—It’s all ash, he told them.
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.

I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?

Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.

We brought back a Catholic prayer book from our recent visit to Southern California. It originally belonged to my husband's paternal grandmother, a woman who had six children before she developed rheumetoid arthritis. My father-in-law, the youngest, was born a few years before the Great Depression. His father was absent and his mother struggled. The prayer book is well-used, with pamphlets, prayers, and newspaper clippings inserted between the pages, like these instructions on using prayer and self-mortification to overthrow atheistic Communism. As my father-in-law pointed out, when you have six children to feed on one income during the Depression, you take whatever solace you can get, even the idea that focusing on your bodily pain can bring about the end of a godless regime. Because if there is no larger plan, no god, or if that god is powerless, then what is the point of suffering?

My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.

Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.

The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.

*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.



Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.

Tags: God, religion, College, Philosophy, Death, Atheism

J. had a freezer full of goose breasts riddled with shot. His family owned property on Broad Creek with a duck blind right against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.

He’d told me that a former tenant of the Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother were renting from their grandmother on the far side of the property, had keeled over one afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a heart attack. By the time they found the body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off half of his face. It probably started with wake-up licks that progressed to nips and then frantic biting. But J. was often full of shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the night there holding it, too nervous to walk the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the gory scene, the spiritual remains of this lonely person floating over the room.

One muddy November night, when lingering kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent the evening at the bar, drinking and picking at each other. By the time we shoveled into the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was crackling. We had a fight about something ridiculous or something deep-seated and heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun cabinet.

As I write this, I can’t believe that I did such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I can remember is me stumbling in the shabby living room of the Sugar Shack where it was cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that his face was cragged in shadow. I was hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually J. took it away and returned it to the cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next morning barely able to move, felt around for his sleeping form and remembered that he was probably hunkered down in the duck blind with his cousins.

I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.

"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker and the All Stars. Click here for a danceable, levity-producing version from the documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown. It features some of the original Motown sessions musicians and the late Gerald Levert as singer.

Image from the Washington College magazine.

Tags: love, writing prompt, Round Robin, College, hunting

Back when I was dating my opposite, the racist homophobic conservative hunter J., I was a regular reader of Gourmet magazine. I would prepare special meals for J., smoked salmon ravioli, pissalidière crisscrossed with anchovies and dotted with bitter black olives, pears braced with crystalized ginger and honey and baked to a custardy finish. J. and I had chemistry, an easily bruised love, so we each tolerated the other's differences, limped along even though he lived in another town and had very real reasons to keep me at arm's length.

I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.

Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.

Here is the original recipe, from Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.

Roasted Autumn Vegetables

1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired

In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.

Gourmet
October 1990

Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.

Tags: boyfriends, recipes, sage, DC, College, Gourmet Magazine, Roasted Autumn Vegetables, fall, autumn, cooking

Peter was only after the blender.

I was working in the college bookstore, propped up on a stool behind the register, when he came in to buy something small, a pack of gum, a used book, a cassette tape, I don’t remember. As I passed his change over the counter, brushed my fingertips across this stranger's calloused palm, Peter said “I know you from the newspaper. You told it like it was.”

A month earlier I was one of five or six people chosen to answer a question for The Elm: what did we think about the proposed student fee increase? Below my photograph was the statement “I know nothing about it. I have no opinion.” Ignorance and flat honesty prevailed. It was my statement, my stand on nothing in particular that got me the boy.

Or maybe it really was the blender. After asking my name and relationship status, Peter went straight to appliance ownership: if I had the blender, he had the basil. He knew where to score pine nuts and a fine wedge of pecorino romano. Peter wanted to come back to my place, make a little pesto.

The blender sat on the stained linoleum kitchen counter in the small college apartment I shared with my roommate Martha, right beside the coffee percolator that she filled with Folgers each morning. Martha bought it with plans for soup-making, warm vichyssoise in winter, refreshing gazpacho during the humid summer months, but in reality we used it make frozen drinks. After the Piña Colada incident the appliance went fallow, gathered cooking grease and flour dust.

Peter's basil source was a garden across the Chester River, a plot of rich soil courtesy of his employer, Anthony's Landscaping. We rode there one sticky June night, pedaled his tandem through a landscape defined by moonlight and shadow, moved our legs in time to the percussion of crickets. The basil had formed a moat around a pair of tumbledown beefsteak tomatoes. Rabbits and groundhogs had ravished the rest. As I smoothed my fingers over the soft leaves, pale in the semidarkness, the basil sighed, let out a breath of spice and earth and warm sun, a promise of pasta sauce and anise-tinged kisses.

When you are 18, most of the world is still a mystery, or it should be. I already had a boyfriend, and Peter knew it, but something about his earnestness – his habit of tossing rocks at my window for midnight bike rides, the fact that he was as aimless at 24 as I felt at 18 – made him irresistible. He was an English major whose literary mind had been muddled by deconstructionism, an Estonian-American who later taught me the best places to go in Washington, DC for Ethiopian food and the blues. Peter liked to pass things on. It was insider information: the slightly off-kilter notes of Thelonius Monk; the tuneless pounding and punk bands of d.c. space; the Biograph movie theater; linguini with pesto sauce.

His pesto obsession was endearing. And it was an obsession. In circa 1988 Chestertown, Maryland, pine nuts were an exotic foodstuff. Without a car, Peter had to finagle his way 75 miles and back to DC to procure one expensive cupful. He arrived at our place on the appointed night, clutching two bouquets of basil, a greasy paper bag half-filled with pine nuts, and a crumbling hunk of cheese. Martha and I had already peeled the garlic, purchased a good-enough olive oil. We had wiped down the blender. In the kitchen, I started grating cheese while Martha opened beers. Peter began tossing pine nuts and knobs of garlic into the machine.

The blender turned out to be an inferior pesto-making tool, or perhaps it was all in the technique. Crammed in the bottom, the garlic and pine nuts slowly turned to paste, while the basil calmly refused to be pulled into the fray. Peter finally grabbed a wooden spoon. The high-pitched whine of the blender was interrupted by a thunk as the bottom of the spoon splintered against metal blades. Too late to go back now. He picked out the shards.

Twenty minutes later, Peter offered a fingerful of the final product. Eyebrows raised in anticipation, I kept a cheerful expression, gazed past the green film coating his glasses to look directly into his eyes. The pesto tasted of garlic and more garlic interrupted by a heady nip of basil and the punch of sharp cheese. Raw pine nuts, resinous and rich, just barely kept the other ingredients in tune. As olive oil ran down my chin, I carefully deflected a splinter with my tongue, a little kick from Peter's secret ingredient.

(First image: Me, Chestertown, MD, Summer 1988, taken by "Martha." Companion picture of Martha not included. Second image: Basil plants, from Vultus Christi.)

Tags: pesto, basil, blenders, pine nuts, College, cooking, gardening, naivety , cooking mishaps

Image from Hope4Survivors

You want instant writer's block?

Try to write about your own shame.

That's not how today started. I wanted to write a story about a boyfriend I had in college, the tale of my second long term relationship. Our innocent beginnings. He was a teller in my bank, we shared smiles and pleasantries. Then one evening, when I was leaving the local watering hole with one of my male floozies, J approached me and said “I know you’re leaving with this guy, but can I call you sometime?” I gave him my number.

There was the little detail of my real boyfriend and our slowly dying couplehood. I had to put that out of its misery. It wasn’t a clean death. And when J went on a white water rafting trip with his family a month into our serious dating, I might have had a bar hookup or two. In between his return and our demise, we shared a period of sweet intense love. I loved him. I really did.

I was kind of crazy then. Angry. Pathologically needy. J was sarcastic and cruel, bitingly funny with a mean streak brought on by his quietly twisted childhood. After six months of total absorption, our relationship stalled and then limped along for another two years, with sporadic weekend visits (the margarita-inspired sex in a sprawling azalea near the Capitol grounds; the drunken knock on my door after a Redskins Super Bowl victory; my leap into the pool with the band, fully clothed, after I secretly followed J and Frieda back to his bedroom). I had a few mini-boyfriends on the sly, including one fellow philosophy major who totally trampled my heart and a graduate student who was a Jew posing as an Italian-American. Nervous about how he would be perceived in a Catholic-tinged philosophy program, the graduate student exploited his olive-toned skin and love of opera to go undercover, lived an odd temporary lie.

Still, J and I continued in our half-love without discussing the side relationships. The week I headed for graduate school, he left me a message, sang “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane,” to my answering machine, funny and bittersweet as ever. In November of that year, 1992, I found out that he’d gotten a new, serious girlfriend. After a tearful, confessional conversation, I mailed him a copy of the credit card receipt for my abortion. I’d been holding on to it for five months, waiting for the right moment to tell him.

Shame.

Ashamed of who I was and what I did. Ashamed of the abortion – the abortion. You think you can wash away shame or pain by showing it to the world, or to a limited subset of the sympathetic. Sorry, my good religious friends, my lovers of life. I let one baby happen by accident and took care of the next by violence.

By the end of my first semester in library school, I was in crisis, totally falling apart. Enter my first real attempt at therapy and my future first husband, the slow process of life rebuilding. If you are reading this, thank you future first husband, future ex-husband, for being so totally solid. I don't think I've given you enough credit for that. There is absolution in unconditional love.

I am starting to sift through the decade after the stillbirth, shining light on a dark time, preparing myself to come clean. I have wondered if the blog, my self-made public confessional, is the best way to expurgate shame. Wouldn't it be simpler to say nothing at all? Maybe finally get around to locating another trusted therapist, go the traditional recovery route? Or, if I must expose the ugliness, couldn't I just make it quick, compile a list, invite brief flagellation or accolades for my honesty and then move quickly on to self-forgiveness?

No, no, I have to transform the shame into a narrative, examine it inside and out. I need to dust if off, shine it up, put it in the shop window. Later, I'll pass it along to my fictional characters. They are waiting backstage, eager to take on the burden, ready to be set into motion. But before all that, before I can pass the torch in good conscience, I'll occasionally be picking apart my mistakes here, aiming for tricky self-forgiveness.

I hope you can stay with me for the ride, can keep an open mind and an empathetic heart. Oh, the places we’ll go!

Tags: shame, guilt, the stillbirth, secrets, College, boyfriends, love, emotional striptease

(Let's call this faction.)

The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.

Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends:  we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.

Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.

He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.

The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.

By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.

Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)

The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.

You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)

Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?

Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.

I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.

Tags: writing prompt, College, roommates, alcohol, smells, faction, date rape, Joy Division, guilt, lies, secrets

By the time the lease ran out, I was barely speaking to Joan and Alistair. I owed Alistair money – someone in a group of kids I brought home from d.c. space had landed on the coffee table in a dramatic drunken loss of consciousness, permanently bending the metal frame. Post-fall, the table sat with one leg propped up on a thick paperback, its glass top tilting slightly to the left, a reminder of my dissolute ways. I started hiding out in my room, emerging only to eat and use the bathroom. Then Joan didn’t invite me to their spring engagement party, bluntly telling me that I had to find someplace to be when Alistair's wealthy Westchester County, New York family met her working class Baltimore clan. When it was time to move, I looked only at studio apartments, determined to live alone this time.

Capitol Plaza Apartments

The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.

To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.

Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.

Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.

Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.

A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.

I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.

In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.

In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).

The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.

“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.

Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.

It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?

Tags: College, friendship, coincidence, DC, roommates, alcohol, Columbus, loneliness, isolation

Ellumbra of Smoke Signals passed this meme along some time ago and I am finally getting around to completing it! 

Instead of passing it along, I offer it up to anyone who would like to participate. 

7 FACTS about Jennifer 

1 - WORK: I was a reference librarian for about ten years, first for a state legislative agency, then for a Washington, DC think tank, and finally for the "world's greatest deliberative body." Four years of working 40-50 hour weeks in a basement paging through Congressional Records, locating report language, and watching C-SPAN with my colleagues for the laughs led to disillusionment and burnout. (Note: There is really much more to the job than that, but an exhaustive listing of what we did would bore most readers). I quit to go to culinary school. 

Took a detour to be a stay-at-home mother and freelance writer. 

2 - EDUCATION: After one false start, I received a bachelors in philosophy, a masters in library science, and a certificate from a culinary school. My first college experience was about drinking; my second, about thinking, my third, about getting a job, and my fourth about taking a chance while I still could. 

3 - FRIENDSHIP: When I do make a friend, it is generally for life (even when I am not good at keeping in touch). I’m still figuring out how to make connections as a reserved person without a traditional working life in a place I don’t know very well, since we’re still fairly new to Northern Californa. It isn’t easy, but I am getting there. I don’t need a posse, just a few confidants. 

4 - RELATIONSHIPS: My second husband and I have been married five years as of last Saturday, and have been together for ten. After a tough 2007, we’re in a good place now. Happy belated anniversary, honey! 

5 - WWW: The Internet was just taking off when I was in graduate school. I remember becoming quite engrossed in the usenet groups. Gopher -- a kind of menu-driven WWW -- was the hot technology during my first library job. It’s a totally different world now. Completely addictive, too, especially now that I am blogging. 

6 - FITNESS: Run 3x a week when I can, other exercise on the off days, walk almost everywhere. I’ve been mainly vegetarian (some fish) for 13 years and don’t see going back to eating meat. 

7 - DREAMS: One basic dream: that I make an authentic life as a writer. A better way to put it: I am living an authentic life as a writer, making the dream a reality. (Thank you to The Fearless Blog for cheerleading the idea that we must think something to make it so.)

Tags: Memes, DC, job, College, librarian, running

If I couldn't prove it, why should I believe?

There was no other conclusion. I couldn't believe in God. This wasn’t a question of whether or not he existed, but was a question of my own belief. No proof was sufficient and I had no faith, no religious background, no desire to hide behind the wimpy safety of Pascal's wager.

Shortly after I reached this conclusion, a product of a paper I wrote on God’s existence in a Philosophy 101 class, I dropped out of college. It was the middle of the second semester, sophomore year and for a while I kept it quiet, kept on accepting my father and step-mother’s checks, which were enough to cover my half of the rent. My roommate, in shaky recovery from an eating disorder, was working as a waitress. As the money dried up, she got me a job waiting tables.

It fell apart. We drank and drank, put ourselves in dangerous situations. I was moving to DC, she didn’t want to come. She slept with my longtime boyfriend, I abandoned her for an Eastern Shore boy who lived with his brother in a place called the Sugar Shack. That fall, my mother drove me and the cat to a small rowhouse in NE DC where I was renting a room. I was starting a new life as a sophomore at Catholic University.

This was the atheist’s choice? Catholic University? I was thinking of majoring in education and Catholic had a good program. The school was located in Washington, a city I wanted to live in. My decision was sealed during the interview, when my interlocuter -- Miss DC 1988! -- told me I was in. But on that first day of school, I jettisoned education for philosophy. It was the most interesting thing going.

Amy, my housemate, was 30 years old to my 20, a Peace Corps survivor. Amy counted her potatoes and onions, and even recorded the shape her peanut butter was in -- the knife slashes, the peaks and valleys and indentations -- before she put the lid on the jar. I found her tallies of produce, her vivid peanut butter descriptions, recorded in tiny script on a piece of paper hidden in the pantry. When I moved in, she had envisioned late night bull sessions with her new gal pal. What she got was an unhappy, underage semi-alcoholic, quiet and removed. She coped by counting her vegetables, a safeguard against (non-existent) theft.

I found salvation on the second day of classes, while taking notes for the History of Ancient Philosophy. N., a Basselin scholar, started up a conversation with me and his fellow Basselins joined in. They were men my age, in the seminary and on the road to priesthood, in addition to being philosophy majors on steroids. If it weren’t for N., who pulled me in, supported me, got me a job when I was desperate, and on occasion gave me food "donated" from the seminary kitchen, I’m not sure I would have survived. He was -- and is -- a good friend.

N. is happily married now, to a kind-hearted, amazing woman. They have five kids. He and his wife have accepting of me, of my quiet atheism. They approach me without judgement.

But am I still an atheist?

I don’t have faith, but I am not as slavishly devoted to proofs. For those who believe, God is real. As for me, I’ll have to be content with not knowing.

Tags: College, God, Philosophy