About Cities I’ve Lived In: Berlin (The Berlin Wall)

The visual artist Christoph Niemann writes an art blog for the New York Times. He has recently moved to Berlin, Europe’s hippest city (which is why all the artists move there these days). Where I also happen to have been born.

(It hasn’t rubbed off on me much, obviously. To wit, in the decade and a half since it’s become Europe’s capital of cool – as the mayor likes to say, “poor but sexy” — I’ve spent maybe a total of six years there, five of which were in high school. As I write this I’m sitting at a Starbucks in a Chicago suburb. Where it’s nice and sunny. And the only hipsters I’ve seen are high schoolers whose combined slovenly outfit cost roughly $400 at Urban Outfitters.)

Anyway, I vividly remember the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, even if I was still a little kid at the time. My parents took us to the Glienicker Brücke, a famous Cold War exchange spot for spies, and we greeted the odd-looking East German cars as they slowly rolled into Free Berlin. (That’s the West, for those of you who skipped European history that day.)

I’ve noticed that a lot of people this side of the Atlantic have pretty much forgotten about the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a day that changed the world when the Soviet totalitarian tyranny — by far the most murderous regime in history — finally crumbled.

Christoph Niemann remembers that day, too. This is his artistic recounting of his experience of Berlin and the Berlin Wall. Go and have a look.

(Thanks to Steven Baird for the tip.)

Some of My Favorite Things: The Intellectual Side of Football/Soccer

You’ve all seen Monty Python’s football/soccer match of philosophers.

If you laughed, you might also like this team roster of great writers. I did.

Its only great failing is its omission of German authors. They’d normally claim the coach position and the offensive midfield.

Some of My Favorite Things: Bobinsky’s Astounding, Stu-pen-dulous & Amazing Circus

Some of you know that I am an avid reader of most things Neil Gaiman writes.

One of his books, the disturbingly scary and brilliant children’s (-ish) book Coraline has been made into a movie that will be released in the spring.

The movie was adapted and directed by Henry Selick, who also did The Nightmare Before Christmas. You can check out the movie’s website with a featurette and other fun things.

Now, one of the characters — a Russian gymnast and mouse trainer called Sergi Alexander Bobinsky, or Mr. B. for short, who lives upstairs from Coraline — has his own blog. Read the book first. Then read the blog. Rather fantastically funny.

P.S. Do NOT try his Best Beet Smoothie recipe, though.

P.P.S. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be Russian. But he’s fictional, so it’s ok.

Some of My Favorite Things: McSweeney’s Lists

Here’s something I’m slightly ashamed to admit to. I love a lot of these lists. They’re addictive, and they make me laugh my head off. Sort of like the Hamster Dance, which I had hoped by now would’ve disappeared forever as just slightly less evil than the virus in 28 Days Later, but hasn’t.

Why am I ashamed?

First, because it’s rather nerdy to enjoy any lists except the Harper’s Index, the New York Times bestseller list,  the Dow Jones index, ESPN’s college football rankings (or for the civilized, Europe’s soccer leagues), and the beer rankings at Berlin’s Bierbörse.

Second, because, while it’s an excellent and often very funny publication, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern was co-founded by Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers’ first novel was the oh-so-ironic A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was neither. Although, come to think of it, I have a signed first edition. Don’t tell anyone.

Some of My Favorite Things: The Digested Reads Podcast

John Crace over at The Guardian (a UK newspaper) reviews books old and new by condensing them into a usually uproariously funny summary version. I’m sure it occasionally rankles fans of said books to be so astutely mocked, but I found myself laughing out loud even at the podcasts about books that I’m a little less critical about than Mr. Crace.

Check it out (and subscribe via iTunes) here.

(Sensitive Christian Alert: Many of the podcasts are as explicit as the books are.)

For the Curious

Some of you know that I’m working on a novel. And some of you are waiting to read it, either because you’re one of the people whom I’ve asked for feedback, or because you’ve heard me read the first tantalizing chapters at one of the increasingly popular readings, or because I’ve promised to send you a copy when it’s done, or because you’re one of those people who wants to see whether you’re in it. (Which you’re not, but if you want to buy a copy once it’s out just to make sure, that’s fine by me.)

Well, it’s not done. But… I have a treat for you anyway. Here’s an artsy wordcloud made from the 250 most common words from the manuscript as it is now. Click on the thumbnail to see it up close. Can you guess what the novel is about?

Probably not. But I bet you can guess the names of a few major characters…

Anyway. I better get back to wrapping up the next chapter.

Harding University and Academic Freedom — A Reaction?

Whether or not this is a reaction to the uproar about the apparent censorship of Mark Elrod at Harding University for his political beliefs, I think this is good news:

Yesterday, July 16, 2008, Harding published a press release entitled “Harding student, faculty to participate in DNC”. The statement announces that Mark Elrod will be traveling to the Democratic National Convention to act as a faculty leader at the The Washington Center’s Democratic National Convention Academic Seminar in Denver Aug. 17-29. A Harding student, Rachel Gardner, will also be attending the convention and seminar series as a student leader. The press release quotes Larry Long, Harding’s Vice President of Academic Affairs, as saying:

“It seems like an ‘honors’ approach to experiential learning: putting students in a setting where they see firsthand the processes of politics, international business, finance, government, etc., and then are given guided opportunities to reflect on and respond to what they have experienced. As for the faculty, participation in Washington or at a political convention would allow a faculty member to bring back to his or her classroom firsthand experience with the material he or she is teaching. If it is good for an archaeologist to go to a dig, it should be good for a political scientist to go to a convention.”

As those of you who know me well are aware, I am a political conservative. Nevertheless, I appreciate this gesture as one of hopefully many to come that shows Harding’s commitment to political free speech as an essential part of a healthy academic culture, a culture that promotes excellence in all things, including mature political discourse. Dr. Long’s statement is a clear endorsement of such discourse as valuable and necessary for students and faculty alike.

As a Harding Honors College alumnus, it also warms my heart that the program, which Larry Long conceived and that is now headed by the remarkable Jeff Hopper, continues to show this kind of leadership on campus.

Harding University and Academic Freedom

Note: All the opinions expressed in the blog post are my own, and not that of any other individual or institution mentioned in this blog post. Likewise, I consulted none of the people mentioned in this post in advance to obtain their assent, nor did I receive their endorsement of anything I say. Accordingly, they are not to be held accountable for anything I write.

There has been some controversy recently about how my alma mater, Harding University, treats political dissent among its faculty. The occasion for that controversy has been, I think, blown far out of proportion. But the aftermath in the blogosphere has included a level of vitriol, smug self-righteousness, and plain arrogant belittling that goes far beyond what is appropriate among Christians. It is time that the Harding community thinks about who it is and how it wants to reflect its Christian identity when it comes to treating those who disagree with the (supposed) majority view in and around the school.

Quickly, the facts that are a matter of public record:

On June 20, 2008, political science professor Mark Elrod was interviewed by Rodney McCarthy, the author of the otherwise innocuous Downintheblog, about the upcoming presidential election. During that interview Mark endorsed a plethora of standard Christian positions on issues like abortion, feeding the world’s poor, and committing to peace, but also stated that he thinks gay marriage should not be something that persuades voters to vote one way or another in the upcoming election.

On June 29th 2006, the New York Times published an article about a movement among young Barack Obama supporters who aim to make the candidate more acceptable to those who have bigoted reactions to Obama’s middle name, Hussein. Mark at the time was a co-host for a Facebook group that encourages all Obama supporters to change their middle name on Facebook to Hussein on Barack Obama’s birthday, Aug. 4th. The Times quotes Mark several times in support of Barack Obama. The French newspaper Liberation has since published an article on July 5, 2008 on the same subject that also quotes Mark.

These two instances were the most recent cause for an uproar in the Harding-related blogosphere about academic freedom at Harding. Like previous moments of dissent by Mark – such as one last year when he had argued that while abortion is immoral and a tragedy, it should not be the one main consideration in picking whom to vote for during elections if none of the candidates is actually going to do anything about it – some members of the wider Harding community did not take up their disagreement with Mark, but instead turned to the Harding administration. In essence, they stated to the administration that they would not tolerate a Harding faculty member who holds such opinions, that they think Mark should be fired for expressing beliefs they do not share, and, in some cases, that they would otherwise cease donating money to Harding.

As a result, the administration asked Mark to re-affirm that he identifies with Harding’s Christian values and with its mission, which he has done. The administration informed Mark that his public association with Barack Obama posed a problem because Obama is a Democrat, and asked Mark to disassociate himself from the Facebook group that the New York Times interviewed him about with the following statement:

“Due to unanticipated publicity directed toward Harding University that was generated by my association with the ‘My Middle Name is “Hussein” Too’ event on Facebook, I am no longer involved in it.”

Moreover, the administration informed Mark that his blog was drawing too much outraged attention from the donor community. Mark reacted by making his blog private on July 9th.

In the ensuing discussions, the question has repeatedly come up whether it is healthy for Harding to stifle even mild political dissent because some donors and alumni decide to be offended by it. The question has been framed as one about academic freedom. Basically, one side has argued that Harding is a politically and academically monolithic community, that Mark was stupid to think for himself and expect to get away with saying what he thought publicly, and that Mark should be made to conform or else be made to leave. The other side has argued that this is a case where Harding has not lived up to its responsibilities as a Christian academic institution, responsibilities that include insisting that all sides of the truth be told about any issue and that charity be extended to minds entrusted to the college by protecting minority voices on campus rather than aiding those who harry them.

I do not want to place too much weight on a moment that Mark may wish should pass as quickly and painlessly as possible, but I do think that some significant assumptions have been in play in this conversation that really ought to be reconsidered by all those who, like myself, care about Harding University, and who wish to see it prosper as a respectable academic institution in the future. After all, as alumni, it is in our future whether we want it there or not – our degrees from Harding mean we have no choice but to care what happens there.

False Assumption Number One: Harding is a Republican College

Harding’s declared motto is “developing Christian servants.”

Harding’s mission does not specify a political affiliation. In fact, the majority of the Harding community has switched political allegiance over the years from one party to another. The campus was majority Democrat until the demise of the last Dixiecrats in the 1970s, and it was only when the Republican Party decided that one expedient way to win elections was to pay lip service to Southern conservatives that much of the Harding community shifted to the GOP.

I think it is safe to say that this lack of party affiliation stems from the fact that the Harding administration is wise enough to know that political parties’ main interest is in power, that politicians will change their tune to appeal to the most voters no matter what it takes, and that it would be immoral to yoke a college interested in Christian teachings to any group that pursues worldly goals – especially in a field as explicitly mercenary as partisan politics.

Of course, that does not mean that feelings about whom to vote for haven’t often been passionately held at Harding. Harding does declare a religious affiliation to the Churches of Christ, and that means that most of its administrators, faculty, and students come from the same demographic that also tends to make up the Churches of Christ. That demographic is Southern, lower middle class, and socially conservative. As a result, the secular attitudes that this demographic holds have often also been the predominant ones on campus, and they have been frequently discussed as if they were the same as spiritual values. But nowhere is upholding certain social and fiscal politics stated as part of Harding’s mission.

Presumably, this is so because those secular attitudes are subject to change while Christian values are eternal. History shows us this very clearly. Christians who are part of the Churches of Christ have themselves altered their political stance drastically on important issues over the last century alone. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, Churches of Christ leaders urged their congregations to turn away from patriotism, voting, or any other civic involvement because their allegiance was to the Kingdom of God; now, Churches of Christ are among the most fervent believers in Christian political activism. The Churches of Christ were majority pacifist until World War II; now, they are among the denominations with the highest percentages of veterans and military chaplains. Churches of Christ were one of the last denominations to desegregate; now, they would be shocked to hear most of their grandparents were opposed to it.

Desegregation is a good example of how the conflict between spiritual values and secular attitudes played out at Harding in the past, and how the two were often falsely treated to be the same thing. Until his retirement in 1965, Harding president George Benson insisted that Harding remain segregated. His reasons were two. The first was that while perhaps he wouldn’t go so far as others and claim that African Americans had no souls and were the eternally damned sons of Ham, God did not intend for different tribes to mix and so it would be unbiblical to have black students sit next to white students in classrooms. When the student body overwhelmingly asked for the school to be desegregated in 1957, Benson interrupted the chapel service to announce that “The redbirds, the bluebirds, the blackbirds, they don’t mix and mingle together, young people!” (I’m not making this up; copies of his speeches on the matter are in the archives of the Brackett Library). His second reason was that he thought conservative donors would stop giving money to Harding if he desegregated the school. It took the new Ganus administration less than a year in office to make Harding the last Church of Christ school to integrate, without any repercussions of divine ire or bankruptcy due to donor flight.

What was a political issue people felt strongly about and muddled with their Christian beliefs had faded away. Harding’s Christian convictions prevailed over the political leanings a majority held – because of a courageous president who was not afraid to have the necessary conversations about the evil of racism.

I don’t mean to suggest that history will vindicate Mark’s political positions; it may or may not do that. What I am pointing out is that when Harding is at its best, it has a history of upholding eternal values over the social and political attitudes of those who shout the loudest, because the eternal values matter more. Harding’s commitment is not to a political party or to conservative social attitudes; Harding’s commitment is to truth. Harding should be proud of that heritage, and should be unafraid to encourage constructive dissent in order to become aware of its own blind spots and in order to challenge all sides of a given argument to refine their arguments so that the truth can prevail.

Nor is Harding politically homogeneous now. While the majority of students and faculty at Harding tend to be political and fiscal conservatives, not all of them vote Republican. At least one VP and at least two deans are outspokenly Democratic-leaning, and so is a sizable, if not very vocal, proportion of the faculty and administrative staff. This is both healthy and in line with Harding’s commitment to loving others as one loves oneself, whether they agree with one on everything or not.

(It’s also in line with the law.)

False Assumption Number Two: Harding’s Commitment to Freedom Means It Should Not Tolerate Dissent

Harding University has long been in a secondary business to that of “developing Christian servants”. Since the 1940s, it has also cultivated a campus culture committed to freedom and the American Way. George Benson’s predecessor J.N. Armstrong had advocated private piety. But after Armstrong was run out of office for holding a minority view in the Church of Christ brotherhood about whether or not the thousand year reign of Christ prophesied in Revelations would be before or after the Second Coming (how priorities change…), Benson took the post in 1936. Just a year earlier, Benson had had to flee his missionary post in China to avoid the abuses of the Communists during the Chinese civil war. When Benson returned to America, the Great Depression had hit the country, and Benson would later recount in his speeches how horrified he was to hear on trains and in the street that many American workers were beginning to think perhaps Communism or at least socialism wasn’t such a bad idea.

Benson was afraid that the persecutions Christians suffered in China would spread to the U.S. if Marxism gained a foothold, so as Harding’s new president he added to the school’s mission that of advocating the freedoms that ensure democracy and the liberty to be Christian. The way this advocacy actually took shape was in classes, speeches, and scholarship programs whose sole purpose was to argue that the American enterprise system was the root of all freedom. The lucrative side-effect was that big business was quickly enamored with Benson and donated enough money to rescue Harding from near-bankruptcy. As time passed, this led Benson to slant his rhetoric more and more in a way that embraced whatever the big business agenda of the day was. His role also changed. He spent less and less time leading Harding and more and more time on political grandstanding and on partisan punditry.

Eventually, the Benson’s preference of the political propaganda machine he had created and based out of Harding became a problem, both legally and because it threatened to consume Harding’s academic purpose. (For instance, Benson had neglected to have Harding accredited for most of his tenure.) Benson resigned from the Harding presidency and committed himself entirely to the National Education Program, the remnants of which are now still based at Harding as the Belden Center and as the American Studies Institute. While Benson persisted in his work until his death in the early 1990s, his political importance after he resigned from the Harding presidency faded almost immediately, and so did any contributions to Harding from big business. Nevertheless, most current members of the board, most members of the current administration, many Harding faculty members, and also the more rabidly partisan alumni are graduates of Benson’s indoctrination programs. They have inherited from him not just the good desire to protect freedom, but also his sometimes brisk and intolerant style that could only see the world as for or against, never as the field of questions and attempts at answers that it in fact is.

Benson’s legacy, however, would be best honored if Harding kept taking his original insight as serious as he did: That a community where the fundamental human freedoms are not respected is not just a community not worth having, but also one that will eventually do away with the Christian faith.

This includes the freedom to dissent. God is not just the Creator; he is also the great dissenter. Whenever humans think they can take care of things on their own, when they think they have finally figured everything out, when they think they no longer need to question themselves because they understand all the law and the prophets, God says, Behold my Son, a stumbling block to the Jews, and a scandal to the Gentiles. Moreover, God calls us to dissent to the current wisdom of the world, which to Him is foolishness, and he allows us to dissent even from Him, if our dissent is one of the struggles we face in life because he appears to us only through a glass darkly, and if we dissent in the faith that He will find us in the end.

Harding’s commitment to freedom is a great and beautiful thing. But it can only be a true freedom, a godly freedom, if it includes allowances for a difference of opinion – allowances for dissent. Both as an academic institution committed to academic freedom and as a community that is passionate about the American Way, Harding should encourage thoughtful, constructive dialog and be unafraid of dissent. After all, among brothers and sisters, iron sharpens iron, and the truth can take all comers graciously and courageously.

To insist on stifling dissent rather than taking it on in open and fair dialog, on the other hand, is cowardly and betrays a sense of insecurity and a lack of faith in one’s own position. Shouting others down or dismissing them smugly is not part of the American Way. It is also un-Christian. It is the opposite of what Harding has always stood for.

False Assumption Number Three: Angry Right-Wing Donors Have An Unbreakable Stranglehold on Harding’s Administration, Which Acts as Their Henchman

The pretense that some dark cabal of angry right-wing donors has an unbreakable stronghold on Harding’s administration and is just waiting for a chance to turn it into Freed-Hardeman while we watch helplessly is just that: a pretense. I would even go so far to say it’s a pretense that Harding critics like to use as an excuse to not actually engage with those things that happen at Harding that they disagree about. It also reflects a certain ignorance about how and why the Harding administration reacts to the kind of pressure we have recently heard rumors about.

Things are much more straightforward than that: Follow the money.

Let’s face it. Harding is a pauper. Schools like Harvard receive daily donations the size of Harding’s entire endowment. It’s small. It’s so small that Harding actually has to live off the tuition its students pay – a ridiculous notion for most big name schools. In fact, it’s so small that Harding has been grasping at any way to make a bit more money recently, whether it be jumping on the online MBA bandwagon, letting upper-level courses in various departments count as graduate courses so it can sell some M.S. and M.A. degrees to Chinese exchange students, starting understaffed and low-quality graduate programs in education all over Arkansas, creating a physician assistant’s program in a state that is on the RNA system, or starting other professional training cash cows like a pharmacy program – all to make some extra benjamins.

You see, Harding is in a bind when it comes to donors. It’s committed itself to a no-win constituency that doesn’t really go places much, financially speaking. It takes all comers academically. It sets low standards for in-class performance. It discourages academic competitiveness. It has no commitment to publishing or to connecting students aggressively through national conferences. And once the students graduate, it does not offer them much to be grateful for except for memories of Spring Sing, Harding swings, and marrying too young. Established and wealthy schools treat their students like assets, make sure they place high-level internships, assist them in applying to top-level graduate programs with all the weight of their faculty connections, offer them access to a well-cultivated network of industry players, and see to it that they place high-income jobs, all because they know that this way their alumni will make it big, will make big bucks, and feel invested in giving back big. If alumni place highly out of Harding, it’s because of their own network or their own efforts. And when they give back to a school, it’s the grad school that rescued them from Bible Belt middle-class mediocrity. What Harding is left with, a few well-known donor families aside, is calling school teachers and bank clerks and retired missionaries during Sunday lunch to ask for an annual donation of $100.

There is nothing wrong with that. Harding has its own priorities, and it should be praised for sticking with them even at great cost.

But what this does mean is that many of its comparatively high-level donors are basically people who would not get a hearing elsewhere, and the donors know it, and they know they can exploit Harding’s dependency on them.

The worst-case scenario of what happens in situations like Mark’s is this:

Donors with an interest in the Republican Party hear that someone at Harding openly supports a Democrat. Their interest is piqued for two reasons.

One: Like many evangelicals, they know very well that the Republican party has done next to nothing when it has been in power to change any laws in favor of evangelical causes, but at least they’re more likely to make those changes whenever they feel like it than the Democrats are. Ergo, they support the GOP as a matter of a very optimistic conscience, and think of anyone supporting Democrats as busting that bubble. They don’t like to be disillusioned, and so get angry about it.

Two: They have enough money to donate some of it, but not enough to have risen above their bitterness that taxes are keeping them from all the riches they feel they truly deserve but will never have. Thus, they support the GOP’s fiscal conservatism and view anyone supporting Democrats as people who love lazy thieves that threaten their status as God’s wealthy elect.

Also, they’re businessmen, the kind that reduces tips in restaurants if their every whim isn’t served as quickly as they can come up with one and who then sneer at the waitress when she comes back to the table with her makeup smudged from crying in the kitchen, so they know money is leverage, especially with paupers.

Accordingly, they call Harding’s administration and tell whoever is taking their call that either Harding makes sure all students continue to be godly little GOP supporters and vote accordingly, or they will quit sending money. No GOP monolith from Harding, no dough. They are, in other words, buying votes. This is immoral and illegal, but on the other hand they feel they’re doing it because God wants them to.

Since the Harding administration needs money, they do as they are told and tell any dissenters to shut up.

All those idealistic free thinkers are shocked into silence and resignation because now that one of their own has been told to tone it down, they think they are entitled to feel absolutely helpless and also feel persecuted, put down by the Man – which since James Dean and MLK is actually kinda cool.

Here’s a secret. The Man doesn’t exist. Harding ain’t Harvard. It ain’t Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, or even the University of Arkansas. That’s who truly rich Fat Cats give their money to. Harding does not have those kinds of donors, like I said. The Man at Harding is like the Wizard of Oz: a creepy little midget behind a dusty curtain who calls himself ruler and barks at the moon.

Which means:

On the one hand, the administration has to work hard to court oodles of little wizards – lots of smaller, slightly affluent donors with fond memories of the past grandeur of dancing ‘round the Maypole and nights beside the lily pond. And it has to keep lots of them happy. This makes the administration sensitive to when those donors have an ideological aneurism because their calcified geriatric brains can’t tolerate dissent about politics any more than they can tolerate not sitting in the same spot in church every Sunday or not having their exact usual meal at the Dixie Café afterwards, preferably served by the exact same waitress, hold the gravy. That dependency has become worse since Harding has been aggressively pushing endowment gifts by will, which you can only get from people twenty years or so away from the last time they changed their mind about what it means to have the right opinions.

On the other hand, it means that any alumnus or alumna willing to send any amount of money has leverage with the administration. That includes new donors and people who aren’t donors yet because they can’t afford it two years out of college. In fact, the administration would rather have donors who will be donating for a long time in the future than not. As a result, all those frustrated with Angry Right Wing Donor Cabal have no reason to feel silenced or outmaneuvered, unless they shut up and sit down.

Here’s something else that’s easy to forget. Any recent Harding alumn, even those who, as my friend James Wiser put it, “view their alma mater with no small level of confusion and embarrassment” thanks to Harding’s recent approach to academic free speech, has bought a $35,000 stake in Harding simply by going there. That is quite a bit more money than some saintly curmudgeon who paid $2,000 back in 1952 and is now promising $10,000 after they fly away in glory. And what is more, the recent alumn has invested that money into the current administration, not into those long by. That is a vote of confidence that the alumn has every right to insist to see honored.

Those $35,000 also are part of a bargain the alumn has made with Harding that means, in return for that money, Harding promises not just an education, but also a meaningful degree. Paying for a meaningful degree from Harding means that Harding has an obligation to keep that degree meaningful. That means the alumn has a right to expect Harding to remain consistent with the values of a meaningful higher education, including the freedom of academic inquiry and the freedom of speech, including political speech. If Harding instead decides to make its faculty chant partisan mantras in unison, it not only makes itself ridiculous in the academic world, but also devalues that investment of money and good faith in the current administration that the alumn made by attending Harding. Harding would be morally defrauding the alumn.

If reminded of that fact by enough dissenters, I doubt that the administration would go on doing it for very long.

Accordingly, dear disenchanted recent alumni: Do not back off. Do not give up on Harding because you think you will not be heard. Do not wait for the current board to die and the current administration to retire. Write. Call. Email. You matter. You matter at least as much as all those intellectual cowards who run to Daddy Burks because they are afraid their own point of view won’t hold up under scrutiny from one or two dissenting voices. You matter more, in fact, because David Burks likes to think of himself as a reasonable man, and because the more well-reasoned, patient, and insistent letters, emails, and calls he receives, the more easily he can feel like he ought to listen, and the more likely he is to want to do so.

Your future donations matter to Harding. Your good-will matters to Harding. And the more of you write and call and email, the more you will matter. You are no longer non-conformist undergrads who sit outside Midnight Oil and smoke oh-so-rebelliously and think of pranks to play on Dr. Burks. You’re now adults, you have real concerns, and Harding has real obligations to you. Let the others shout and slobber vitriol. You insist to be heard – with dignity, with self-confidence, and with all the best traditions of Harding like wind at your back.

I did. You can, too.

Wrigley Field Confessions

I have a confession to make:

I went to a baseball game. At Wrigley Field.

What’s the big deal? you might ask. Everybody in Chicago does that, every two or three weeks. Or at least North Siders do. (For you who aren’t from here, South Siders go to see the White Sox.)

And it really was packed, as always. In fact, Wrigley Field is one of the most sold-out parks in baseball. It’s an icon. It’s so much of an icon that it didn’t install floodlights until a few years ago, and all its games had to be played in daylight, like it was still 1908, the last time the Cubs won the World Series. It’s so much of an icon that the biggest concern the team’s fans have had since a cut-throat investor bought the team a few months back, is that he might sell the naming rights and turn the place into Viagra Park or something. Its brick and ivy have hosted all the baseball greats there ever were, including the ones that even Europeans have heard of – Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, although neither of them ever played for the Cubs. (Though I must admit, we know one because of the candy bar sold at American airports and the other one because of Marilyn Monroe.)

“Every blade of grass here is steeped in tradition,” the friend I went with told me. “This place is Chicago.”

And I’d sigh and I’d say, “I know.” I know of people who named their daughters Addison because Wrigley Field is on Addison Street. I know people from halfway across the country who choose screen names like bricksnivy. I know people who risk the wholeness of their office window deep in Cardinals country by hanging the heart-break Cubs’ logo in it. I know people who show up at the ballpark at eight o’clock in the morning for a two o’clock afternoon game and spend their day drinking beer and eating Cubbie burgers at the Cubbie Bear bar and grill across the street.

I know Cubs games at Wrigley Field are a big deal.

But the big deal for me is that I went knowing squat-all about baseball.

I’m baseball illiterate. I can’t pronounce dugout like the president can’t pronounce nuclear. And it’s not because I don’t like sports. I love me my sports. I don’t have a TV in part because I’d be watching too much ESPN. But I wasn’t born in this country. I was born in the Rest of the World. And in the Rest of the World, girls watch figure skating and boys play The One Game – soccer. And when they get tired, they watch boxing. And after ten minutes of that, they switch back to the soccer re-run.

Not that I’m a soccer snob. I feel I have to say that in this country. Because here soccer is a sport for Europhiles who sip wine and for stoners who don’t love America and for girls who didn’t make the cheerleading squad. In the States, soccer is what the wusses play who couldn’t get enough muscle on them for the football team. Not that the attitude is surprising, seeing how the only real soccer player this country has seen since Pele spent his mid-forties here two decades ago is Europe’s least favorite aged ballerina, David Beckham. And the only soccer matches shown on TV even close to prime time are World Cup games, dominated these days by Italians who are even better at theatrical writhing after being looked at too hard by the opposing defender than they are at complaining to the referee afterwards. And the only soccer gossip that makes it to U.S. sports pages tends to be about faded Brazilian strikers with funny names who are caught with transvestite prostitutes.

Not the kind of thing Bubba likes. Or, for that matter, Jake, Chad, or Mike.

Never mind that in European, African, and South American cities soccer matches between rival teams often take on the character of tribal warfare between opposing fans – brawls, stabbings, and all. Your average soccer fanatics make NASCAR enthusiasts look sober, Raiders fans look like prim and toothless grandmas, and Michael Vick and his doggies look like a gambling virgin trapped at a frat party invaded by riot police.

Never mind that the game has the highest bloody injury rate of any team sport other than rugby.

That in every self-respecting German village, for example, there are two places that men can hang out at – the pub by the shooting range and the pub by the soccer clubhouse, which is often the same pub.

Never mind that when a German goalie wore a pink jersey a few months back to advertise a certain cell phone company of that color, he got beer bottles thrown at him until he switched into something else less offensive in color.

And never mind that my own training as a defensive midfielder in high school included pointers for unobtrusive head-butting that I can still execute flawlessly.

But that’s more Friday Nights lights kind of soccer, not the kind that gets TV coverage in distant lands. Distant lands being here.

But enough about soccer. All I wanted to say, really, is that soccer is the reason I don’t know anything about baseball: I didn’t grow up with a taste for the game. I do enjoy many U.S. sports that work with the same skills as soccer does – quick, hard-hitting, ever-moving ones that require near-perfect fitness and a subtle, ever-adapting, fearless, reckless, dancing mind capable of bodily force, the kind of mind that intuits all the other players on the field in their ever-shifting patterns, strikes in the exact right split-second, and does so with the ruthless, unflinching, elegant precision of a beautiful release.

In this country, those sports are hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and – frequent breaks and pansy padding aside – football, not the slow, lethargic bursts of baseball. I’m afraid to most people who don’t know the sport, baseball looks like long periods of standing around and butt-scratching and tobacco-juice spitting interrupted by an occasional throw and one swing that usually misses. It looks like the kind of sport, in other words, that people watch who also watch poker on ESPN, and who switch to darts when they’re feeling frisky.

Which is why, when a friend of mine who was a baseball pitcher in college asked me whether I wanted to go see the Cubs, I immediately said yes. If anyone could explain the rules of the game to me, he could. If anyone would alert me to the subtleties that made it so important to the people here, he would. This would be fun.

It was an afternoon game, and looked like it might rain, so we went early.

“That way, if we get rained out, we can at least get a couple of drinks,” he said.

“Rained out?” I asked. “They cancel the game if it rains? What kind of sport is this?”

“They don’t want to slip and injure themselves,” he said.

“Don’t they have cleats?” I asked.

“It’s tradition,” he said. “That’s why it’s a summer sport. And if you’re going to start like this, we might at as well not go.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll shut up. Wouldn’t want them to melt if they’re all sugar. Want to borrow my umbrella?”

“I’m warning you,” he said.

Like real Chicagoans, we went by El train. We live in Hyde Park, on the South Side, so it takes about an hour. You can tell a lot about Chicago by sitting on the El. For instance, we were the only white people on the train until we hit Roosevelt station in the gentrifying South Loop. By the time we’d gone through downtown, there weren’t any black people left. But we’d picked up all the suburban Cubs fans that took the Metra train into the city and switched to the El at Madison or wherever. The El was packed. It was loud, everyone was wearing red, white, and blue shirts and hats. Some wore t-shirts with clever lines about some star Japanese player (“Horry Kow!”, for example). A few of the fans were already drunk. I was feeling great. It felt a lot like going to soccer games at home, just without the raucous singing or the firecrackers going off on the train.

At Addison Station, we shouldered our way through the throng out onto the street. Scalpers shouted ticket prices. Street vendors offered anything from cotton candy to fan fashion. Beggars in wheelchairs held up placards that said things like “Go Cubs! Spare some change, I’m hungry. Did I say, Go Cubs?” Policemen tried to direct the crowd by shouting. Traffic was at a crawl.

We crossed the road and ducked into a bar, had a beer and a Cubbie burger, and then headed for the hallowed gates of Wrigley Field itself.

Saint Peter at the gates came in the form of a security officer, a not insubstantial lady with a very shrill voice.

“Has that been opened in any way?” she asked, pointing at a water bottle in my hand.

“Umm…,” I said, not knowing whether the right answer was yes (because they didn’t want me to sell anything inside) or no (because open containers with water, much like toothpaste and aftershave at airports, are the first spare part necessary to build a bomb, and I’d forgotten to hide my invisible turban).

“Ok, let’s keep moving!” she shouted, not waiting for an answer.

We got to our seats while some baritone who must’ve sounded better with accompaniment than he did over the intercom warbled the national anthem. There were people sitting in our seats. I said, “Four and five?” They nodded. I smiled. They moved over to their own seats behind a pillar. We sat down. They were excellent seats, halfway between home and first base, eight rows up under the sunroof. (The rain threat had been a hoax. It was sunny all afternoon.)

Then the game began.

For those of you who haven’t a clue what baseball is, let me explain.

For my British readers, baseball is a version of cricket, more or less, except at three hours a game, it’s shorter. The ball is not oval but round and does not get bounced by the pitcher. The bat’s surface is also round and the bat is swung over the shoulder instead of downwards. Once the batter hits the ball, he runs the course of a large rectangle rather than back and forth between wickets. There is no breaking for tea.

For the rest of the world, it goes like this.

On a heap of sand in the middle of the field stands a guy with a big brown glove on. That’s the pitcher. He wears pinstriped tights and a baseball cap, hence the name. A handful of his friends in the same getup stand around the edges of a large sand rectangle and make serious faces. Way out in the grass by the bleachers are a few more of the pitcher’s buddies, half-crouching with their hands on their knees or adjusting their crotch or chatting with the fans. Nothing happens for a long time. Maybe somebody spits tobacco juice or stretches. Everyone looks bored.

Apart from the vendor who climbs up and down the bleachers and screams something about peanuts, the only person on the team moving at all is the guy who crouches behind one of the corners of the sand rectangle, called home base. He makes rapid finger signs at the pitcher. He’s crouching there because that way he can wriggle his fingers behind the back of the one guy on the field who isn’t on their team. He does that until the pitcher nods.

That guy from the other team is the batter. You can tell the batter apart from the others because his pinstripe tights are a different color and he wears a helmet that looks like a plastic version of a baseball cap. He also holds a long round stick. That’s the bat. He swings it at the air lightly now and then and spits tobacco juice and pretends to check the weather and shifts and tries not to look like he’s nervous.

At some point, the pitcher either remembers that he’s holding a ball or decides he’s bored the batter long enough to catch him off guard. In any case, he makes a wide motion with his arm, puts his best leg forward, and hurls the ball at the guy who crouches behind the batter.

That’s called the pitch. It’s important to pay attention at the pitch because nothing else will happen for the next ten minutes except for the vendor guy coming by again and this time shouting something about hot dogs.

The ball flies at the batter and the batter swings, and most of the time, he misses. The guy behind him catches the ball (which is why he’s called the catcher), and the referee behind both of them makes a little dancing motion. The crowd cheers or boos. Then everyone waits again until eventually the referee sends three batters off the field and the teams switch positions.

Every now and then, the batter hits the ball. If nobody catches the ball before the ball hits the ground, the batter runs in a large square from one little white marker to another until he has to stop because he will either get hit by the ball as it’s being thrown back by the striped guys way out in the playing field, or because the little marker ahead of him gets touched by someone with the ball. Those someones touching the ball to things are the pitcher’s buddies. They’re either called outfielders or basemen, depending on where they stand and scratch their butts while nothing happens. There’s also one extra guy who stands halfway between two of the bases.

“Who’s that?” I asked my friend.

“That’s the shortstop,” he said.

“Ah,” I said.

“Why’s he called that?” I asked. “He doesn’t look that short to me.”

“Tradition,” my friend said. “He’s supposed to stop things short.”

“Ah,” I said.

“But he keeps dropping the ball,” I said.

“That’s because he doesn’t care,” my friend said. The Cubs were down 1-8 at that point, about halfway through the game. “He’s being pissy.”

“He gets to be pissy?” I asked.

“It’s a psychological game,” my friend said.

“Why don’t they switch him out?” I asked.

“They can’t,” he said. “Or they won’t, anyway.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because then he’d be more pissy,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “That makes no sense.”

“It’s tradition,” my friend said.

Tradition is the main thing in baseball, I found out. Like dividing the game up into nine parts rather than halves or quarters, and dividing those nine parts into tops and bottoms, although it’s got nothing to do with tops or bottoms, and in fact nothing is different between tops and bottoms except for the color of the players’ hats on the field.

Or like stopping not at half-time or anything for a break but in the middle of the seventh part (called innings) and singing a song about caramel-covered popcorn and swaying. The swaying is made easier for most people by the fact that at Wrigley Field, they serve copious amounts of a beer called Old Style, which is basically a watered-down head-ache, and for seven bucks a cup, they serve it to anyone as long as they have someone with them who’s twenty-one, or sit next to someone who’s twenty-one, or has borrowed the driver’s license from someone who’s twenty-one, which is the legal drinking age in this country. Cheers.

By the way, those white markers the batters have to touch as they run around the large square are called bases. Bases play a big role in American slang, in such phrases as “to touch base with someone”, “get to first base about something”, and “to be off-base.” And if one learns the American way of making love (apparently mainly groping and keeping score of where one groped), baseball also makes sense of the bumper sticker I saw a couple of weeks ago that had the pink ribbon for breast cancer and read, “Save second base.” It also explains what some guy with a popped collar means when he nods in the direction of a girl he and his buds know and grunts, “Home run with that one.” And it explains why his friends laugh in the way you do when you don’t quite buy it. Because even four balls only get you to first base.

That being said, baseball has nothing whatsoever to do with America’s other favorite pass-time. Unlike all other sports, there are no cheerleaders, poms teams, or scantily clad women strutting around the pitcher’s mound holding up a placard announcing which inning it is. The Cubs being the happily snobbish Chicago team (as opposed to the more blue-collar White Sox), Wrigley Field attracts its share of hot co-eds in very short striped pants. But it’s in Wrigleyville, which means that at least a third of them is there with their girlfriends, a third is there with their dads, and the other third is looking to score an investment banker, none of which have anything to do with sex – a fact that isn’t helped by the fact that most younger men there wear t-shirts that read things like “Shut Up, Sit Down, And Drink Your Beer” or are pimply-faced and sixteen.

(I asked one of those co-eds, Jacqueline, about that when I left my seat between one of the ten-minute periods it takes their pitchers to warm up between innings. She pouted and said, “Yeah, that’s about it. That and tourists. Where are you from?” “Row eight,” I said. Then I asked her to point me to the restrooms.)

They have troughs in the restrooms, by the way, at Wrigley Field. But don’t let me dwell on that too long.

All in all, the game ended up being pretty awesome, actually. The Cubs scored six runs in the sixth inning, and then scored a few more, and there were even home runs (Which is when the ball gets hit further out than the field is large, and the batter and all his friends can kind of trot the big rectangle and wave.) And then, after the crackerjack song and another top and bottom, we came to the last inning. The score was 10-9 for the Cubs. The pitcher walked one player, then gave up another run. If the third batter hit the ball far enough, someone would run all the way around the rectangle and the Cubs might lose after all.

Then the most amazing thing happened. The batter hit the ball, and what followed was maybe the most accurate, athletic, and goddamn smart series of lunges, catches, passes, and tagging batters out that I have ever seen. It wasn’t just good. It was gorgeous.

And that was it. Three batters out. Cubs won. Everybody was happy. We left. I bought the hat.

And next week, I’m going to go see the White Sox. I hear they have fireworks.

Anything But Ordinary (Parts 1-3)

“She came in through the bathroom window
Protected by a silver spoon…” – The Beatles

By the time I drove up to the girl’s house, crisp dark night had covered a long white day. My tires crunched in the snow, and snow carefully everywhere descending flecked the beam of my headlights.

The house I was going to was a House With A Name, once called a castle, though it had long lost the tower that made it one. The driveway, laid out for carriages a hundred fifty years ago, stretched long, slender, and white as my car slid along it, stirring the sheet of snow with its humming.

I parked in the light streaming from the windows, cut the shuddering engine, and sat for a moment, watching the snowflakes cover the windshield. It was ten degrees below freezing, and my car heater had long stopped trying to catch up with the melting point. My hands ached in my gloves. My feet were numb.

When I stepped out into the blistering night, a woman I hadn’t seen before poked her head out the front door.

“You must be Jonathan,” she shouted, her words white vapor in the arctic air.

I smiled, removed my gloves, and shook her hand through the narrowing gap as she nearly closed the door again, shielding all but her face from the icy wind.

“I am,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

She introduced herself. I nodded. My eyes wandered to the little boy who had appeared at her hip, gazing up at me. The same wide eyes had greeted me last week, the first time I had come. And like then, the boy’s knuckles were white with effort from clenching the collar of a silver Great Dane puppy that was wriggling and whining, straining to get past and lope into the snowdrifts. I winked at the boy.

Last week, when fog had lain over the snow-covered town, the house had been dark. Hoping it was the right place, I had abandoned my car at the curb, walked up the long drive, and rung the doorbell.

I had waited.

Nothing happened. Through the glass panels of the door, I could see the blue flicker of an enormous television, cartoon figures chasing each other across the screen, but I could see no people.

I rang the doorbell again. Blinking away snowflakes, I counted to thirty, knocked, shrugged, and turned away. I was not ten meters down the driveway when a stifled click stopped me. Someone had opened the door.

A small voice said, “Hi.”

“Hullo,” I said, wheeling around. “I’m here to see… your sister.”

The door had opened full wide and a boy, knee-high and eyes enormous, was staring down at me from the top of the stairs.

“Do you want to talk to my dad?” the boy asked.

“Sure,” I said. “That would be fine.”

“He’s not here,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, and took a step backwards when a Great Dane pup, silver and all legs and pink tongue, brushed past the little boy. The boy squealed “No, Scooby!”, and the dog’s ecstatic romp out into the snowflakes was cut short when, a blank look of elation on its face, it crashed headfirst into my knees. Laughing, I shoved the dog back towards the boy. The boy clutched the dog’s collar and slid around the hardwood floor for what seemed like several hilarious minutes, hanging on for dear life.

When the dog finally held still, the boy looked at me with great gravitas and squeaked, “Do you want to talk to my mom?”

“That would be great,” I said.

The boy nodded.

“She’s not here, either,” he said, and promptly fell squarely on his backside, giggling as the dog lunged forwards. I caught the escaping beastie by its collar and shot it a look that let it know we weren’t going to be friends if it kept up the shenanigans. It wagged its tail, sat, and began to lick the snow off my pant leg.

“Your sister wants my help with something,” I’d said to the little boy. “She, I hope, is here?”

Which was when his sister’s voice announced from the intercom that she’d be right down. She’d forgotten she asked me to come. She was so sorry. I should please come in.

And I did.

But that was then.

Now, the mother gave no indication that she would budge to let me in before my frozen ears broke off. Smiling all the while, she explained through the gap in the door that, sorry, but the girl had forgotten that she was babysitting at the neighbors’ house that evening. Could I please go over there – and she waved vaguely at the snow – there was a path there, to the neighbors, somewhere between the bushes if I could find it, and only if I really didn’t mind. Then she smiled a little longer, saying nothing.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Good,” she said. The girl, she said, was already waiting for me and oh yes, Jonathan, could you two keep it down, the neighbors’ kids are supposed to be in bed, and so sorry again about the mix-up.

I thanked her.

She nodded and closed the door.

The girl’s footprints were still where she left them in the snow. I followed them the short way to the neighbors’ house, which looked even larger than the first, if not quite as lit up. I knocked. The girl’s silhouette moved through the light and the shadows on the other side of the glass door, and then I stepped inside to her vaguely embarrassed smile, and slid out of my coat.

“This way,” the girl said and led the way to the room she had picked out. I watched her as we went, weaving around chairs and in and out of hallways. She had told me last time we met that she danced on a poms team, and it showed in the forgetful grace with which she walked.

“Did you find your way through the snow okay?” she asked, half-kidding, over her shoulder, and added that oh yes, we needed to keep it down, the neighbors’ kids were supposed to be in bed.

Like the week before, the girl was wearing comfortable athlete’s clothes, and if all else were to be the same as well, she would smile often, say straightforwardly what she thought, blush a bit when she was about to say something that put someone else down, parry dry remark with dry remark, and in every other way pull off very well the difficult act of being the kind of cute and utterly ordinary princess that the richer suburbs are rather cluttered with. And she would do so with a sparkle in her eye.

As we walked, the girl repeated the rest of what her mother had told me in a curiously raspy voice that probably made her self-conscious but that I found reminded me of Paris and also of Brazil. The memory instantly made me feel warmer.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“I like this house,” I said, a little lamely. “It reminds me of the one I grew up in, in Europe, the high ceilings and all that.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s gorgeous. Here you are.”

She handed me a glass. Then she looked up at me, her immense eyes expectant, waiting.

[This ends the first part of "Anything But Ordinary," first published 19 April, 2008. What follows is Part Two, first published on 12 May 2008.]

[Note: For all those West Coast producers who were waiting to get their hands on this piece, sorry. I optioned the movie rights already to SJB of NYC. Call him.]

The girl’s eyes were swirls of green and brown, vast and speckled with light. It was her eyes and her cheerful dry humor as she talked, and not the warm air of the house, that unclosed my shoulders stiff from the cold, that tingled the cold out of my fingertips.

I sat down at the head of the table. She slid into the chair next to me.

“Oh my God!” she said, “I’ve definitely got so much I want to ask you. I don’t even know where to start,” and I said, “Take your time.”

I propped my feet up and crossed my arms behind my head.

The girl ummed and aahd, pulled some papers out from between her books, and ruffled through them. She was watching me watching her out of the corner of her eye; I could tell from the way her mouth twitched back and forth between smiles and taut concentration.

“I’ve got it,” she said, “one sec.”

Spotting a band-aid on one of her fingers, I asked, “What did you do to your hand?”

“Oh, that,” she said dismissively. “I banged it up playing lacrosse.” She laughed and fiddled with the band-aid. It had pink flowers on it. “It wasn’t even like we played hard. Mainly we did sprints. Like, you know, fifty of them. Oh my god, excruciating. Then we did some drills with sticks, and I wasn’t paying attention. That’s all.”

“Is that where that scar comes from, too?” I asked and pointed at a faint rugged line on her tanned forearm.

“No, that’s from falling out of a willow when I was little,” she said. “I broke my arm, and I had to wear a cast for, like, forever. Yeah, I know – I’m special.”

“Sure are,” I said, “but that was years ago. I dropped my spare car key into the elevator shaft just the other day. I stood there laughing as I listened to it bounce nine stories down into the abyss.”

“That would suck,” she said. “Thanks for making me feel like I’m not the only klutz. Anyways, I got some more prep books.” She handed one of them to me. “I even read this one.”

“Ah,” I chuckled. “Did it say the exact same thing as the others?”

She laughed. “Yeah,” she said, “but you don’t understand. I need to do really, really well on this, and I don’t even have any idea where to start. Yikes. Not so enthused about this entire thing, to tell you the truth. So it’s good you’re here. I wanted to ask you…”

A rustle in the hallway cut her short.

“Sorry!” she mouthed. In the lilt older girls who are young women use with younger girls who aren’t, she called out, “Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?”

The doorframe stood empty a little longer.

“I know you’re there,” the girl pointed out to the shadows.

A pale little girl in her PJs peeked out from behind the doorpost.

“I don’t have to be in bed til nine,” she declared.

“You sure about that?” the older girl asked. “‘Cause I’m pretty sure your mom said…”

“Yes,” the pale girl pronounced, exasperated, “I don’t have to be in bed til nine.”

The older girl smiled and rolled her eyes, “Okay, whatever. We’re kind of busy, though. Can you go back to your room?”

“No,” the little girl said and pattered barefoot towards the table where we sat. She waved a piece of paper. “I don’t get my homework. I need your help.”

The older girl glanced over at me. I shrugged, amused.

“Awesome,” she said under her breath, “I guess we’re definitely helping her.”

I laughed, “I’m sure we can handle a fourth grade worksheet of…”

“Riddles!” the little girl proclaimed.

“Riddles,” I said.

[This ends the second part of "Anything But Ordinary." What follows is Part Three, first published on 21 May 2008.]

One little girl beamed remorselessly, and two of us grinned sheepishly, and three of us solved them all, all the riddles except, of course, the riddles we were to ourselves. Row after row, like this:

Try

Stand
2

Or this:

ACCAUGHTT

Or this:

M CE
M CE
M CE

I know. Riveting. In fact, it’s

Funny Funny
Words Words
Words Words

Soon after, the little girl slinked off to her room and her bed, taking her riddles with her.

“You’re pretty good at solving those, huh?” the girl asked.

She took a sip from her glass and sucked on an ice cube, slowly turning it with her tongue.

“About as good as you are, yeah,” I said. “I think we went fifty-fifty.”

“No, we didn’t.” She grinned as she loosened her gold-and-hazel hair and retied it into a loose bun. “I won. That should be pretty embarrassing for a genius like you.”

“It is,” I said as stone-faced as I could.

She shot me a glance with a question in it. I ignored it.

“I was just joking,” she said a little quieter.

“I know,” I smirked. “I was laughing real hard on the inside.”

“Right,” she said, face perfectly straight. “Don’t fall off the chair.”

“The only thing that would make me fall off the chair,” I said, “is if you blow me away.”

“Haha,” she said.

I nodded at the papers in front of her.

“Oh, yeah, that,” she said. “We should probably get on that. Don’t expect to be too impressed, though.”

“I don’t,” I said. “That way I’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

“Hey,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to motivate me?”

“You’re the best,” I said. “The smartest. Amazing.”

“Thank you,” she said.

We spent the next forty minutes doing what we were supposed to.

Her part was to touch her pen to the corner of her mouth, tilt her head, raise an eyebrow, and gaze at the problem in front of her. After a few seconds, she’d tap her pen on her book once or twice, lean closer with a chirpy “okay” or a low “hmm,” scribble a few notes, shift in her chair, purse her lips, untie and retie her hair once again, then quickly, almost furtively circle an answer and glance over at me – triumphantly if she was sure she’d gotten the answer right, tentatively if she wasn’t. If she did not look at me at all, I knew she’d guessed. Eyes studiously downcast while I read the answers, she’d perform the finale to her meticulous choreography by punctuating each solution with a cheerful “Yes!” or with an “Oh my god, I so knew that” or with a half-whispered, round-lipped “Oh!”

My part was to know everything. And to talk about it as if it were utterly captivating and relevant to her life – not the easiest thing when what you’re talking about for a longer time than most people spend discussing their three favorite topics combined every day is actually a multiple choice exam about nothing that particularly matters.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “It kind of matters. It’ll decide whether in ten years I’ll stand in line at the welfare office or the First Class queue to the Caribbean.”

“Not quite,” I said.

“Practically,” she said.

I did not say that if she was much like all the other princesses, ordinary or otherwise, that I talked to (and mostly talked at) in the evenings while we were licking ice cream off our respective silver spoons, the only real difference it was likely to make was whether it was daddy’s phone call that got her into where she wanted to spend the next four years partying and watching the sports team, or whether she wanted to view this as a personal challenge.

“Sports are important to me,” she said after I had not said as much loudly and often enough. “Partying, not so much.”

“Ah,” I said. I didn’t believe her. I grew up around kids with her background. I knew her classmates, some of her friends.

And I’d been watching her watching me. About of a third of the time that I spent explaining, she’d look me straight in the eye and nod and look interested. Another third of the time, she’d pretend she was listening by making affirming noises while doodling in the margins of her book. Flowers, mostly. The rest of the time, she’d actually stare past me into space, the look in her eyes as blank as the snow outside.

I stopped.

She looked at me.

“I was listening,” she said.

“You were staring at the wall,” I said.

“The chandelier in the other room, actually,” she said. “But I was so listening.”

“The trick is to look the other person in the eye all the time,” I said. “That way they feel like they’re interesting. And that’s what I’m here for, after all. So you can make me feel good about myself.”

“Of course,” she laughed. “I really was listening, though. I just get distracted so easily, you wouldn’t even believe. I think maybe I have ADD. Shiny things, you know. But I heard everything that you said.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” I said.

She repeated what I’d said verbatim, surprising me for the first time.

“Okay,” I said. “I believe you. You win.”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

Finally, she put down her pencil.

“I’m getting tired,” she said. “And I think I’ll do just fine tomorrow, thanks to you. Also, I have to apologize.”

“What for?” I asked.

“I have a pretty weak memory,” she said. “Actually, very weak.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“You’ve been holding up pretty well,” I said. “I thought.”

“It’s not about that,” she said. “I forgot what you do.”

“I, um, tutor,” I said, a little confused.

“I mean in real life,” she said.

I laughed.

“I mean,” she said quickly, “not that this isn’t…”

“No, no,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

“I already know you’re a writer,” she said. “But aren’t you still in school?”

“Yes,” I said and pointed at the sweater I was wearing with the university’s name on it. “See?”

“Right,” she said. “Represent.”

I laughed. She glared, then smiled.

“That’s a pretty good school, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s a pretty good school,” I said. “Full of nerds.”

“Oh?” she said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m not kidding, though. They sell t-shirts that say, ‘Where the fun comes to die.’ They sell t-shirts that say, ‘Where the squirrels are cuter than the girls.’”

“Yikes! Sounds awful,” she said. “But I bet you make tons of money when you graduate.”

“Depends on your major,” I said.

That was a mistake, of course. I must’ve been getting sleepy, too.

“And what’s your major?” she said, predictably enough.

“Literature, kind of,” I said, and closed my eyes briefly.

“So, you… read books?” she said. “That’s cool, I guess.”

“It’s not like English class; I don’t want to be a teacher,” I explained. “I’m at the Divinity School.”

“So you want to be a preacher?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I want to be a better writer. I read about things like mythology, how authors portray religion, or how it changes what they write, that kind of thing. I’m not there, like most students, to, you know, read the Bible and become a better person.”

What was I doing anyway, explaining myself to some girl I’d never see again after tonight, as if living my passions was the same thing as stealing a cookie from the cookie jar? I shot her a crisp dark look that covered a long pause, long and white and drifting in my mind like the snow outside the window, and as cold.

As she looked back at me her eyes became very still, sparkling with thought until any hint of blankness was erased and they were light-specked swirls of green and brown again, dancing very shy, as if they were undressing, as if she was going to say something she was not sure she should.

I waited, face blank again.

“Actually,” she said finally, “I’m a Christian. I read the Bible. It means a lot to me.”

And immediately a cock crowed.

At least in my head.

I wish there were more to this story. I wish I could say that I told her that she was the first person in more than a year I had heard those words from – “I am a Christian” – who had said it unflinchingly, without apology. I wish I could say I told her that I hadn’t prayed in months and that it was that evening, when I stepped back out into the drifting snow and felt the snowflakes melt on my face, that I thought for the first time that perhaps I should. I didn’t tell her that those four words had made me happier than anything else she might have said or done.

But I didn’t say any of those things. Instead, I told her I was one, too, and switched to the normal politenesses that go on between church-going people. Where did she go to church? (Close by.) How did she like the worship there? (Very.)

Then we dropped the subject, and I slipped back into my jacket and wriggled my fingers into my gloves. As I left, I agreed to help her with some essays she said she had coming up. We told each other how jealous we both were about where the other was going over Christmas (I to Europe, she to California). Then she said, “Thank you,” and I closed the door and disappeared into the night. And as I drove home along the freeway in a snowstorm between veering trucks, I thought about how sometimes people we think are quite ordinary can surprise us and turn out to be anything but.