More on: family

  This essay will appear in Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, an anthology from Cascade Books, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. ON THE DAY of my baptism, my father stood at the back of the church—hung-over, or quite possibly drunk even at that early hour—and shouted, “Hooray for Sara!” as…

SHE’D BEEN Flying a Cessna, shooting practice take-offs and landings with a flight instructor at an Omaha airstrip that was just a windsock and one lane of unnumbered concrete runway veined with tar repairs. Richard Nixon was president, the month was September, the temperature was sixty degrees, and she was Karen Manion, mother of two.…

One morning after the crucifixion, a Sudanese boy came to see his mother and father. He found his hut burnt to the ground. Two figures dressed in white asked him, “Boy why are you weeping?” “Because,” he replied, “they have taken away my family, and I do not know where they have laid them.” The…

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. —I Corinthians 15:51 After the smell of lilies filled the tiny country church; after we drove down valleys and across mountains through winter rain and fog and dissipating snow; after the funeral director took our coats and intoned…

1. MY LIFE HAS GOTTEN so unpleasant that I have to write it down. I’ve learned that nothing makes a bit of sense to me unless I write about it, like I’m getting old and can’t remember things or can’t see straight until it’s all spelled out in front of me. But that’s ridiculous; I’m…

MY OLDER SISTER calls to tell me about him. She is upset. Not upset, but worried. She said she saw him—a guy she went to high school with, in line at the grocery store. This was in the town in which we grew up; she moved back and I moved far away, didn’t have any intention…

WE’D HEARD RUMORS of the difficulties that had befallen our neighbors, the Samsas, but we’d certainly never expected to become embroiled in their misfortune. In the five years that they occupied the flat opposite ours on Charlotte Street, while their familial habits offered us no grounds for complaint, they had held themselves conspicuously aloof from…

I TELL MY mother lies. Sometimes three or four times a day. I lie mostly about money. That I’ve sent it or that I’m just about to send it. Or that surely I will send it tomorrow. My mother waits for money like the bums waited for Godot. One day she called seventeen times. So…

On the swift cruise there was only time and water, twin mothers of an anxious son. And money. In the long end of day we pushed right at the sun and failed again except at witness, the beauty softened by mist and latitude until we could almost bear it. What else could we do? We…

It didn’t help that the boys are Jewish, and the stone angels only clumsy halfway- hoverers, not as smart as electrons, quarks, or strings that turn like dazed rubber bands in a breeze. It didn’t help that we’d walked all over Paris first. Still, the rose window entered them: a complication, a shattering of light.…