HOME

The sun is high at six in the evening as the train pulls into South Bend. For the last half hour of the ride it has raced along the tracks, across the green fields and through the trees and the little hidden rivers. As the train turns into our city we all look out on it and at the setting sun as if we’ve never seen a Walgreens, never seen a Masonic Lodge, never seen a landing strip before. We are all filled with wonder and gladness to return home.
No matter how good the trip was, no matter how enjoyable the journey to friends or place may have been there is nothing like the journey home and the walk into one’s own house. There is no relaxation like that the body takes when the feet plant themselves on the floor and seem to reach, like plant roots into the ground and draw up strength from being in this place: home.
People who have never loved their home don’t understand. People who have never been rooted to a palce cannot know what this is like. To come home and say, “New York was nice, yes. But it wasn’t South Bend. To travel to Amsterdam and say, “Well, yes, there were plenty of museums and the canals were lovely. But you can’t get two packs of Marlboros for four dollars at the Speedway gas station.”
Americans are addicted to rootlessness and in love with places they don’t belong. We are supposed to like our big cities and our individual lives and run from our families and the places that sustain us. But two days from Chicago were two days I couldn’t see the sky, and felt disconnected from the land. The neighborhoods on the North End now aren’t like the old neighborhoods, or like my neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else and everyone’s sister and mother and grandmother, where everyone is tangled together in invisible webs. Here, in my city there are buses and trains and cabs but courtesy is not simply a formality. You WILL see this cab driver again. So you’d better behave. This bus driver is your girlfriend’s cousin. So you are connected. Everything is related to everything. The woman at the cigarette shop with not charge you for what you bought today because she likes you. The librarians will wave your fines. If you ask a waitress for free dessert she will think about it a moment, and then come out with one. Money is not quite as powerful as sheer decency. On the busy streets of down town lawyers wave to you, the trolley drivers lean out their windows and shout to you. You must give to the bums because, yes… they know you. You are wholly responsible, wholly cared for, wholly a part of this city and, therefore… whole.

FIRE

I've been to Andrew's site and it always gives me hope. Or rather I should say he gives me hope because he's got that raw longing to do great things that most people think is unhealthy after eighteen. Today Andrew's article is called "A Writer?" and now that it is official and I really will be going back to school in the fall and taking many courses which are centered around the repsonibilities writers have to be communicators and builders, there are a few things I'd like to say about what I am attempting to do.

A few days ago a dear friend of mine read my novel. This is saying a lot because anyone who is a writer knows that the last people to sit down and read your work are dear friends and family. And he wrote to say what it did to him, how it affected him, and I felt blessed because that's when I realized I had finally come to the stage I wanted to reach. Even though I didn't know I was going toward that place. Not until he told me. Before I wanted to be good. I wanted people to think I was good. But it wasn't until recently that I realized that I needed to be a bard and a bard ought to be a servant. When David said he laughed a little and cried and little and even felt like an ass a little, and I realized that this is what I was doing. I don't even say trying to do, but doing. Reaching into a very real part of myself to pull out something very real for people. Something so real and hot that you might burn your fingers on it. Any of you who has read Witch's Blood for some time knows that I would love to be very, very famous and make some money and I'd like all of you, my fellow bards, to do the same. But I don't have any prractical advice along those lines. The advice I have for you is: don't settle. Don't resort to silly how-to-be-a-writer formulas. There is a force out there and inside yourselves friendly to an artists who does not settle and who strives to honor his or her gift by honoring the people around them. There is a force that keeps and upholds those who walk with the fire.

THE CREED OF SAINT THOMAS

I believe in one God, a divine mystery
Beyond all definition and rational understanding,
The heart of all that has ever existed,
That exist now, or that ever will exist.

I believe in Jesus, messenger of God’s Word,
Bringer of God’s healing, heart of God’s compassion,
Bright star in the firmament of God’s prophets, mystics, and saints.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
The life of God that is our innermost life,
The breath of God moving in our being,
The depth of God living in each of us.

I believe that I am called to be Jesus’s twin,
Allowing myself to be a vehicle of God’s love,
A source of God’s wisdom and truth,
And the instrument of God’s peace in the world.

I believe that God’s reign is here and now,
Stretched out all around us for those
With eyes to see it, hearts to receive it,
And hands to make it happen.

I believe in the community of God seekers
In all the religions, as well as outside of them,
The great prophets, mystics, and saints,
And those just beginning their spiritual journey.

I believe in a future on this earth when all
Will be God-centered and God-conscious,
When will learn to live in love and peace,
In the fellowship of brothers and sisters.

I believe that in death, life is changed,
Not taken away, and that we will go
From step to step in God’s life, God’s love,
And God’s glory for all eternity. Amen

-- Ron Miller

In driver's ed, as you take more and more exams, watch more and more movies and sit closer together with people you are tired of, eventually everyone becomes crankier and crankier. Toward the end of the thirty hours emotions, especially among the boys, are flying high. Girls tend to do a thing because it needs to be done, and their lives are hard enough as it is. Each boy is in driver's ed not because a car gets from point a to point b but because a car will make them sexy, independent, respected. They have all of next year to realize how wrong they are. Most of them came in like stags at mating season, ready to butt heads. Now they are all wearing thinly veiled looks of annoyance with each other. In America, at least, conformity is the main obsession of men ,especially very young men. And the fact that most men are really nothing alike fuels the mutual dislike hovering around this room.

Blake gets up to ask Zachary is he is gay or not. To my surprise, and this tells me how much thigns have changed since I was a teenager, Zachary says he is, and leaves it at that. In my opionion Zachary's would have done better to invest in acne treatment for him as opposed to driver's ed, but that's just my opinion. His horrible complexion isn't winning him any friends and I can tell things are hard enough for him as they are.

Adam, who is the youngest person in the room, probably, has just turned fifteen and looks like he is already too old for these people, like hiugh school is really a huge waste. I'll miss him, but in the end he's about it. I know I overanalyze. Yes, I know, but I think how there were really only five people worth knowing and I didn't get to know most of them. How it's weird that we live in a place where you can spend two weeks chumming it up with someone and then never see them again.

I remember my friend Amber from back in college: "Chris, I don't know you think I should make friends. As soon as the semester's over we'll never see them again, so what's the point?"

Amber, I'm inclined to agree with you as I ride home on the bus with all of these experiences with all of these people I shared a life and close quarters with for two weeks who I will never see again.

I have jsut come off the bus and am coming down Notre Dame Avenue when I look up and see Matt standing their in his jeans and his thin shirt walking a chocolate lab bigger than himself. He is my neighbor. For two years now I've seen him pass by my window and up my block wondering what kind of kid he was. He was one of the only ones I didn't know. A year ago he came into Sacred Heart looking sort of vacant and I allowed him into the pew where we were sitting. But I don't think I've ever heard him speak. There has always been a great gulf of me the much older and he the much younger. Today he is standing there with his dog, looking at me, waiting.

He sat across from me in driver's ed.

And I am reminded that in my field, when I star school in the fall I am like to have Adam's mother for a professor and maybe Spencer's father. And maybe the whole point of it is that you don't know what leads to what. You don't know what the B is that comes after A. You just know that here is life, and you have got to live it. Hopefully with joy, and if you do a million surprises can come your way.

Well, these last few weeks have been a gift, but an exhausting one. Now that it's over I can't imagine how I got through driver's ed. It was one hell of an ordeal. Now it's over and now i'm glad. What's left is the part I wanted, the six hours of driving where they swing up to your house when you want them to in a nice car and then drop you off and you don't have to get up at the crack of dawn.

Today I felt like it was my last day of high school. That was the longest day out of all four years. I distinctly remember hating everyone and feeling that this was the hugest waste, that I couldn't wait to get away. The last two weeks have taken me back through that place I almost forgotten and helped me deal truthfully with so much that was in the past. There were many people I liked, many I didn't. Some experiences were great, many were boring. I was often happy. Other times I was cranky beyond belief.

Above all what makes me happy is getting to be an adult again. I always preferred adulthood to any other period of life. Some people in their twenties tend to look fondly back to the womb. I never will. The best thing about all of this is getting to be a grown up again. Because i look young enough I didn't look ridiculous in driver's ed. I looked fifteen years old. And even when people knew I wasn't... well, when you're fifteen you can't see much beyond a fifteen year old's world. In that class I was fifteen. I wasn't a writer. I wasnt' a graduate student with a degree in English Literature and religious studies. I wasn't a shaman or the poet in residence of Saint James Cathedral. I wasn't the founder of Foot in the Door Press. I wasn't even anyone's friend. Because everyone else's friends went to so and so high or so and so junior high. All of my friends live in an adult world. Very little that meant anything to me could have meant anything to these kids I sat with day after day after day. In the end I felt too old, like I didn't belong. I felt as if I were doing time. And the funny thing is: that's EXACTLY how I felt in high school.