March 16, 2004
Four proofs


First, I want to say that I received some great e-mail over the past week from readers about my last entry. I'm grateful for all of your meaningful thoughts on the subject. I'm somehow encouraged to realize that there's no shortage of us struggling to unpack religious baggage from the past while reaching for a new faith as adults.

For whatever reason, this journal seems to have some of the most intelligent and thoughtful readers in the universe. If you guessed that this makes me feel pretty good, you would guess right.

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So, right on the heels of my last entry comes this, a brief celebration of four things that are so smashingly perfect that they recklessly prove the existence of a very clever, beautiful and benevolent God.

First on the list, naturally, is Andrew Bird.


I've written an awful lot about him lately, haven't I? Are you sick of it yet? I can't be blamed; to my poor brain, his name has become a thing of strange rapture, three little syllables synonymous with Beauty and Art and Truth and other Big Important Words.

He's skinny as a rail, but Lord, he packs mighty heat.

(He is playing four times in the next four days in Austin. Yes, part of me is riddled with jealousy of the grand fortune of my Austin friends. But the jealousy is starting to spoil my enjoyment of the existence of a benevolent God! So I move on.)


Second on the list is the very young, very small Kathleen Matilda.


I envision for myself a trip to Chicago to meet this young lady some day soon, maybe as soon as she and her parents are able to sleep all the way through the night. (Congratulations to all of you.)


Third on the list is the tulip trees in Atlanta.


Here's a question for people who do not live in Atlanta: Why do you not live in Atlanta? What else do you need to know about living here?

Next year, come visit me on March 10, when the tulip trees first bloom again, and we will go to Grant Park in the morning to look at the tulip trees and perhaps take very careful, close-up pictures of them, and then we will go out to breakfast. Deal?


(Do I repeat myself? I am guilty; they're a favorite subject.)


Fourth on the list is my brother Tim and his magnificent dog, Don Dokken, who together form a holy dyad of nearly incomprehensible goodness.


I took a day off work last week to spend with Tim and Don at the farm in rural Georgia where they live.

The fact that I was volunteering my precious vacation time to be with my brother is a good indicator of how I feel about him. He is one of my favorite people ever.

We went out to breakfast, the three of us, at an outdoor café in Athens, where the waitress poured hot coffee for Tim and me while slipping doggie biscuits out of her apron for Don.

I was there because for the past couple of months I've been trying like the dickens to comprehend basic modern philosophy (don't laugh; some things come very slowly to me, and philosophy has always been one of them). Tim is a natural teacher, an easy person to talk to about any imaginable subject. So I arranged to spend a day with him, and we went out for breakfast and sat around talking until the sun was high.

And then we were having such a good time talking that after the plates had been cleared we just went down the street to yet another outdoor café, where we drank more coffee and watched people walk by (this is starting to sound vaguely Hemingway-ish) and talked about Descartes and Kant and Rousseau and even a bit about Foucault.

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Tim lives in a converted church building out in the country that has an old cemetary in the backyard.

In the evening after the sun had gone down he looked at me and asked, "Want a cigarette?"

Technically, neither of us smoke — I've half-heartedly burned up about five cigarettes in my life — but what can you do when it's the beginning of spring and the backyard is a cemetary and the frogs are starting to sing for the first time all year?

You can only do what we did, which was go outside and smoke the cigarettes over the dim graves, and listen to the frog songs rising up from the phosphorescent trees, and gaze up in perfect wonder at the endless sky.