A Country Boy Can Surmise

A couple of years ago, I was asked to give the homily for Evensong at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Paris, Kentucky. I count it among my greatest honors to have been invited by my friend, The Reverend Donavan Cain to give this talk and am glad to share it with you here today. Drawing In the Dirt In one of my favorite novels, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, her lead character, Ames, writes the following: “For me writing has always felt like praying…you feel you are with someone.” I have never identified more with a line in a piece of literature, for writing has always been my strongest connection to God. Art has been my salvation. Truly, writing saved me. I had a profound relationship with God from a very early age. On more than one occasion I was convinced that God was speaking to me. One time I remember very clearly: I was in my back yard, playing on my metal swing-set by myself. I spent lots of time alone, by choice, and ...

Good dogs are everything that humans hope to be, but never have quite achieved yet.   When I think back on all my good dogs I had when I was a boy, I can't help getting a little bit sad. There was Arky, a little obese weiner dog my aunt in Arkansas gave me.  He thought he was a big, ferocious dog, and would bare his teeth to anyone who threatened me.  He sat right beside me when I propped my back against a tree to read a summer afternoon away.  There was Fala, a white spitz I named after FDR and Eleanor's trusty dog.  Every day Fala trotted out to Hoskins' Grocery where my bus let me off. Everyone on the school bus crowded to one side so they could see him sitting there patiently awaiting my arrival.  When the bus screeched to a halt there he'd wag his tail--three thumps on the ground behind him--then jump up to walk home with me.   Those were the two I had the longest, although there were others along the way.  I miss them every single one.   And now I have other dogs,...

1.  A homeplace, left to be devoured by the ironweed.  Once, someone lived there.   A family, maybe.  They had lives and loves and sorrows and most of all, they had their own stories.  In the cool of the day they'd sit on the porch and tell big tales and flies buzzed in the kitchen and the children ran down to the creek to play and a woman with weary eyes broke beans on the porch, so used to this work that her hands didn't even think about what they were doing.  One of the children--the last one--left when he was eighteen and looked back at the little house and remembered all the good and the bad and everything in between.  He had no idea that he'd never be back there, that he'd go off and forget who he was.  He had no idea that someday nobody would remember any of them and the house would sink down and down and down until it had been completely overtaken by the wildflowers, the weeds.  He had no idea that the only thing that kept the roof from taking flight was the gat...

An especially terrible headache is as big and endless and dark as the ocean, stretched tight across the globe, middled by black white-capping waves that chop at the horizon, a largeness and darkness like death.

I love books.   I love reading them, but there is even more than that.             Touch. I love how cool the pages are when you first open them in the mornings.   Or how warm the pages are if you’ve left it out in the car for awhile in the summer, like something baked the exact right length of time.   The endpapers and the spine and the little letters that are sometimes imbedded in the cloth, a kind of Braille for book-lovers.               Smell.   The new ones: people talk about a new-car scent all the time, but what I love even more is a new-book scent.   They should make little deodorizers of that aroma to go under one’s car seats.   And the old ones:   they smell like history, and rain, and the skin of all the people who loved them before, and every room wherein they lived.               See.    Yes, of course we see them when we read them, but I love seeing them on the bookshelves, too.   Or lying about, covering every available surface, stacked on the stairs, on the night...

Holiness shows itself when you are not watching for it. Sunday, the Sabbath, the holiest day of seven holy days, I was in a car with several of my closest friends and my two daughters. Members of my given and chosen family. We had been to the top of the mountain to look out at three states. There, there, and there, we said. “Look at Kentucky, it’s the prettiest,” one of us said, laughing. “No, Virginia is,” said another. “On a clear day you can see North Carolina,” somebody else said, “and none of them can beat it.” Each state was completely the same from up there. Each state was completely different from up there. Each endless and green and lush with more mountains, rolling on and on and on, for ages. We spent a long while up at the pinnacle, talking, climbing rocks, studying trees. There were long bouts of silence. Family—especially the chosen kind—allows that between one another. Then, coming down the mountain, there was a box turtle in the road. We had all been laughing...

                                       Beauty survives, no matter what.             My grandmother has Alzheimer’s.   This evening, she didn’t recognize anyone but me, and then, five minutes after she knew me completely and totally, she was looking at me as if I were a stranger.   She was studying me and she wouldn’t admit it, but she had forgotten who I was, too.   She didn’t remember anything.               At one point she asked her age.   My aunt, Sis, told her she was eighty-two.             “What month was I born?”               “March, honey,” Sis said.               “Yeah, I was.  It was March,”   Mamaw laughed.   She closed her eyes and laughed like music, like a tinking piano.   “They used to call me Windy Wanda, because I was born in March and I never hushed talking.”             “Yeah, they did,” Sis said.   “I had plumb forgot that.”               Mamaw was lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her neck even though the pulsating heat of a late evening in...

When describing a particularly beautiful green eye we are tempted to come up with some kind of smooth simile, like "green as river water" or "green as a redbud leaf" (both of which I've used in my novels to describe green eyes).  But the fact is that there is nothing to compare to the beauty of a green eye because it is the perfection of green, a kind of green that transcends even the most brilliant things in the world such as rivers and leaves.