Confessions From A Conversion Van

—for Raven

We All Live In The Same House

On the weekends I live in Cumberland, Maryland, in an old Victorian house divided into six apartments. The landlord tries to keep the place up — fresh paint, hedges trimmed — to conform to the historic Washington Street milieu. But now that the city has cut down the hundred-year-old maple out front, the rough edges are more visible: Rusty gutters. Sagging porch roof. Broken attic windows patched with cardboard. It’s a very old house. Entropy is starting to show its cracked and broken face.

Upstairs from me a new family has moved in — not replacing the old family but joining it. I don’t know how many human beings now share those four rooms, but several of them are full-of-life kids, and sometimes I feel as if I were living inside a drum. They are slowly expanding into the halls and stairwell. One morning I was checking my mail when a little girl in her pajamas, sitting on the second-to-the-top step, startled me from above.

“Are you my daddy?” she asked.

“I don’t think so, honey,” I said.

“We live in the same house,” she said, air whistling through the gap from a missing front tooth.

She was right about that. Three times already I’d had to knock on their door to tell them their music was too loud and remind them what time it was.

Monday morning on my way to work, I pass the same little girl skipping rope on the front porch while her stepfather or grandfather or uncle is talking on his cellphone. She has tan skin, somewhere between African American and Caucasian, with a hint of Asia in her eyes. I say hello and am halfway to my van, parked on the street, when I hear her call after me, “Are you somebody’s daddy?”

I take a few more steps as if I haven’t heard.

Come on. Wake up. What’s important here?

I turn back to her. “Yes, I’m somebody’s daddy,” I say. “Are you somebody’s mommy?”

She and the man laugh. They are both missing front teeth, and I’m caught off guard at how kindly their laughing faces look.

“I have a flower for you,” she calls.

It’s an hour-and-a-half drive from Cumberland to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where I teach at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. I haven’t slept well all weekend because of a recent breakup. I’m unprepared for the day, running behind, and the little girl upstairs has a flower for me. I return to the porch to accept from her a pink blossom she’s picked off a vine.

“Give it to your little girl,” she says.

“I will. I’ll do that.”

Checking my watch — I can still make it to the Bob Evans restaurant before they stop serving oatmeal — I’m on my way again, but I pause briefly, as has become my habit, at the stump where the hundred-year-old maple used to be. In autumn the tree was a most unusual mix of orange and red and yellow. One of a kind, in my experience, and in a single afternoon it was gone. Fireplace logs and sawdust. Pausing there one more time to lament what cannot be undone, I come within a whisker of tossing the flower onto the grass. My arm is cocked in the toss position before I come to. I look back at the little girl, who is looking straight at me.

Thank God you didn’t do that.

I jump onto the low stump and bow extravagantly to her. She returns my bow and laughs.

The Little Things Are Actually The Big Things

I’m making an effort to drive slowly. I had one grandfather who was dead at my age, of what we called “natural causes” back then. There comes a time when speeding doesn’t make sense, because you’re missing all the little things, and the little things are what you have left. Plus I drive a 1987 Dodge conversion van that gets only thirteen miles per gallon even when I stay below the speed limit. Idealistically I start out with the cruise control on fifty-five, but the moment comes when I push the pedal to pass a truck on a hill, and, lost in the morning news, I’m soon going eighty like the rest of the traffic.

I lose myself in Morning Edition the way some men lose themselves in sports. Lately news of the tanking economy has been downright addictive: the foreclosure of America; every day fresh defeats snatched from the jaws of victory. Even the rich are running scared. Something is wobbling here in Camelot, something deserving of my notice — or so I tell myself, as if news addiction were a kind of good citizenship. Once you’ve heard about one corrupt ship of state going down, Thoreau says (I’ll be teaching him this afternoon), you’ve heard about them all. As for the news itself, Thoreau remarks, “How much more important to know what that is which was never old!”

My addiction somewhat satisfied, and feeling cranky with myself for indulging it one more time, I turn off the radio and push in a Tara Singh cassette, as a kind of news methadone. Singh, who died three years ago, was an Emerson and Thoreau man, a lifetime devotee of spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, and a close friend of Helen Schucman, the scribe of A Course in Miracles. For many years I’ve been a student of the Course, a blend of Christianity, Eastern religion, and psychology that Schucman said was dictated to her by a divine voice, sometimes identified as Jesus. That we choose our lives, right down to the little details, is one of the Course’s major themes.

I relax my foot on the gas pedal and let the trucks pass me for a while. To wake up and see what is, Singh is saying on the tape, you’ve got to keep life simple and go slowly; the faster you go, the less clearly you see anything. “We all feel there should be peace and goodness in the world,” Singh says. “Many with good intent have become famous by holding these as ideals. But unless their own lives are at peace, they have no integrity.”

What does Singh mean by “at peace”? Is it serenity? Is that the litmus test for seeing what is, and thus knowing who you are? But I have serious doubts about New Age serenity. Smiles, peaceful words, and other outward appearances may hide the truth as easily as express it. It pleases me to remember that Singh could be cranky himself. Thoreau was plenty cranky too, according to the townsfolk of Concord, especially on that day he spent in jail for not paying the poll tax levied to bankroll the land-grab war against Mexico. So could Krishnamurti be cranky when taking questions from his audiences, impatient that they didn’t get it. Jesus must have been feeling cranky when he drove the money-changers out of the temple with a whip. Can one be cranky and “at peace” at the same time?

Helen Schucman was cranky when, in the 1960s, Jesus told her to write down the material that became A Course in Miracles. “Why me?” she asked; she was an agnostic at best. “Because you’ll do it,” the Voice said. Though she never wholly believed in the Voice, she gave it a capital V when she wrote about it, and for seven exhausting, cranky years she put everything it said down on paper.

I take it as a good sign that she wasn’t a serene person. “At peace” may mean something more like doing what you’re called to do.

Here It Is

Bob Evans is packed. Even in these troubled economic times, we the people still have money to throw around. None of us is going to get out of here for under seven or eight dollars, including tip, for a breakfast we could have made ourselves for pennies. Maybe we won’t be buying a new car every three years from now on, but we are still hungry to be served.

My usual table in the corner is the last one open, and it occurs to me that Doreen, my regular waitress, has been saving it for me. She knows the mornings I come in and where I sit, and we both look forward to our snappy exchanges. There are many single men like me sprinkled around the room, each of us taking up a whole booth or table by himself, eating a family-style breakfast, with the waitress playing the little woman.

I open the blinds as if it were my own living room, and the morning sun streams through the slats, turning dust into beams of light. When Doreen comes to take my order, she closes the blinds again, because the sun is shining in another customer’s eyes.

“It’s spring, and I can’t even look out on it?” I ask.

She laughs, thinking I’m just playing the crotchety husband to her bossy wife.

For weeks now Doreen has been glancing sideways at me as I read the Course, which looks like a Bible. This alarms her somewhat — that it looks like a Bible but isn’t.

She has reason to be alarmed. For a “Christian” text, the Course is about as far from the Bible as you can get. For example, in the Course Jesus says he didn’t condemn Judas for betraying him; the idea that he could condemn someone is a gross misinterpretation of who he was. Nor did he ever take a whip to anybody or think of anyone as swine. He suggests that the Crucifixion never happened. Fascination with the Crucifixion, the Course implies, grows out of our unconscious desire to be punished, because we see ourselves as sinful instead of as innocents who make mistakes. The Jesus in the Course can see only the good in everyone. A lot of people misunderstood him, he says, because they saw him through their own dark lens. Any behavior that appears unholy is either a cry of pain or a call for love.

I order a cup of oatmeal, one egg over easy, and whole-wheat toast. Doreen asks me, for the first time, what this book is that I’m always reading. I show her the cover: A Course in Miracles.

“Miracles by God?” she asks, her deep brown eyes glowing with suspicion.

“Who else?” I say.

“You’re going through a hard time, aren’t you, honey?” She’s seen me tear up a few times lately, missing my ex-girlfriend Raven, feeling rejected. I can’t always hide it.

“Yes, I am. And the hard time I’m going through is my life.”

She laughs. I can always make her laugh. From her apron she pulls a book of wives’ prayers for their husbands, as if she’s been waiting for the perfect opportunity to spring it on me. Doreen wears a big diamond ring and a wedding band, but from overheard bits of conversations I know that all is not perfect in her home. Another kind of foreclosure crisis.

She leaves the book with me while she attends to other customers. I read a paragraph, substituting “ego” for “Satan” and “mistake” for “sin.” I can’t look down on Doreen if I want this breakfast arrangement to work out. Now that Raven’s gone, I have to get my feminine connection where I can. See her as your sister, the Course would say. See her as trying to say what you both know but in another language. Give her every benefit of the doubt. Think of her as doing better than anyone would have the right to expect.

Doreen comes back with my oatmeal, scooting around the place as if she were on roller skates, carrying plates of food on her arms. She’ll bring the egg and toast later, so they’ll be hot when I eat them. She picks up another book I’ve brought in: Walden.

“And this guy?” she asks. “What’s he all about?”

“He lived for a couple of years by a pond, by himself, and wrote about the experience.”

“Oh, I love nature,” Doreen says. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say, and while she’s pouring my coffee, I can see several inches down the neck of her blouse. As she turns to the next table, I have the strong impulse to give her a little pat on the behind.

Thank God you didn’t do that.

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