November 1976
Thanksgiving. Cindy and her husband Ron traditionally opened their home to whoever wanted to eat and drink well. They lived in what amounted to a large cabin in central Oregon, five acres of hills and pine trees. Cindy was a high school principal in a district where most of the students were rich and white. She said she dealt with the same problems any principal did in any district, but that the drugs the kids used were of better quality. “These parents,” she said, “they think because their kids are star athletes and scholars, they don’t do drugs. Pot is legal in the state, but these kids want something better and stronger. And these kids? They think I’m just as ignorant because I’m old. I want to tell them that I’ve got some experience in these matters.”
Cindy had more than academic experience in the area. As a teenager, she’d run with any wrong crowd she could find, and several times I’d heard my father leave the house in the middle of the night muttering that would be the last time he would help her get home. The day she left for college, my parents hugged her at the airport, and on the drive home my mother was crying not because Cindy was leaving, but because none of us was sure that we would see her again. When she came home for the summer, though, my sister told us that she had found God and had left her previous self behind. My parents were joyful, but I was skeptical. My parents had learned to see what they wanted to see, but I was still too young for that.
Ron was a chiropractor, and he had done well. I’ve always thought that, like a preacher, a chiropractor is little more than a shaman that does nothing but plant mythological seeds of healing and hope. But, I could not argue with his obvious income and success, and he and I got along quite well. Ron was also a deacon in his church. “You still resisting coming into the fold?” he asked as he and I wandered around the acreage surrounding his house.
“I think I’m beyond saving, Ron,” I said.
“Nobody’s beyond saving,” he said.
“Maybe I’ve been saved in my own way, then.”
He laughed. “Cindy tell you to talk like that?"
Cindy hadn’t, of course, but I knew she’d drifted from the fold herself. “It just gets…tedious,” she’d told me a few years earlier when we’d met in San Francisco while Ron was there for a convention. “I mean, I’ve gotten the message. I don’t need to hear it every week. If God and Jesus don’t love me by now, they never will.”
We were sitting at the table. Ron was praying. I’d bowed my head slightly, but my eyes were still open. I watched as Cindy yawned. Tom and Michelle, a married couple that taught at Cindy’s school, sat across from me. My parents sat on each side of me, and the way my father was breathing, I thought he might have fallen asleep. Brian, Cindy and Ron’s son, sat next to his mother. Their daughter Wendy was with the Peace Corp in Guatemala; everyone had taken turns talking long-distance with her earlier and she seemed slightly homesick. “No turkey here,” she’d said.
After dinner, Brian was off to visit his girlfriend. Tom and Michelle stayed long enough to clean up, and then they had to drive to Portland to catch a flight to Amsterdam. “You travel?” Tom asked me as they said their goodbyes.
“Sometimes,” I said.
Cindy spoke up. “Don’t believe that, Tom. He’s never home. Half of the time I don’t even know where he is.”
Later, I sat alone with my parents while Cindy and Ron finished putting the food away. Neither one of them was especially energetic, full of food and old age. They lived in a retirement home not far away. Generally content, they seldom complained. “You should visit more,” my mother finally said. My father had finally dozed off. “We like to see you.”
“I will,” I said. “I like seeing everyone.”
“Your nephew and niece barely know you,” she said.
“They know enough,” I said.
“They needed a cousin. They’ve got nearly no family beyond what you see here.”
“Mom,” I said. “Not today.”
She looked at me, her lips pressed tightly together. She nodded, and we sat there, breathing.
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