Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [44]
On August 8, 1977, I rose from a metal folding chair in the basement of the Moose Hall in Barron, Wisconsin, during the closing verse of “Close Thy Heart No More,” and committed my life to Christ. Sometimes when folks professed they rose with joyful weeping. Other times their faces would be twisted in some combination of relief and holy fear like Sam at the end of Robert Duvall’s The Apostle. But although my heart was beating high I was composed, because I had been thinking about this for a long time, and I was ready. The conversion had been under way since the day I read “The Hell-Bound Train” and gave up cussing, and was herded to its conclusion by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during a stretch when I got to reading The Revelation of St. John the Divine in bed alone at night. To paraphrase Townes Van Zandt on the blues, after Revelation, everything else is just zippity-doo-dah.
I believed, and believed fully. And when—many years later—my belief turned to doubt, I left the church the same way I came in—quietly, over time. I have no cataclysmic story to tell, no single precipitating crisis. I can summon a little residual crankiness over the usual anecdotal complaints—workers running folks off over matters of hemline and haircut, pious elders with televisions hidden in the armoire—but I would never cut it as a bitter heretic. By and large, the people I worshipped with were a humble, tolerant bunch, content to pursue quiet example over thunderous harangue. So much so, in fact, that when in my wandering I hear someone snarking on fundamentalist Christians, my first thought is, Hey—those are my people you’re talking about.
When you drift as I have, the Friends call it “losing out.” Lately I wonder if I was out before I was in, if the voice of Paul Baumer put an existential whisper in my ear, casting shadows between black and white. I wonder too what sort of self-pitying train wreck I might have become had I not been raised by two people whose daily actions transcended my dogmatic quibbles and still do. Sometimes Mom apologizes to us kids, saying she and Dad took on too much, and that we suffered as a result. She says this, and I think of all the books, and prayers before meals at the big table, and the parade we made trooping up the stairs to bed while Dad played “On Top of Old Smoky” one more time, and how cozy it was with ten of us crammed in the Volkswagen after gospel meeting on a winter night. Or how after twenty years of opening my emergency medical kit, the first thing I think of when I see that green bottle is Rya on her last night bravely beaming.
Anneliese and Amy have bundled up and gone cross-country skiing out the ridge. Two days ago we had a blizzard that laid down a thick batting of snow. The spruce tree limbs remain bent beneath daubs of white, and the wind has pushed a four-foot drift around the garage and right up to my office door. While the flakes were still dropping, Amy celebrated with repeated swan dives from the top step of the office stairwell, planting her face in the peak of the drift and chewing snow.
I can see them now from my office window, gliding back to the yard in the fading light. Amy is leading in her blue snowsuit and goggles and Anneliese coming up behind, her current state betrayed by just a hint of top-heaviness beneath all the bundling. Moments like this, when I see the two of them together at a distance, I often think of the three years of history they have on me. It’s not unsettling; it’s just one of those hiccups in perspective that can leave me momentarily disoriented. I shut my computer down and head for the house. We’ve planned an evening together, watching Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory