I've always admired conviction.It's an impressive trait that I don't seem to have. That's why I wrote this story. I've been scared to submit it or show it to anyone, worried about how my dad would feel about the way I portrayed him. I love writing nonfiction, but it's damn scary, because it is so likely to hurt people you love, even if you're not quite sure how. I once mentioned a friend of mine in a story, but I was worried about how he'd feel about being in it, so I just kept his role minor. I just used him to connect one subject to another in the piece, and he got really angry. I couldn't understand why. Finally, he told me why. He was hurt that he'd been barely mentioned.
Nonfiction is a genre that can scar by omission. Some things that seemed like everything to me have been met with shrugs by friends and family. They don't even recall. Some story that's laughable and silly to me is hurtful, embarrassing, insulting to others. Even knowing and loving these people as I do, I can never predict what will stay with them, what will sting, what they will argue about until they're blue in the face. I guess that's what makes nonfiction so worth writing. Real-life characters are just so much more interesting and unpredictable than fictional ones.
So here's a story that sets out to be an homage to my father and his convictions. My frustrations and doubts with writing and faith and church and the people who populate churches all creep into this piece, but make no mistake: this one's about my dad, and my awe at his faith that keeps going even when I know he's as lost as I am, as scared as I am, as confused as I am. I wrote this about six months ago. Love you, Dad!
On the Seventh Day(Losing Faith)
This Sunday, my father woke up before light, let the dog outside, and laid down on the carpeted floor to stretch out his aching, aging back. He read the newspaper as he stretched, twisting and holding a position, grunting in discomfort inches from the words. He took a walk under the dawning light and rehearsed the sermon he’d prepared for that morning. Because he recites so much while walking, when he gives the actual sermon, he paces the stage, unloads the words that he has chosen, appearing unable to stop, powerless to contain this energy that has been building in him.
On Monday, I woke up to discuss Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale in class. I listened quietly as my classmates debated whether Hermione is brought back to life through magic. She waits in the wings the whole play, presumed dead and frozen in granite, until a masterful sculptor carves out her warm, blinking shape, and she steps forward to hold her long-lost daughter. But most of the class can’t help but think that she has been alive all along, simply hiding under the deceitful sculptor’s white sheet, still as stone. I only suspect that, as Shakespeare rapidly approached the end of his play, he decided suddenly to make this story into a comedy. So he put away all the props he had planned, the blood-stained cloaks, the rusting daggers, the wines laced with poison, and he invented the Oracle to be the god of his play, able to magically resurrect those long thought dead. It didn’t matter to me whether or not Hermione had been alive all along. I only cared that, in the story that Shakespeare had intended to write, Hermione would have been dead, would have stayed dead.
My friend Megan broke her toe on Tuesday, and we talked of past bruises and cuts we’d absorbed. I recalled the time I badly cut my inner thigh on the school playground. My father had walked me and my sister up there after school to play, while my mom presumably relaxed at home. I fell off a balancing bar and got a thick, bloody gash. I don’t remember seeing the wound, only looking at the scar later and recalling my father pulling me, sobbing, home in my rusting red wagon. When I wrote about it years later, I omitted my sister’s presence at the scene, not because she was a detriment to the piece I was writing, but because it would require more work to fit her in there properly. The shame of that decision has spilled over to the memory itself. Remorse still pricks me in the thought of that little red wagon when it is not trailed by my sister picking me dandelions to try to stop me from crying.
Last Wednesday, five weeks from graduation, I spoke with my father, trying to figure out how to fit writing into my career plans. He talked to me about writing sermons, his methods, and how they have changed over time. He told me how he had always loved to write for the written form on the page, to write work that stands up to the most intense scrutiny, to the most doubtful and skeptical reader. But he said he couldn’t do that anymore. “I have to write for performance,” he said with something close to shame edging into his voice. “So now, if you read it on the page, it’s childish.”
On Thursday, my film class talked about the use of soundtrack in determining the mood of a film. My professor showed a scene of Jaws, told us how the music enhanced the fear of that unseen threat, that danger lurking just beneath the surface. She told us that the same scene with that menacing fin gliding through the water became comical when combined with the Backstreet Boys playing instead of John Williams’ unnerving score. She then began showing the same scene over and over while different songs played, and it reminded me of when I used to run the sound board for the worship services at church. I would listen closely through the headphones, push and pull the dials, and turn up the reverb on the less skilled singers. I would take what I could from their raw voices and meld them together so everyone listening would believe that they were in harmony with one another.
On Friday, I woke up to find that my only class of the day was canceled, and I could stay home to work on a project for school. Sitting down to my computer, I thought of my dad, who doesn’t go in to work on Fridays. He types his sermon on the dining room table, a fan whirring up into his overheated, decade-old laptop. I remember one Friday a few years ago that, when he was done working on his sermon, he charged out to the backyard and began mowing like a mad man, speed walking from one side to the other, going over the same spots time and again. He got out a chain saw and cut down a dying tree, and then he planted five young saplings in a row along the property line. He ripped out bushes by the root because they were in the wrong spot. I remember him sitting down after with a glass of ice water, and looking out back through the kitchen window, surveying his work. It was just a mowed lawn, but he made it his metaphor.
On Saturday I wrote. I pulled out all the notebook scribbles from the week and I trimmed them or tossed them. I tore down my memory and dissected it, examining its rings, searching for scars. I read the same lines, once loud, once soft, once staring hard at the words, once with my eyes closed. I listened more closely, trying to find a way to make it all sound like harmony when it was really nothing more than a childish outline, a regret, a carefully scripted deception.
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