Waking up at midnight is becoming part of my life. There's no baby to feed, no cat to let out, there's no wife that's mad at me, and there's no drugs I need to take. I just wake up at midnight and remain restless for an hour. There might actually be a wife that's mad at me, but we don't talk much anymore, so I'd never know.
I did a bit of lying today. I told people I was returning to a religious life. That's not entirely true. I'm creating an entirely new entity from scraps of the old. That's not returning. That's creating.
I'm not a superstitious person, so I'm a bit resistant to admitting that I like to look for signs in life. I look for signs because, for whatever face I put forward, I have all the confidence in life that usually comes from a stuttering child with ADHD, which is to say, almost none. I hide it, though, because it's generally my conviction that fear spreads, and if I act afraid, then that might make other people wonder what makes me afraid and should they be afraid too, and so it begins to spread, whether there's actually anything to be afraid of or not.
I'm starting this new religious life being terribly honest with everyone that I am, always was, and probably always will be, agnostic. I'm not afraid to admit this. Some of the greatest Christian apologists I know of spent some time as an agnostic. C.S. Lewis famously questioned his faith deeply after the death of Joy, his wife. There's even a play about it. I was in it, at Galloway, with Brent Lefavor. Charles Darwin, one of the world's most influential atheists, was actually a believer most of his life and used his theory of evolution as proof of God, but there came a time, after a period of considerable loss and grief, that Darwin too became an agnostic.
The key here seems to be that these men became agnostic after periods where they were hit with tremendous loss and grief, often the death of a spouse, a child, or both. Everyone is hit with periods of loss and grief. It's a consequence of being emotionally open to the world. If you allow yourself to love, then you make yourself vulnerable to the loss of love, and sometimes the loss of love can come in a sequence with other events that break even the strongest of us.
You wouldn't know it to look at me, but God's been very generous to me. Perception, he gave me and empathy, and these I've rolled and baked into something I call art, both my ability to create art with words or images and my ability to appreciate art, words, images, sounds, tastes, all of it. Being empathetic and perceptive and open to loving can be very dangerous to me because, on this level of existence, nothing you love can last; sometimes, born and dying in the same day. Being open to the world like this means that sometimes periods of loss and grief come at me like waves on a California beach. I lie and tell people it broke me only once, but in truth, it's broken me again and again, and although this last time I stayed out of the water for a very long time, I'm always going to return to the beachhead. I'm back now, picking the spot on the horizon I want to swim for.
I started the day not really looking for signs at all. Today was going to be an experiment. But signs I found. The signs were that I went to Sunday School not knowing what to expect and found two of the smartest guys I ever knew from my experience at Millsaps and three of the most Christian. That's probably a very good sign.
The pastor's sermon today was about an issue I've been thinking of and worried about for some time now. When he finished, the people, the church, MY church, applauded him, even though you could tell he was a bit nervous about how we would respond. That's a sign that I have allies in places I didn't expect. That's a very good sign.
The best sign today was that I had lunch with a girl who I love more than I love most of you combined. When she was very small, I hid myself in a cave and rolled a great stone in the door. That was to be the end of me. As a result, I missed most of her growing up. That's one of my greatest regrets.
Today at lunch, she wore an aquamarine drop that I recognized. "Is that the drop your grandmother made?" I asked her. It was, she said. "I wear it all the time."
"Do you remember her at all?" I asked.
Collins was quite young when Mother died. As small as she was, she ended up getting a three-for-one deal that year. Jimmy died, then Mother died, then after my divorce followed those, I hid away from the world enough to make it almost like I died too. She told me the things she remembered about Mother, things a child would remember. Images mostly, places, feelings. Though I didn't ask, it seemed that if she could remember my mother, then she might also remember me, and although I missed so many years, I might be able to connect the thread between the love I had for the child and the love I have for the woman she became and a calm spot appears in the great ocean of loss and grief that was my entire life while she grew.
I announced to my family my intention to become a professional writer and to do it in the pretty near future. Being professional, to me, means I make enough money to live off of it. I don't care about the money that much, although who doesn't like money? at least enough to pay for lunch anyway, but I'd like to be able to say that I did this legitimately, and I did it with no help at all from my father or any benefit of my bloodline. If I can do this, if I can actually get published, actually get paid for scribbling words into a machine, then that will be something uniquely my own. Everything else I've ever tried to do, somebody will say, "Oh, I remember when your momma did this, or I remember when your daddy won an award for that, or your Uncle Boyd went to Washington because he did this:" but not writing. That will be my own. That will prove my value to the universe besides being just another third-generation heir because, quite frankly, third-generation heirs have a pretty horrible reputation, and unless I do this, I won't have done much to improve it.
I'm very likely going to write much more about agnosticism and faith and life and art and Galloway and Millsaps and Jackson. The signs are there for me to do it. Maybe I'll be able to do it in the daylight hours, so I don't have to spend what time I have left on this globe awake alone at midnight tap-tap-tapping away while everyone around me sleeps.
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