studies Film Fusion had to come out somewhere.)

So, where does Australia fit in? Was it good? No. The opening of the film, as Nullah, an Aboriginal/White boy, narrates Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman)'s transition from England to Australia, shows some of Luhrmann’s signature cartoonish spark. Her outfits are fabulous, and her Britishness is comically over-the-top (she actually says “poppycock”). The interplay between Lady Ashley and Drover (Hugh Jackman) could be sprightly, but it quickly devolves into “look how girly the girl is” and “wow, isn’t he a typical man?” They first meet in a pub brawl, him whacking his opponent with her suitcases while she squeals and tries to collect her dusty undergarments. Then, on the way to her Outback ranch, she gushes over a leaping kangaroo, while he snickers when it’s suddenly shot before her eyes, mid-coo. I have to say that I was as horrified as Lady Ashley by this shot.

Such silliness is charming in other Luhrmann films. It’s appropriate for the burlesque theater folk of Moulin Rouge and even works as a modern day equivalent of Shakespeare’s bawdy humor in Romeo + Juliet. In Romeo+Juliet, the silliness twists into beauty when Mercutio curses Romeo on the beach with his dying breath, a storm rolling quickly in. The transition is flawless, and I don’t know any teenage girl who didn’t cry when she listened to “I’m Kissing You” on her Discman. But Australia never makes it close to the soul of its audience. We’re supposed to take the love story seriously, but there’s not enough meat to it. OK, I know they’re in love, but I don’t really believe that they are -- not even when the lovers, seemingly separated forever, see each other through gun smoke and mist.

OK, so it’s not good. It is so bad, it’s good? Well, no. The villain, a captain of the beef industry, practically cackles from his tower as he surveys his corporate kingdom, but the film doesn’t give us enough room to really bask in his evilness. There’s too much seriousish stuff distracting us. There’s the racist oppression of Nullah, his mother, and other Aboriginal people, there’s alcoholism, and there’s Lady Ashley’s spunky resistance against a monopolized Outback beef industry. There’s pretty scenery that could be breathtaking with the right camera work. And then, there’s WWII. Despite a reminder in the opening credits that Australia got hit worse than Pearl Harbor, the war, when it arrives, feels like a convenient cap to a story that plays like a Disney Channel movie where the heroine (maybe an Olsen Twin) isn’t going to let the bad guy get away with being a bad guy.

Is Australia a good movie? No. Is it so bad, it’s good? No. Is it enjoyable? Well… kind of. I left the theater inspired to incorporate ties, vests, and tweed into my work wardrobe. I was charmed by Nullah’s fragility; there’s something about a 10-year-old’s shoulder blades that tugs at the old heartstrings. His phrasing was sweet when he told Lady Ashley that he would “sing her to him,” even if his accent when he sang did make it sound like he was singing “mango, mango” instead of whatever whimsical word it was supposed to be. I’ve never been to Australia, and it looks like a beautiful place. As always, it’s a pleasure to watch Hugh Jackman for 2 hours. He’s cute. All in all, if someone invites me to see it again, I think I’d rather go to Brooks Brothers and buy some ties.

The Knotty Pine

The entrance to The Knotty Pine evades. You must search for it, having found the other bar in town to be closed. The Knotty Pine is nobody’s first choice. It’s an orange sign pasted onto another sign on a peeling wall on the side of a weary building. Beaten down Harleys wait outside for their masters. As you approach the threshold, you hang back and let the rest of the group go in first. Ahead, you hear a smoker’s voice merrily counting the women as they enter. One, two, three, four! Look at that, boys! On a Tuesday night!

You glance back across the road at the strip of woods leading back to the camp, wondering whether to risk a walk back alone. You decide not. As it turns out, your fear of the dark is stronger than your offended sensibility. You go in and creep to the end of the bar, by the mirror that somebody hung to expand the room. You hunch your shoulders and crouch down into the mess of students around you. Invisible, you talk to a square blonde girl while keeping track of the grizzled men at the far end of the bar. You order a water.

Exploding Sheep

Sheep explode at the drop of a hat. I know. I was skeptical too, but it’s very true. Last week, I rode a bus through the Scottish highlands with a bunch of Presbyterians from Ohio.

As you approach the Scottish border from England, the sheep grow more densely by the side of the road. They're like jellyfish -- brainless instinct plants them as close as possible to people. They slosh up to the motorway side of the field and stare droolingly at passers-by. Except that their eyes don't really focus on any particular thing. So they kind of stand vaguely facing the motorway, drooling on their own hooves and the shirts that their mothers laundered only this morning. It must be frustrating to be a sheep mother. At the moment when the sheep-to-fence ratio reaches saturation, our guide plays a rousing bagpipe version of "Pride of Scotland" on a boom box. He holds it up while the Ohio Presbyterians sing along.

In the highlands proper, we pay extra to be invited to visit real live sheep farm. We have been promised puppy cuddles! a chance to pet lambs! Babe the Gallant Pig!! Instead, we are treated to a view of the sinister side of sheep-kind.

The shepherd is a flannel-shirt-wearing-thirty-year-old-Scot-with-incomprehensible-accent. In America, he'd probably be a West Virginia redneck, but puppies and accents make everything more attractive. I can't understand his introduction of himself, so I decide to call him Angus. Scowling, Angus waves for the Presbyterians to gather around. Each dog has its own whistle, he tells us in a tone he would use with a kindergarten class. Not only that, but each dog has a different whistle for each sheep-herding move. You can tell who the dense ones are when Angus's whistle elicits no response. He whistles again. "Oh, for Christ sake." Growling, Angus runs toward the sheep and starts herding them himself, glaring at a slack-off dog who is determinedly not meeting his eye. I watch Angus nudge a stubborn Ewe while his dog daydreams about a day at the beach. I wonder whether it’s the dog who is dense.

Next, Angus teaches us how to sheer sheep. He disappears into a pen and emerges dragging a bundle of sewagey wool with a face. The giant clump of used Charmin walks on matchstick legs in a slanting drunkwalk as she tries to avoid the dogs. Angus flips the sheep onto her back and wrings her spine as far as it will twist. Her gut hangs, her legs splayed. You see where people get Scottish shepherd jokes. Her face looks like a separate Lego piece that’s been popped onto a too-big body by a maniacal seven-year-old. Angus explains, if you pick up a sheep around the neck and wrestle it into such a position, an exploding stomach is just a hiccough away. The Presbyterians watch him adjust his grip, all horrified concern for the sheep’s stomach.

Now, we will feed the lambs, which means I’ll get to live out my childhood dream of being Heidi and living in the Alps and having a crippled friend who gets a new lease on life and learning how to milk Swanly and Bearly. (They were goats, but who’s counting?)

Angus holds a baby bottle aloft, and speaks very slowly. “Now, you’ve got to be very careful when you feed a lamb. Once the lamb’s got through the milk, you’d better pull out the bottle. If the lamb sucks air, the air’ll wait in the stomach until later. Then, it’ll explode out and take the stomach with it. Lost 4 lambs after the last tour.” He watches us like a driver’s ed instructor who has just shown the prom night crash dummy death video. “Who’s first?” The Presbyterians glance at each other. Nobody wants an exploded lamb on her conscience, but nobody can resist a baby animal either.

Each of us cautiously takes a bottle, and Angus unleashes a mass of lambs. They’re just as sewagey as the shearing sheep was. But where she had an indolent drooling expression, each of their eyes has a homicidal gleam. They chest slam our knees and stab our feet with their hooves. One tries to eat my camera.

An old lady named Ruth is so taken aback that she doesn’t seem to hear Angus screaming at her, “THAT LAMB’S SUCKING AIR!!” The rest of us throw our bottles as far as we can and dive at Ruth. “The lamb! The lamb!” we shriek, intent on saving the murderous living dread lock. Someone snatches the bottle from Ruth, who responds by patting her hair back into place and floating calmly away from Angus.

We buy all of the souvenirs that Angus sells and then hold our breath as we re-board the bus. As we pull out onto the motorway, I watch the farm recede through the back window. At the edge of the lamb pen, amid the carnage of baby bottles, while Angus attends to scolding a lazy dog, an almost imperceptible explosion sends a flotsam of mud and wool flying into the air.

Lace Caps

I like to think of myself as a social person. 73% of the time, I refrain from telling stupid people that they're stupid or pointing out acne on the faces of stringy teenage boys. It's rare that I scowl at babies or snicker at the sweating man with a mullet whose hip is gradually laying claim to what is clearly my part of the bench on the subway.

In the car, I sometimes admire my own magnanimity while I watch Cambridge people walk by. I try to follow Atticus Finch's advice an put myself in their places. I step into their shoes to walk around in them. I imagine waking up in the morning and deciding that it would be a twinkling, sparkling stroke of brilliance to garb myself in purple burlap hammerpants for which I have paid $365 at an obscure boutique in the South of Italy where I summer. If I dress in drab enough fabrics of obscure enough origin and droopy enough drape, I might be able to conceal the fact that I grew up in a suburb of Toledo. I imagine taking the bus from Belmont to Harvard Square at 11:30 on a Wednesday morning. When the office secretary flipped my forged note onto her stack with pursed lips, and I realized with surprise that I had gotten away with it. What glory! To flip through records in the clammy basement of In Your Ear at 11:30 instead of at 3:45 while an aging, balding Clash fan glares at me from behind his counter. The light is cleaner now, and the secrets of the adult world are open to me. I wear girls' cigarette black jeans and a fedora that I wear ironically. I think.

I decide to share my depth of insight with my husband. "Don't you just love people?" I muse, leaning back and watching an embittered nanny trying to fold a blonde whining mess into a Bugaboo stroller. Smiling, my husband reminds me that I don't in fact like people. "Remember last night at the movies when you said 'I hate people?'" Yes, but that was because the 8-year-old behind me insisted on using my seat as a foot-drum while her mother chronically cleared her throat and then kept uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. Hardly a fair example.

"OK. What about that woman in your section?"

What woman? Oh yes. When Fred Buechner came to speak to our literature class about landscape and spiritual thin places, he agreed to take ten minutes of questions. Most of us sat stunned when he'd finished speaking. We were still riding on the rhythm of his language. Except for Sandy, who was always seeing immediate connections to her own life. She raised her hand. "Mr. Buechner, you talked about placed where you can see through the veil into the divine. From my work in New Orleans last year after Katrina, what do you think about when the veil is not just thinned and drawn aside, but it's actually torn?"

"I'm sorry. I don't understand," Buechner scanned the crowd for another raised hand.

"What about when the veil is not only drawn aside but torn?" Sandy persisted.

"I just don't know what you mean."

Undeterred, she sat and told the young man sitting beside her a story about her son's new baby who apparently shows signs of being quite talented.

I turn back to my husband. "I know what you mean. I try to think of her as a character out of Jane Austen. Think of the wonderful characters whom you'd hate if you met them walking around at the mall. I'm going to put a lace cap on Sandy."

"Hm. Good luck. We'll see how long that lasts. What about that guy?" He points to a 55-year-old man pulling his brand new Sebring convertible into our parking spot. The man backs out and re-aligns until it's perfect. He gets out, careful not to slam the door too hard.

"Definitely a lace cap candidate." Aren't we all sometimes?