Was telling Finley a story this morning
about Robin's cousin Riki's husband George,
now dead of a heart attack years after they divorced.
I was in DC for the MLA convention.
I was actually offered a job later as a result of that trip,
at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas.
I tell everyone this story.
They flew me to Beaumont and ended up liking me well enough
to offer me a professor job,
but I couldn't drag my family down there.
Far cry from not that many years before,
I passed out trying to give a presentation
in German class about the Kurosawa movie, Ikuru,
which had impressed me when I saw it at the student union—
with Eldon, I think.
The movie was about a city bureaucrat who always passed the buck.
Some women were trying to get a pestilent swamp in their neighborhood
drained and replaced with a park.
They wouldn’t give up, but he just kept sending them
to another department. Then he found out
he had cancer and just a year to live.
Prostitutes and dissipation only made him more miserable.
Finally one day the women came back,
and he decided to get them their park built.
It was amazing, the red tape he had to fight through—
it was literally a Christ-like effort, but he succeeded,
and in the last scene he’s swinging in a park swing,
a beautiful smile on his face,
completely happy.
I tried to say all this in German,
but I short-circuited and fainted.
The teacher was freaked, but luckily
a nice young man offered to take me to the student hospital.
I actually felt fine after we left,
but it turned out his real motive was to win a star for his crown
by bringing my soul to Christ.
I went to a Campus Crusade meeting with him.
There were lots of Christian students there,
including a guy who said that if I accepted Jesus
my grades would improve—
a documented fact, he said—but I said,
that's not surprising and doesn't prove that Christ is real;
it just means that students do better when they introduce
a little discipline into their lives.
This was a tough argument for him to refute.
I think he wondered why
I didn't want to introduce discipline into my own life,
but he couldn’t quite put the question into words.
I turned out to be incorrigible.
I had to send the Jesus boy on his way.
He was a little brokenhearted—he said
he didn't think he'd managed to bring a single soul to Christ.
I was his only prospect.
But my story was supposed to be about
George's schizophrenic sister.
At about the time the Jesus boy tried to rescue me,
I remember, there were adds in the student newspaper:
Call this number if you're interested in serving humanity.
It was the Moonies, I found out later.
If I had answered one of those adds and called the number,
I probably would have been invited to a party somewhere in Boulder.
I would have been prevented from leaving the party
by many attentive, insistent people,
who totally had my best interests at heart.
I might not have been able to resist them
the way I resisted the Jesus boy.
Anyway, George's sister joined the Moonies
and was with them for at least ten years,
being moved around the country,
from California to Florida, to Arizona.
She was counting on them to pair her up with someone.
The Moonies were well-known
for arranging marriages for their devotees, and she wanted that.
But they just couldn't do it,
couldn't find someone to pair her up with,
so she gave up and went back
to live with her mother—
who was bat-shit crazy, George said; his sister
was much better off living with the Moonies.
But today I read a review of a book by David Orr
about Frost's “Road Not Taken.”
The poem is a wolf in sheep's clothing, Orr says.
Everybody loves it—
it's the most popular Google-searched poem in any language—
but it's not really about how confident you can feel
about your bold choices.
It's about never ever being able to know whether or not
your choice was better.
about Robin's cousin Riki's husband George,
now dead of a heart attack years after they divorced.
I was in DC for the MLA convention.
I was actually offered a job later as a result of that trip,
at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Texas.
I tell everyone this story.
They flew me to Beaumont and ended up liking me well enough
to offer me a professor job,
but I couldn't drag my family down there.
Far cry from not that many years before,
I passed out trying to give a presentation
in German class about the Kurosawa movie, Ikuru,
which had impressed me when I saw it at the student union—
with Eldon, I think.
The movie was about a city bureaucrat who always passed the buck.
Some women were trying to get a pestilent swamp in their neighborhood
drained and replaced with a park.
They wouldn’t give up, but he just kept sending them
to another department. Then he found out
he had cancer and just a year to live.
Prostitutes and dissipation only made him more miserable.
Finally one day the women came back,
and he decided to get them their park built.
It was amazing, the red tape he had to fight through—
it was literally a Christ-like effort, but he succeeded,
and in the last scene he’s swinging in a park swing,
a beautiful smile on his face,
completely happy.
I tried to say all this in German,
but I short-circuited and fainted.
The teacher was freaked, but luckily
a nice young man offered to take me to the student hospital.
I actually felt fine after we left,
but it turned out his real motive was to win a star for his crown
by bringing my soul to Christ.
I went to a Campus Crusade meeting with him.
There were lots of Christian students there,
including a guy who said that if I accepted Jesus
my grades would improve—
a documented fact, he said—but I said,
that's not surprising and doesn't prove that Christ is real;
it just means that students do better when they introduce
a little discipline into their lives.
This was a tough argument for him to refute.
I think he wondered why
I didn't want to introduce discipline into my own life,
but he couldn’t quite put the question into words.
I turned out to be incorrigible.
I had to send the Jesus boy on his way.
He was a little brokenhearted—he said
he didn't think he'd managed to bring a single soul to Christ.
I was his only prospect.
But my story was supposed to be about
George's schizophrenic sister.
At about the time the Jesus boy tried to rescue me,
I remember, there were adds in the student newspaper:
Call this number if you're interested in serving humanity.
It was the Moonies, I found out later.
If I had answered one of those adds and called the number,
I probably would have been invited to a party somewhere in Boulder.
I would have been prevented from leaving the party
by many attentive, insistent people,
who totally had my best interests at heart.
I might not have been able to resist them
the way I resisted the Jesus boy.
Anyway, George's sister joined the Moonies
and was with them for at least ten years,
being moved around the country,
from California to Florida, to Arizona.
She was counting on them to pair her up with someone.
The Moonies were well-known
for arranging marriages for their devotees, and she wanted that.
But they just couldn't do it,
couldn't find someone to pair her up with,
so she gave up and went back
to live with her mother—
who was bat-shit crazy, George said; his sister
was much better off living with the Moonies.
But today I read a review of a book by David Orr
about Frost's “Road Not Taken.”
The poem is a wolf in sheep's clothing, Orr says.
Everybody loves it—
it's the most popular Google-searched poem in any language—
but it's not really about how confident you can feel
about your bold choices.
It's about never ever being able to know whether or not
your choice was better.
