Last year, I sent you a letter from just past the worst summer of my life—a summer that taxed the bones, interrupted northern vacations, served burned-to-shit hospital coffee and, in its one truly benevolent moment, supplied live Springsteen like a balm.
When people ask after the state of summer 2024, I say “it’s better,” my voice curling up at the phrase’s end; not quite a question mark, certainly not a period. Let me share five scenes from a fading season.
1. On and off I-40, through New Mexico
I tuck myself into the tightest spaces, real and imagined, which line this route. Crooks of passenger seats and back-of-the-lounge beds; precious legroom around picnic tables, historic restaurant tables, really any sort of table; the few reverent steps before a statue of the Madonna and Christ-child, keeping their watch over downtown Santa Fe.
My eyes envision resting against the weathered walls of arroyos; slipping between fence gaps and into roadside villages to wait upon consoling constellations; curling into myself atop mesas where lightning and fringed rain write their poems.
I have grown tired of living outside the heart of this country, of seeing beauty and God and the stuff of life from a cautious distance. It’s summer, and I want to give myself away to wild ground, wild spaces, wild belief until I am more a part than apart.
It’s summer, and I want to give myself away to wild ground, wild spaces, wild belief until I am more a part than apart.
2. North Kansas City
Sealing the end of a long going, broaching the beginning of a long staying, my family slips inside a series of stories. At The Rabbit Hole, a children’s museum where fresh coats of paint frame gathered wonder, we sit in oversized chairs, watch constellations pass, wait to cross thresholds into carpeted rooms where someone always leaves a light on.
Scenes from Goodnight Moon and Crow Boy and Curious George and Frog and Toad gently reach over to take hold of your compass, showing you once again how it works. We always stand just a few degrees away from the real magic of living.
3. A Zoom call connecting Missouri and Alabama
Living inside a Nick Cave lyric, I labor to tell a friend about two images of God I cannot reconcile.
“I don’t believe in an interventionist God,” Cave croons over gentle jets of piano. “But I know darling that you do / But if I did I would kneel down and ask him / not to intervene when it came to you.”
I address such a dilemma, such a shapeless God, I tell her. If God is in the business of intervening, I can’t see the effort or the end. I spent this summer, and the summer before, watching other people’s lives and my own, then flirting with a very particular deism.
I don’t want to believe in an interventionist God. Not now. But if God sits back to watch and express some holy love from a remove, my truest doctrine—that everything matters—suffers, even crumbles. Maybe I cannot see God, wherever or whoever God is, I posit with something like conviction.
My friend gazes through the screen in loving incredulity, as if she’s just heard Mary Oliver deny the tall trees.
“You encounter God more than most,” she says, and I am undone by divine intervention.
My friend gazes through the screen in loving incredulity, as if she’s just heard Mary Oliver deny the tall trees.
4. Fretboard Coffee, Columbia, Missouri
I test a theory on my friend Donald. Every writer, I think, is only ever working out one problem, one passion or sentiment a thousand different ways. I wonder aloud if he agrees and what his one thing might be. I will leave it to him to tell you himself; in person or on the page, he does so with clarity and generosity
When the question inevitably comes back to me, I exhale and say, “I think I’m always testing how much weight the word sacred can bear.”
When the question inevitably comes back to me, I exhale and say, “I think I’m always testing how much weight the word sacred can bear.”
5. Cosmo Park, Columbia
My son tries to remember his routes while vinyl flags droop from his belt. And I attend the final pages of one of the year’s finest novels. Near the close of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Long Island Compromise,” a character enters the afterlife and inquires about the what and how of judgment.
“It’s not what you think it is,” someone responds. “It’s not judgment like on earth. It’s understanding. It’s the ability to look at your life and find yourself justified.”
Our eternal novice trips over the word justified, so yet another character intervenes: “It’s like forgiveness.” This sets off a pages-long reverie, a journey in reverse to see how many of a life’s mistakes and sins bear the weight of misunderstanding and trauma, of the bricks and best intentions we use to pave our paths.
And from the shaded edge of flag football practice, I really want to cry. I don’t know what to believe about what I just read. I don’t know how to put what I believe on the page anymore—the word believe itself keeps shedding its past and future tenses, belonging to the present alone.
But I long to taste forgiveness, to know where I was wrong about being wrong. And on this night, this promise—woven into a satirical novel about Judaism and capitalism—represents the best news I know.
But I long to taste forgiveness, to know where I was wrong about being wrong.
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Every writer wants to be a magician, but I’m always giving up my secrets. I sift summer scenes, these days you never lived through, in hope:
of coaxing the light, the heat, from your own summer;
of loosing memories to float before your face, wispy and true like campfire smoke.
Maybe you meet God more often than most despite your weary protests. Maybe you too are testing how much weight the word sacred can bear. Keep pressing; keep adding to the scale. It never topples.
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