Heretic: A Philosophical Review

Author’s Note: The movie Heretic focuses on Mormonism, but the script puts the faith in its place as coming after Islam as yet another revelation. The film uses the vehicle of Mormon missionaries going door-to-door as a way to broach some bigger questions. I have a soft spot for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not only because we have some Mormon friends, but because I have read the 1945 book, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, by Fawn Brody. This biography is essential reading for anyone wanting to know about the beginnings of a faith created by an obvious huckster and sex fiend. The story is fascinating and upsetting in equal measure.

Several Mormons that I have had the honor to call friends have admitted to me that, underneath their outward profession of faith, they are essentially unbelievers, but to proclaim such would be to lose lifelong friends and family forever. To me, this is a testament to the evil undertones of Mormonism, but also any faith that maintains such strong in-group biases. Of course, sending children out into the dark world to make converts is horrible, dangerous, and deeply manipulative, but then, the virtues of any faith are apparent in what their followers are expected to do to win converts. 

The cinematic universe rarely delves into the realm of philosophy and religion; when it does, it is hard to think that what is made will be in any way intellectually engaging. Some of the fare is blatant evangelical nonsense, like “God’s Not Dead” and its abhorrent sequels. Movies like this ply viewers with saccharine plots about unbelievers who lost their faith when something bad happened to them. We are expected to watch in abject credulity as the hard-hearted protagonist finds their faith again, after their grief is used as an expedient to foist born-again dogma on them. These “movies” only meet the definition of ‘cinema’ in the loosest sense. Badly scripted and horrendously acted, they are glorified ad campaigns—bankrolled by wealthy evangelical groups—and are transparent cheese fests. Only a simpleton (presumably, those for whom the movies are made) wouldn’t see through the hucksterism and casuistry of the same old con done up in cinematic lights.

Other religious films attempt to adapt parts of the Bible for the silver screen. Done less as an attempt to win converts than as blatant cash grabs on stories everyone is already familiar with, they are no less cheesy, but usually not so preachy. We might mention The Passion of the Christ, Noah, The Ten Commandments, and The Greatest Story Ever Told as notable examples. Hardly more watchable than the aforementioned straight-to-DVD ad campaigns, mainstream productions don't touch the depth of personal belief so much as exploit stories for box office success. Whether assuming, (as it used to be) that everyone is Catholic, or making the born-again characters in a story the butt of ongoing jokes in the script, all of it is enough to keep evangelicals in fits of foam-flecked rage. None of it gets to the foundational questions of faith in an objective or rational way.

I was hopeful about The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis,  despite the garish “untold” part, which everyone who knows anything about Lewis already knows. It is true that Lewis was an atheist and came back to faith with support from his friends, among them J.R.R. Tolkien. The movie skimps on the details provided openly by Lewis and never gets to the quality of his real battles with faith. If I had heroes, both Lewis and Tolkien would be on the list. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on by or about both men, including collections of their correspondence. The movie unfairly dramatized what were friendships based on literature, language, and writing, rather than faith. The viewer will either think that Lewis’s atheism was not sincere or that his faith was thin and insipid. Neither has the merit of being even close to the truth.

Then, I came across a movie that had a little fanfare but seemed to cause discomfort with viewers beyond its ‘horror/thriller’ genre because it allegedly asked serious questions about religion and faith. Heretic (2024), starring Hugh Grant and written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, appeared to finally be a movie willing to dissect the religious impulse and challenge belief structures, at least based on the trailer.

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The story centers around two Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, as they go about their routine movements of daily mission work. They discuss visiting the home of a prospective convert who agreed to have a chat about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at an earlier time. After a brief debate, they finally decide to visit Mr. Reed (Grant), in obviously destabilizing weather. As they wait for Reed to answer the door, the viewer gets the sense that the opening scenes have all the hallmarks of Hansel and Gretel wandering into the forest and foolishly knocking at the gingerbread house. 

At first, Reed outwardly professes to be very interested in the questions of faith. In what may be unintended nods at M. Night Shyamalan or Alfred Hitchcock, the tone darkens quickly, and the viewers are made to feel immediately as though something is off and nothing is as it appears.

Reed is welcoming, appears genuinely interested in the discussion, and eases their discomfort about being in a home with a male without another woman present by telling them that his wife is baking a pie, but is feeling a bit shy. His initial disarming and friendly demeanor takes on the slightest edge as he proves that he knows much about the beginnings of the faith. He asks hard, probing questions about the most problematic parts of their faith. The more Reed goes on, the more uncomfortable his visitors become, and when he leaves the front room, ostensibly to get his wife at their request, they try to leave. Realizing that the key to their bike lock was left in their coats, which Reed took for them, they decide to leave the bikes and walk the few miles back to their church. The nervous sisters find the front door locked and realize that their only way out is through the house.

As the tension and mystery build, Reed invites them into the “kitchen” to meet his wife. Hesitating, they fake a phone call and tell him they are being demanded to return to their church. Reed admits that the front door is on a timer and cannot be opened until the next day and invites the missionaries to leave via the back door. They are ushered through a dark corridor into a library that feels very much like the sanctuary of a small church, and where Reed informs them that there is metal in the walls and ceiling that blocks phone signals. 

The walls of the second room are covered with religious iconography, and behind an altar set with candles, there are two doors. Reed goes on with his college-level discourse dismantling monotheism, describing how each subsequent variant from Judaism through to Islam and then to Mormonism, are iterations of the former, each more tawdry and harder to believe.

After a compelling rant, in which Reed also dismantles the idea of Jesus as having been based on previous historical and mythical beings with similar powers, he writes a message on each door. On one, he scribes Belief and on the other Disbelief. The missionary sisters are then compelled to choose one or the other based on how his message has shaken or reinforced their faith. Having gazed into the space beyond the doors already, when trying to leave, they are confused and frightened and well aware that they are more like flies in a web than unwary visitors in the home of an eccentric.

Here is where the movie drops its pretense and moves from a theological thriller to a ‘horror’ movie. I won’t give away what comes next, because I believe that it is worth seeing at least once, if one has the intestinal fortitude to withstand the disappointment. Yet, as the film transitions, the intellectual game of the first part starts to feel strained, then abstract, and finally disintegrates into something more tedious than harrowing. By the end, everything that we’ve heard and witnessed feels like cotton candy in the rain.

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Despite being well crafted and even well written, Heretic makes several mistakes that cause the film to feel disingenuous. Behind the intellectual rigor of the first half lies a film that is about a final girl escaping the clutches of a madman. It pretends to have equal depth at the end but perpetrates a kind of cinematic bait and switch. By subtle hints and clues, it shows itself for what it is, even from the beginning. It turns out to be no less tropey (and sometimes hokey) than any other selection from the genre. Proof that the movie producers think we, the viewers—perhaps like those who fall for televangelists—are imbeciles. 

The sister missionaries in the film, who are outwardly naive and innocent, are shown as more worldly than they let on. Reed, despite his outward appearance of wanting to have a chat about faith, is openly nefarious, barely keeping his devilish glee under wraps. At several points, the camera shows the viewer lovingly—almost lingeringly—where Chekov’s pistols are in the first few moments of the movie, so that we will know that the item is of importance to the progress. Discordant plot notes clumsily underscore the entire affair, but never so much as when, wet with freezing rain, the two sister missionaries debate departing before Reed ever answers his door.  This kind of hand-holding in script writing is why people are disappointed with movies these days. 

I watched the film with a desire, I think, to find something truly mindblowing at the end; to have learned a lesson, or to have had strongly-held beliefs challenged. I thought, at least at first, that the plot would reveal that Reed had churned up some ancient and therefore foundational mysteries and, like a character in a Lovecraft story, would say the archaic spell and bring up some horrible chthonic deity from out of space and time. Cosmic horror would have been an ideal climax for a movie that seeks, at least initially, to poke holes in grounded faith and belief. Hugh Grant as Reed perfectly captures the manic and obsessed antiheroes of Lovecraft, especially as he systematically dismantles the outward edifices of religion. 

My hopes were dashed.

The movie swings too hard from mystical topics to an unbelievable tale about a serial killer who has fallen for his own ridiculous religious delusions. Finding that his research inevitably leads him nowhere, his need to find meaning from nothing causes him to lose his mind. Thus, he kidnaps two young women to force the illusion of his own unbelievable faith on them in a bizarre reversal of their missionary work. 

As an analogy for the worn-out apologetics for the silly supernatural claims of religion, the film clearly shows to what level some people will take their belief to keep finding justification to believe it. Faith of that kind—that depends upon miracles—is merely self-delusion in a form that is palatable to the general public. As with any such dance, the effort gives diminishing returns. In that way, Reed exemplifies humanity's tendency to invent increasingly irrational beliefs as past faiths are exposed as man-made, rather than turning to embrace rationality and reason. This is the realm of madness, carefully composed under the fake calm of falsely modest piety, just waiting to find an excuse to kill in the name of its new god or revelation.

Like religious dogma, any horror movie where the young female protagonists fall into the clutches of a madman, the characters must obey certain immutable rules. At some point in the script, it is obvious that only one of them will survive. In Heretic, it was clear almost from the outset which one it would be, but even so, the writers did try to throw the viewer off the scent.

Between them, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes are not so much friends as merely thrust together by the rules of their shared faith. Sister Paxton is timid, naive, even a little immature, whereas Sister Barnes seems to have a little worldliness tucked under her prim black jumper. With worldliness, though, comes the rough backstory that is intended to make the audience think she will crack under Reed’s onslaught of logic.

The movie got the doe-eyed innocent part for Mormon missionaries right, but what it also did, as they wandered through the nightmare of Mr. Reed’s labyrinthine house, was show how faith becomes a choice rather than an obligation. The missionaries are trained to proselytize at their targets (marks?) until they choose to join Mormonism. One of the flaws of religion is that when one chooses to leave the faith—becomes an apostate in their former faith group—one loses their community. The sisters in the film, had a choice to enter Reed’s house, but the choice to leave was fraught with brutal consequences. 

My thoughts on this film are mixed. As the final scene goes dark with collapsing scenery, nothing is resolved. Cinematic symbolism, ever immutable, shows that the storm that trapped them is over and the sun is shining, but the butcher’s bill has yet to be tallied. By ending on somewhat of a cliffhanger, this movie skates free of the consequences of its actions, but does so with intent. How many times have we seen televangelist preachers shown for the greedy monsters they are, but all too soon, they are back on TV hoodwinking others? Quite often. Religion, for all it professes to be a force for good in the world, is guilty of unthinkable disgraces, supporting genocides, authoritarian leaders, murder, hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and war, and yet, we blink and look past all that because we like the sense of fellowship and belonging to something bigger than ourselves. That blinking is a choice, too.

Heretic is not like other films, in that it really does try to break down religious belief into something that is clearly man-made, but it proposes nothing in its place. Because the players are, in essence, all deluded to some degree, the idea that rationalism, skepticism, and reason are options for them is a foregone conclusion. In the end, this movie boils all strong beliefs down to the marrow of madness, but whether we continue to break bones to feast on the marrow is not obligatory, but a choice. The movie broke some tropes, at least at first, by being willing to confront these questions, but it didn’t go far enough to resolve or answer the final queries it made. I like to think this is because the final questions that we face are also not resolved. However, for all its initial bluster, Heretic faded to something silly and unrecognizable, but then, maybe that is a final analogy of religion and faith, too.

Summer Colds and Some Are Not

 We've all been there. Sinuses packed with cement, but the nose is still trickling. Ears clogged. Head throbbing. Hoarse as a raven. Crackling cough. The woozy, dizzy, wobbly feeling that one's head weighs a thousand brick-filled pounds. No appetite, or odd, specific cravings. Waking with the arid Sahara in the mouth. All oomph departs. We shuffle along, the walking unwell, trying to focus and survive, just counting down until our immune systems manage to kick out the offending virus.

600 years ago, the common cold, as carried by the conquistadors who landed on the Yucatan Peninsula, likely wiped out ninety percent of the indigenous population of North and Central America. Today, we still get symptoms, but only the immunocompromised are seriously threatened by a cold. For those who still get colds now and then, it can feel pretty unpleasant, just not likely to cause viral genocide.

I can empathize with people who suffer upper respiratory infections. I spent the early decades of my life fending off almost every kind of bug and illness. I had walking pneumonia five times as a lad. One time was so bad I wound up in the hospital, dehydrated and taking breathing treatments. I caught strep, ear infections (though my brother suffered those worse, and more often than I did), head colds, and chest colds, and developed allergies to dust, dogs, cats, horses, hay, grass, and leaf mold. 

When I moved to NC, I soon found that, as my lungs cleared (I spent the previous decade smoking), the inundation of alien (to me) pollen, dust, spores, molds, and fungi in the air left me gasping. Within the first month after quitting cold turkey, I developed a double lung infection and had to take cough syrup laced with codeine, steroids, and antibiotics. That is when I learned officially that I am an asthmatic. Since everyone around me smoked when I was growing up, second-hand smoke likely contributed both to my asthma and my breathing problems.

When I worked in the schools, surrounded constantly by runny noses and germy little paws, I caught everything that came along. I have a memory of a case of bronchitis so bad that I started hacking around Labor Day and was just clearing my lungs of it as I put up Christmas lights on Thanksgiving weekend.

And then, as if I were injected with some odd immunity pill or vaccine, I stopped getting sick. Oh, once in a while, I get a very mild case of the sniffles, or I might get the stomach bug that is going around, but generally, I rarely get sick. Other people around me drop like snotty, phlegmmy flies, yet I remain untouched. 

From July of 2011 until this essay hit the Web, I have only been “sick” with a cold three or four times. One of those times was in December. The most recent was last week.

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When one becomes immune, one gets used to not having the symptoms and then tends to forget how awful having a cold can feel. After a few years, it can be hard not to mistake immunity for genetic superiority. I mean, how hard is it to be healthy? It seems to take no effort. Everyone got COVID, but I never did. The delusions of strength gained from the Earth's yellow sun can be quite strong. 

No, I'm not from Krypton. I know where my immunity came from. No one can work with elementary school kids for the better part of a decade and not be dipped into the most crawling, slimy, contagion-ridden environment in the world. Children are harbingers of disease and viral infection. When the pandemic was blasting us, the main instructions were to give one another space, don't touch one's face or anyone else's, and wash hands regularly and thoroughly. Go to an elementary school and you will see every one of those rules (and several more) not only flagrantly dismissed, but joyfully, ecstatically, lavishly broken. 

Exposure to that level of epidemiological inferno is enough to make even the most ironclad immune systems clatter to the ground like Grandma's good China plates in an earthquake. It can also, in cases like mine, give one's body a list of antibodies so long that one slowly becomes like a supernova of immunity. Just let a virus or bacteria land on my skin, and white hot lasers erupt and vanquish it. All I have to do is wash my hands, and I'm good to go.

Now, I won't say that I am smug about my immune system. That would be to convey the wrong attitude. I don't think less of those around me who still suffer. Not really. I just thought people were impressed because I never get sick. However, what I thought were looks of admiration for my lack of susceptibility to colds were expressions of distaste and jealousy. It is hard not to brag about one's wellness when others are yarking up a lung all day for weeks on end. A word of advice. Don't tell your friends or family that you never get sick. It is just not the done thing.

Those glares of jealousy didn't start for me until I was working more commonly with people from the younger generations. I don't know what happened when they were small and got sick, but every tiny snuffle or ache must have been treated with the urgency of a medical emergency. One cough, sneeze, or headache, and the kids go running to Google for a diagnosis, then to the doc-in-the-box for meds.

My generation spent whole years alone outside, exposed to every kind of bacteria, germ, virus, cootie, and bug. We dutifully brought them home and got the whole family sick. I sometimes think that's why we were expected to stay clear of our folks; so they wouldn't catch what we had. All of us always had something yellow or green dripping from our mucus membranes. As I mentioned, I tended toward a Victorian level of frailness.

All the illnesses we caught doubled in intensity when adolescence flooded us with exuberant hormones. Stinky, pimply teens necking in the hallway were literal walking vectors, passing communicable diseases from host to host as the romantic impulses rose and fell with the hormonal tides. I remember at least two epidemics of mononucleosis where whole grades were leveled by the kissing bug and they canceled school.

Yet, we prevailed. We clung to life, like snotty-nosed special forces operators. Our parents sent us to school even when we were sick. My mother invited kids over to play when I got chicken pox. If I was sick on Tuesday, I was back in school on Wednesday, sinuses draining, coughing my damned head off, but so were the other kids. We learned to keep going even when we were worn and cadaverous by whatever ailment was “going around”. 

By comparison to our parents’ phlegmatic reaction to our arresting lack of health, my younger colleagues and friends fold like cheap beach chairs at the first sign of sinus pressure or a runny nose. I once had a coworker who had the uncanny ability to sense when they were likely to get sick within a fortnight and would just stay home, waiting for the onset of symptoms. For these delicate ones, anyone sneezing around them can send them into hysterics. They might not be sick at all, but if there’s even a chance, they will not mess around.

While we were spooning dirt from under the porch into our mud pies and then tasting them and getting tummy aches from eating ‘the red berries’ when we were kids, these children were being surrounded by hypochondriacal parents. I seriously once heard a former colleague say, after they had to clear their throat, “Oh gosh. This is probably cancer.”

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Catching a cold for me is so rare that, rather than dread the symptoms, I secretly revel in them. It is a novel experience to blow several tablespoons of mucus into an overburdened tissue and then gaze in to see if there is any sign of infection. It's been so long since I have been phlegmmy or had a chest cold, that the crackling cough and the subsequent expulsion of what we used to call a Rocky Mountain oyster, feels interestingly pleasant. My colds never stick around, though some people in my town have illnesses that last for weeks, and one lady, who—and I’m not making this up—works at a local big brand pharmacy and has had the sniffles since I first moved here. 

Plus, and let's face it, it can be fun to purchase over-the-counter meds. There are a whole host of nostrums, ointments, medicines, and tinctures to aid with the symptoms of a bad cold. One $30 bottle of pills promises the end of chest congestion in just two days. One zinc tablet, if taken within hours of symptoms, can end a bad cold up to five days sooner. If one has the provender to afford them, the selections are endless. I have to carefully remind myself that there is no cure for the common cold. It just has to be gotten through.

My own ailment is all but past, though I’m now convinced it wasn’t an actual cold. I foolishly mowed the grass on a dry, dusty day and filled my nose and lungs with all kinds of monsters dwelling in the chaff of previous mowings. My suffering began immediately after that and lasted several days. A mask will be essential next time. I did develop a cough, but as an asthmatic, this is fairly common with environmental allergens. Never did the expectorations from my upper respiratory system take on a sickly yellow or green tint. Anyway, I'm medicated for my asthma. I foolishly poked the hornet's nest of my reactionary immune system, causing an overproduction of histamine. I'm convinced this is what happened in December, too. If anything, these minor, piddly “colds” were from being out in nature, not from the actual rhinovirus.

Meanwhile, my younger friends treated me like I was a leper. To them, from a distance, of course, I was dying. Each cough or clearing of my throat meant that I would soon be a phantom. My suddenly raspy Kris Kristofferson-like baritone meant I wouldn't survive without 24/7 care from a trained ICU team, and even then, it would be touch-and-go. They were kind, from 20 yards away. One even asked me if my diagnosis was grim.

I don't mean to castigate them for being weenies. I mean, they really seem to care when someone gets ill, which is unusual to those of us born before the 1980s. If our parents had cared about us being sick, I would also take any accumulated sick time to rest and recuperate instead of working through whatever this was, croaking like a crow for a week. Meanwhile, I would have missed a whole week of emails, deadlines, and other things that I'm not going to let the sniffles put me behind on. If the young ones want to shudder and scamper when I sneeze, that’s on them. I’m not sure you can catch asthma, but I dig sounding like Kris Kristofferson, so I guess it all balances in the end.

Did You Feel That?

Author's Note: Minutes after I hit publish on this essay, as if the weather gods were listening, things outside began to go a little haywire. Thursday dawned cooler, cloudy, with the promise of storms. The next few days will be much cooler, especially for August. The pen is mightier, in this case, than the heat wave. 

In late June of this year, just a bit over a month ago, as the summer solstice was being celebrated, Beartooth Pass in Montana got just over 10 inches of snow in a weekend. The storm downed trees, knocked out power, caused travel delays, flooding, and disrupted people's summer barbecues. What might have been a typical cold snap formed into one extremely weird, singularly unseasonal, intense weather event.

In places like Montana, during the correct seasons, snowfall of this degree is as common as mosquitoes in my yard. There have been some warmer winters and some colder ones, cracking the averages, but late June is deep into the year to get this kind of (literally) flakey weather, even in Big Sky country.

Beartooth Pass arises as a topic because we had an incredibly early weather event in my part of the world last week that, despite its place in the seasonal year, was as unusual and noteworthy as the Montana storm. It did not tear things up or stop transportation or electrical service. It was nevertheless profound. At least for me.

For years, I have been thinking about and talking about a change that occurs mid-to-late summer, where the incoming fall season shows itself to be clearly, obviously there, just biding its time. If one knows what to look for, it can be quite a delightful discovery, especially when the days are otherwise endless and oppressive.

In other seasons, these changes can be quite apparent. In deep winter, the blooming daffodils betray the coming of spring. In late autumn, the last of the falling leaves and the arrival of frosty mornings betray the oncoming of winter. Perhaps it is the lack of foliage that makes these changes more prominent in the other seasons. Summer tends to crowd the seasonal changes occurring in its domain with deep green leaves and scorching temperatures, but they are happening.

Going outside right now, you will see evidence only for summer. Verdant landscapes, yellowjackets, mosquitoes, poison mixed in with the English ivy, black-eyed susans popping, the heavy rasping of cicadas, and the swamp-like heat and humidity of the Dog Days. Like any rational person, you would likely pull your head back inside where the temps are reasonable and opt not to go back out until October, at least.

However—and please stay with me here—look again. Try to notice the underlying changes. Gone is the white-hot brightness of June. The sun has taken on a golden light. The sky, when not shrouded with iron storm clouds, has an autumnal cerulean tint. At twilight, you will notice that the shadows are getting ever so slightly longer. Are those crickets? Behold all the little webs woven by hungry spiders on the box elder bushes. There is even an aroma, if you know what to sniff for. The robust, verdant scent of chlorophyll at its ripest.

Practiced senses can (and in my case do) note all these changes in my mental calendar. I'm perpetually looking for evidence. Sure, it's only late July, but the signs are there. Every now and then, too, July or early August renders up a whole day full of evidence of the coming seasonal change. When that happens my heart thrums with the joy of its prophetic song.

Tuesday last week dawned like any other summer weekday. From the windows, appraising the grey light of the predawn world, it looked like summertime. Taking the dogs out to the little grass patch for their morning relief, though, I noticed something refreshingly unusual: it was chilly. 

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In the South, summers begin with a gentle warm up. It can still be cool in the evenings, but May doesn't bring much humidity with it. The days get warm, but only pleasantly so. After a long winter and brisk spring such weather can feel truly welcoming. There arrives the promise of long afternoons in the pool, and by the grill, fireworks and baseball games. The beautiful warmth betrays the coming reality. All too soon, humidity will blanket the land and stifle respiration, cause lots of perspiration and generally make everyone miserable. As the season progresses, it becomes positively, arrestingly swampy. Going outside is like plunging one's head into a sauna. For asthmatics like myself, the air quality declines with the heat and the combination makes it like one trying to breathe on an alien world. 

An 80 degree day in May is warm and delightful. Take a book to a sunny spot. Recline in the green grass. Enjoy the weather. An 80 degree day in July or August, and you just want to climb into your freezer bin and stay there until at least September's second half. I feel this sincerely and keenly. This past weekend, forgoing my usually lovely lie-in on most Saturday mornings, I togged up in my groundskeeper gear and mowed our North Yard while the sun was still low on the horizon. 

Upsetting as this was for the neighbors who were trying to laze the morning away, I had no choice. The yard had become a serious jungle and there were rumors that another heat wave was settling over the region, meaning that the next time I would be able to get out and mow without dying of heat exhaustion would  be weeks in the future.

By the time I completed my work, I was exhausted. It's depressing. At this apogee of the solar year, we could have two more solid months of hot weather ahead. Peppered into this pressure cooker world will undoubtedly be a series of hurricanes that will alternately drench and thicken the outdoors with sultry, bayou-thick air.

So, I did what any rational person would. I went inside, stripped out of my drenched work clothes, sudsed up with Dawn dish soap to kill the oil from poison ivy and dislodge ticks and then put on clean clothes and hung out in the den with Micki and the pups where it was cool and dry. 

My memory, as I sat there pouring over the paperback, kept lurching back to Tuesday morning. Brief, quiet, likely unnoticed, it hung there in my mind. A tiny promise of the future. Cool, calm, autumnal, clear, dry and full of that perfect atmosphere of fall. Was it a devastating snow storm? No. Did it unmoor the power or break transportation? Not at all. All it did was provide proof that, despite the burdensome, potent, blazing summer sun and humidity, the end of all that is coming soon. In a month and a half, it will be the autumnal equinox. Whether fall weather starts on that moment is doubtful, but it will come and then every morning will be as precious, as glorious, as refreshingly chilly as last Tuesday morning was. Since that's all we're likely to get soon, I'll take it in lieu of a snow storm, probably. Maybe. 

I wonder what it costs to fly to Montana?

Break (In) Routine

Our routine is a lubricant that flows into the wheels and cogs of daily life and provides, if not complete smoothness, then bearable vibrations as each day combines itself into its siblings to form first a week and then a month and then, eventually, a whole year. With the passing of each week in that year, we look to the structures of our established daily routine to give us balance, a sense of control, and understanding as each day's adventure unfolds. 

Any actual control we feel we have is merely an illusion. Life brings us challenges every day. Some are major challenges, some minor, some life-altering, some merely pesky but they all diverge from the routine we depend upon. I have come to believe that the routine in my life gives me some comfort when the day turns rough, because, soon it will be lunchtime, or I will clock out for the day, maybe tonight is date night or homemade pizza night, or bedtime is near, when I’ll slip into bed with a nice cup of peppermint tea with honey and a good book to smooth the way into sleep. The seemingly fixed nature of a schedule, especially during the week, really helps me to face the current moment, understanding that regardless if I'm almost fighting dangerous members of the public, or merely cleaning up chairs from a children's event, ‘this too, shall pass. ’

Each day really is like a snowflake, and the schedules and routines we keep are arbitrary, aggravating, and sometimes, downright restrictive. As we make plans (the best laid ones mentioned by the poet Burns) for the future, we strike out into unknown territory, weeks, months, and sometimes years out, placing mental waypoints and milestones so that there is an event to look forward to even though the future has yet to be tainted by the rigors of the present. Such was our family vacation, as we planned it way back in September of ‘24. Well before we ever started packing our towels and swimsuits, we intended to coordinate everyone getting to a beach house we rented for a week of relaxing from routines and schedules.

Making a down-payment on a house on the sand for July, we fixed that moment in the future, but we still had months of routine to get through, so when the whole clan came for Christmas, we collectively looked forward to when we would be together again as a group in just seven short months. To me, way out there in future land, it felt nebulous, ephemeral, speculative.

As the New Year passed and everyone headed home, the longest January on record finally tripped over to February, discussions about “the beach trip” became a universal part of everyone's lexicon. We made plans, bought bathing suits and chairs, and looked happily into the future, trying to imagine what vacation would be like. Each week brought a seven-day subtraction between us in the current moment and the day of departure when we all headed toward the edge of the world where our little vacation spot churned through a family a week in the interim. As time passed, our daily routines began to develop a steady, vacation-flavored wobble.

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Devastating our normal, quiet routines, we crammed a lot into the weeks leading up to departure. It is stunning how fast time seems to fly when you look at it in the rearview. It is also astounding how far up the throttle you can jam the hours of one day as a deadline approaches. The planned things at work, like programs, meetings, projects, due dates and all the regular tasks do add some comfortable stress to the seemingly—in the moment—slow passage of time. Then there are the incidentals, frustrating customer interactions, lost children, broken computers, challenging research questions and almost fights with violent individuals.

Few weeks are ever as crammed as the week before vacation. With fewer than seven days left before everyone headed out to our common destination, it dawned on all of us that there were still a billion tiny things left to do on top of what was, for me at least, an arrestingly busy week at work.

Eight hours of what felt like running, screaming and weeping at work, followed by the horrid, creeping, predatory sense of all the preparation we swore to do in the intervening months (now passed) that remains undone loomed over us. Our lists became unpleasant hornets in our collective bonnet. Add the panic, pressure and inevitably changing plans that forced us to put in another five hours of cleaning, buying, and fretting, it's lucky we managed it all. By the time the Thursday before the Saturday we were leaving, we were all tired, frustrated, ill-tempered and really ready to throw up our hands and call the whole thing quits.

Then, as if the week and our emotions hadn't done us enough evil, Friday dawned and I had to, on top of everything else, take the pups to the kennels at lunch, attend an all-hands meeting, move 700 pounds of metal shelving and close the library. Meanwhile, Micki, who has off Fridays, ran seemingly endless errands, cleaned and packed, prepared for the middle kids and granddaughter to make a stop at our house overnight, got the cats sorted, made several “day of departure” lists and was still cleaning, packing and working on laundry when I skidded home. She was beyond exhausted. I jumped in to help finish the lists, that like a hydra, grew two more items for every one we checked off.

I still hadn't packed or done laundry, the car still needed to be laden with all of our things, and, as if the universe was putting us through Navy SEAL hell week, the Portland kids found out last minute that flooding in Chicago canceled their flight plans and had to scramble to get a new flight. Their updated itinerary meant they would be arriving way earlier at the airport near the beach than originally expected.

Our quotidian routines abandoned us and we were now zombie-like creatures, absently jamming things into a very small and overburdened SUV and unloading things from the mountain kids’ cars. We crashed hard. I don’t even remember setting an alarm.

We awoke well before dawn, ragged, groggy, punchy, echoes of the frenetic few days past still jittering our nervous systems. Details had yet to be ironed out. Our bags had to be jammed into the car. We had to get gas, stop for a biscuit and hot drinks, then race to the airport close to the beach. I will say that 70 MPH feels like snail power when you’re in a hurry. 

Eventually, we made it, and we got the Portland kids and then, in a whiplashing and wrenching reverse of the previous week's panic-inducing pre-vacation madness, we suddenly had hours ahead of us before we could check into the beach house only a half hour from the airport. Unlike its overwrought predecessors, the day stretched out before us, full of promise and nothing on the schedule except waiting to move in and start the week. If you have ever jumped from a hot tub into a swimming pool, the somewhat invigorating shock is akin to what we felt.

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As usual, the first days of a vacation drag. They are so broken from the rhythms of the weeks prior that our brains are undone. Then, midweek, things kick up and soon it is the last day and we're back to thinking about packing and schedules. We consider when we have to check out, feel dread at needing to stuff the cars, hope to get in a final round of putt-putt, several final hours on the beach and then, sadly, with an ache near the heart, check out day dawns. We gave hugs all around, kissed the baby, and headed off to deposit the Portland kids at the airport, after spending some time wandering around in the oppressively sultry heat in downtown Wilmington.

Soon enough, it will be time to pick up the dogs, get laundry caught up, check to make sure the cats are still alive, and then try to settle back into non-vacation thinking. Then, we will begin making plans for our next family vacation, which won't occur for a year or more. Once again, a year feels like a very long time, indeed. 

We'll stand it. There will be other weeks off, other holidays, staycations, weekends with nothing planned, moments of real peace in the meantime. There will also be days when, as if the universe loves to check if we still have the stamina and guts, we will have to face down violent individuals, come millimeters from a brawl, and then force us to sit through a budget meeting as if nothing happened and then go home and pack for a flight.

If time is an illusion, then I'm afraid so are our routines.

In (Bradbury) We Trust

Science fiction is—at least partially—about guessing what the future might look like and then writing something entertaining about it. No one reading these extrapolations truly expects that the author will get it totally right. These are educated guesses, based on how things appear at the moment, and writers of the genre, whether great powerhouses like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, or the many lesser-known bricklayers, rarely get it even close to right. And yet here's the thing: sometimes they do.

Most well-known of the science fiction futurists who got things almost too right is H.G. Wells. In his 1908 story The War in the Air, Wells accurately describes world powers developing fleets of flying machines to build military supremacy and bomb cities. He eerily predicted the Battle of Britain well before flying machines were more than a breathless speculation. So accurate were his guesses (three years before Orville and Wilbur closed the bike shop) that science fiction fans often commented that Wells may have had a real time machine and used it.

Perhaps taking a page from Wells is another author who so closely guessed the nature of modernity that to read his collection of novels and short stories now is to wonder if he borrowed his predecessor's time traveling chair. Ray Bradbury, beloved author of such classics as Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, and The Illustrated Man, is a name that has become a byword for dystopian visions of totalitarian futures, planetary settlement, and censorship. The last two on that list have convinced me that Bradbury was no mere author. He was a prophet of Old Testament proportions. He seemed to know what the world would hold as he looked forward, and his tales are shockingly close to reality.

His masterpiece on book burning, Fahrenheit 451, is an incredible story of a future where technology has run rampant, people wish to live in ignorance, and books are the most deadly contraband imaginable. Here is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job it is not to put fires out, but to start them. If a person's home is suspected of containing books, Montag and his firemen go to that house and burn it. The houses are fireproof; only the books—and the people who have hoarded them—burn.

Montag's world is a place of futuristic technologies and mechanisms, but our modern moment, with a few negligible (and perhaps inevitable) differences. Montag's wife has become more and more aloof. Their house has a room where she can meet with friends from all over, broadcast on their walls. She is constantly listening in on dramas or interacting with people from elsewhere. She spends most of her time with “seashells buzzing like wasps” in her ears, even at night when she should be sleeping. How clear a vision of social media and earbuds does one need?

Because of her continued use of these technologies, she has become depressed, unable to sleep without pills; she is a wreck, continuously needing a fix from her fake friends. As she fades, Montag understands that she has become addicted not just to her sleeping aids, but to the constant sauté of electronic entertainment. As people turn toward technology, they become anxious, restless, unable to connect with other people, causing, as Montag sees it, a crisis of connectivity, purpose, meaning, and sense of usefulness.

Along the highways of the future, too, Montag witnesses self-driving cars, which people push to immense speeds, sometimes dying in horrible crashes as a result. Relieved of the requirement of carefully handling a vehicle, the “beetles” in Montag's future take on the role of the driver and so remove the need for care or caution or personal responsibility. Motorists drink and go driving with no thought of themselves or others.

Finally, there are the spider-like mechanical hounds: eight-legged “sniffers” that the firemen use to spy and search out books in people's homes. Ominous nods at semi-sentient technology that has gone rogue, these robotic assassins surveil constantly on the populace and bring back information to the firemen. The hounds can inject anesthetics or poisons as needed, and once a hound is on your trail, there is no way to shake it.

This may seem the most far-fetched aspect of Bradbury’s dystopian future, but actually, it is quite accurate. While the hounds and firemen of Montag's reality are a metaphor for a rabid hate of reading and books, Bradbury knew something about book banning and censorship even in his own modern moment. His novel was—and I'm sure you will catch the irony, not to say hypocrisy here—almost continuously challenged, faced several removals, and was even subjected to a rewrite (called the Bal-Hi version), which removed references to drug use, swearing, and violence. In one complaint about the novel, would-be banners hated a scene in which the Bible was burned (but were okay with other books going to the torch?), somehow missing the author's point altogether. Bradbury hadn't missed the point, though.

As I write this, rabid gangs of intellectually stunted mammals are trying to pass legislation that will give politically packed school boards in North Carolina the right to “pick books,” totally ignoring that school librarians are specially educated and trained to do this task. Other groups, always tiny but loud, are trying to get their own people on public library trustee boards to wreak havoc so that books teaching about history, diversity, LGBTQ+ topics, the Civil War, and the Holocaust cannot be purchased or put on shelves. People are being persecuted, fired, and ruined because they provide certain books. Spies are being hired into the school or library org charts to rat out the details of collections. Bradbury’s crystal ball showed firemen doing this, but the maniacs who want to ban books today are, in a sense, torching our right to read and ruining people's lives in the same way.

In the compilation of short stories called The Illustrated Man, Bradbury envisions a future that is both dark and terrifyingly accurate. In “Kaleidoscope,” a rocket is cut open by a meteor and sends the astronauts inside flailing out into space. Their dying radio chatter betrays their cutthroat ambitions and manipulations until they all plummet out of range. Looking up at the explosion, a little boy dreams about flying rockets one day. In one tale, wealthy parents wonder that their spoiled children's artificially intelligent nursery has come alive as a scene from the African veldt and slowly begin to sense that the lions in the room are terrifyingly real.

My favorite of the series is “The Rocket,” in which an impoverished junkyard owner saves for years to send one of his family to Mars via rocket. However, each of the family cannot bear to go without the rest, and so no one opts to take the trip. In a feat of filial piety and generosity, the father buys a prototype rocket and fits it with screens and motors, and though it never leaves the earth, takes his family on a wonderful trip using their imaginations.

Bradbury’s prose is curt, steely, even brusque, but poetic at the same time. He captures the reader's imagination with intense flashes of descriptions of rockets and forbidding technology and then balances it all with clipped, straightforward dialogue that imitates the materialistic and sometimes fretful ideologies that he holds in critical apposition with his own era.

People in his stories are seldom truly happy. Something is always missing. They are motivated by the desire for wealth or notoriety, rather than discovery or scientific research. They live in pinched societies, wedged against technologies that have tyrannical tendencies and corporations that treat all but the most wealthy as peasants.

There are smart homes, rocket ships, universal surveillance, super-rich villains, egomaniacal leaders, vicious and psychopathic children, overwhelmed alien invaders, ghosts of how things used to be, pandemics of virus and addiction both to substances and one's occupation. In a sense, minus one or two forgivable excesses which are natural to the author and the genre, it feels almost like Bradbury really did borrow Wells's time machine and took copious notes on what he saw.

I'm not aware of any other modern authors (yet) who have managed to capture the present moment so eloquently and with such keen criticism and skill. Like John of Patmos, he gave us a revelation about the future from his perspective. The ills of technology, the lust for power and money, the dangers of blind wealth, and the impulse to explore are all captured with almost perfect clarity. He puts his finger on the pulse of the American dream, eloquently describing the intrinsic fears that motivate, the tyrannical ideas that pervade, and the swollen self-pride that ultimately destroys us.

He gave a hint at the secret of his magnificent futurism in the following quote, in which he both winks and then sharpens his quill: “Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present.” On that scathing note, I offer you one of America's best writers and encourage you to make a foray into his weird, sometimes terrifying, but always terrifyingly accurate future.

Independence Day Thoughts

Dear Readers, 

First, thank you so much for making it through to July with me. It has been a busy and eventful year for us, and the world has been equally eventful and busy. 

I'm writing this week to speak with each of you about this time of year. It's funny to me how, at Christmas, we get very reflective about wishing that we could all be a little more thoughtful, generous of spirit, focused on gathering and spending time with friends and family the whole year. For me, although I think these are admirable sentiments, I would rather we spread the cheer of Independence Day throughout the whole year.

There are two aspects of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the previous generations back to our founders that are worth acknowledging. The first one is to be appreciative of what we have, but the other is to make sure that inheritance lasts for future generations. It isn't enough to take advantage of our freedoms, we have to work to ensure our children and grandchildren get to keep them.

I know that it sounds preachy, but I always feel uplifted by the idea that we have, despite all the challenges we have faced in our nation's history, made it this far. We have conquered both the existential domestic threats and have faced down enemies far larger than the mad Hanoverian king. It hasn't always been an easy or clearly lit path to get here, but we did it. I don't need to list those threats, because as Americans we know what they are.

Each generation, it seems, has its own crisis to manage and ours turns out to be a crisis that threatens the very heart of our nation from within. Make no mistake, it threatens all of us, no matter which party we adhere to or how we worship, or the color of our skin or ethnic heritage. Once unleashed, like all tyrannies, it will quickly take away our rights and put mad rules in place to remove our dearly bought freedoms, morphing this land of liberty into a gulag.

At this time of year, I want to encourage us to remember the other threats to liberty that we have defeated, whether those based on the divine right of kings, or the lunatic assumption that all humans are not equal, or the looming shadows of fascism, racism, totalitarianism, or whatever this current threat happens to be named by history, we always manage to do the right thing. It takes us a while sometimes, as Churchill implied, but we do get it right eventually. We can only win through, if we remember what it means to be an American, not just for ourselves, but for everyone who calls this nation home.

So, as the flags get hung and we break out the red, white and blue decorations and attend barbecues and baseball.games, watch fireworks and splash about in the pool or the ocean, I want to encourage myself and you, dear readers, that we have faced worse and we have managed to survive. Conjure in your mind those conflicts both martial and intellectual and know that, like before, the only way we get through is by standing together in solidarity and fighting for what America really stands for.

That means voting when the time comes, but also talking to people kindly and respectfully across ideological lines. Now is a time of universal national pride, so let's use it to refresh our sense of what really matters: it is not politics or party adherence; it is unity and acceptance.

That is the note I wish to send to you, this week. Please remember, however you vote, worship, participate in this great national experiment, we got this far by fighting for the country we love despite our personal differences, not by losing hope when threats challenge our very existence. Together, we stand, and make America reach her full potential as a place that welcomes and protects. When needed, she is a land populated with fearless people who love her and will defend what she stands for. 

Happy 4th! Let Freedom Ring in each of our hearts and may those piercing tones burn away the corruption, the hatred, the foolishness of politics and greed in the crucible of our mutual love and respect for our land.

Have a great weekend! 

Dave

Another Shop in the Mall

A large boutique opened in our mall last year, maybe the year before, and Micki recently met with the owner to have her books sold from one of the store's many display booths. We drove over to see the display, and as we entered, I had a familiar feeling. Here, I thought, is a somewhat outmoded delivery system for our endless human need to buy things. My senses swirled, and memories of other malls in other places came flooding back. As I settled on a bench to watch the people go by, I realized just how much of my life has had a mall as its setting.

When I was growing up, the Berkshire Mall on the outskirts of Reading was our closest mall. There were countless storefronts, hundreds of places to sit and loiter, and large spaces filled with massive green plants with waterworks interspersed. Except for the enclosed nature of the mall, it could have just as easily been a busy downtown street bustling with shoppers, wanderers, and family members exhausted and looking for a reprieve from endless spending.

Every mall in America once held the same expectations for those who crossed the thresholds. There were hundreds of stores, ranging from book and shoe shops, toy stores, restaurants, places to purchase apparel, jewelry, furniture, knick-knacks, newspapers, coffee or other beverages, to places to gather to eat or to relax or play arcade games.

The shops were arranged up and down both sides of the mall's broad corridors. In the central area, elevators and escalators took one to the second level to access massive department stores situated within the cyclopean shopping center. There were many such emporiums with names like Pomeroy’s, Wanamaker’s, Sears, and JCPenney. The Berkshire Mall also had a few pharmacies and a Woolworth’s in the old days.

Dotted prolifically throughout the concourse were hundreds of free-standing kiosks selling tchotchkes, doo-dads, thingamies, whatyacallums, and hooza-whatsits. There were food vendors galore, and almost as soon as one entered, the scent of baked, fried, fast food, roasted peanuts, soft pretzels, ice cream, sugary drinks, and other treats wafted over you. Beneath it all hovered the potent aroma of buttery movie theater popcorn.

The panoply of sense-shocking, mind-numbing spectacle was more than a little kid could stand. I, like some desert-marooned wanderer, shambled into the marketplace and was quickly overcome. I loved it. As soon as I had wheels of my own, I spent every moment I could at that mall and then branched out to the other malls in the region. Each larger town in the area had its own unique mall. All participated in the same basic rules of mass-market consumerism, but all were laid out differently. At each, I experienced a wondrous variety of shops and stores in an infinitely renewable variation of wonder and desire to spend my money.

The Lebanon Valley Mall, near Schaefferstown, became a hangout for some of my former classmates. We would regularly gather to see movies, hang out at the music store to rifle through CDs and tapes, pester the bookshop clerks, and eat enough sugary foods to overstimulate the combined nervous system of an entire elementary school. Sometimes, after Christmas or birthday cards had been opened and cash deposited, we ventured to other malls, too.

A few miles away in downtown Lancaster was the Park City Mall, which was more vast than the Berkshire Mall and was shaped like a starfish with a huge central hub capped with what looked like a circus tent. Each arm or spoke was full to the brim with all the shops one could imagine. Near Philadelphia, the King of Prussia Mall rivaled them all for size and magnificence.

Proverbs says that a fool and his money are soon parted. Well, I'm not ashamed to admit that when I was younger and regularly went to all the malls, I was that fool. I could always find something I wanted to purchase. Sometimes—who am I kidding?—most times, it was books and comics. I also splurged on music, movies, food, and t-shirts.

When I moved to Asheboro, being a connoisseur of malls, I visited the Randolph Mall (now called the Asheboro Mall) and probably spent too much time and money there, too. Like other malls, it had portals to Sears, Belk, Dillard's, JCPenney, and a movie theater. It was modest compared to the Four Seasons Mall in Greensboro or the more massive shopping experiences to be had in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, or Chapel Hill, but nevertheless had everything that a mall usually boasts, including its denizens, commonly, not to say derogatorily, called mall rats.

Early on, I learned that there are those humans who thrive exclusively within the gravity of a shopping mall. They are regulars, always there from the moment the doors open until stores close and the security guards kick them into the vast parking lots, shouting, “You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”

There is a perpetual range of misfits and hooligans, lonely (and skeevy) old-timers, jersey-bedecked jocks, overly made-up and scantily clad cheerleader types. There were the overweight and acne-stricken, the nerd, the dweeb, the geek, and the slob. A short guy with tightly braided long hair in a faux leather jacket—a variant of him exists in every mall—talks to his shabby cronies about how he was once an MMA fighter, leading his small band of poorly washed, greasy-haired stick-at-naughts forever in a pageant around the mall, bothering shop owners and clogging up the food court.

Early on in my residency in Asheboro, I got a part-time job in our mall's bookstore. Unlike most of the shops, this place had its own doors to the world that opened earlier and stayed open later than the mall. I used to wonder if any of these mall people ever went home. I secretly believed that some of the ‘mall rats’ actually lived in the walls, behind panels concealing a closed storefront, or precariously balanced in handmade hammocks way up in the rafters. Instead, they just vanish at 9 p.m. and reappear when the mall opens at 10 the next day.

In 2001, Asheboro had a downtown that some ghost towns would have found to be a little too dead. The mall (and the newly completed Walmart Supercenter) were the main hubs of commerce in our small town. I'm glad to say that is no longer true. The downtown is a bustling, thriving, and lively center for food and commerce, and the mall has since begun to fall into the shadow of its former consumer glory.

Now, walking out of the boutique shop and into the wider mall, we see the remnants of shops that are boarded over with neatly painted vistas or photos of families—ironically—outside enjoying nature. Others display enlarged black-and-white pictures of the town's shopping history. Huge swaths where stores once beckoned to shoppers and loiterers are now just wall space.

A few stores remain in operation as I write this. We have a large sporting goods center, our humble movie theater, a Belk department store, a Chick-fil-A, a jeweler, the boutique shop, a few clothiers, and a men's suit retailer. There are several large shoe stores, a smelly bath lotion place, a phone case shop which I swear is a front for some illegal enterprise, a city utility counter to pay water and power bills, the bookstore I briefly worked at, and the Dragon Egg Chinese takeout.

There are a few stores that open to the outside, attached but not accessible from inside the mall. There is a small, perpetually empty arcade, and a host of benches, tables, and cordoned-off areas for queuing (but for what?) are all that remain of a once vibrant shopping experience.

I am of two minds about this. Once a great fan of malls, I now see the benefit that comes from supporting local businesses. When the downtown began to thrive, the mall faltered. It has never regained itself, which implies that the downtown has put down solid roots. Who could lament that?

We have heard promises that one day soon, the mall will be remodeled into an indoor/outdoor format. Whether strictly true or not, I am ambivalent. As I sat there, I was struck by how much the place feels like an airport that is under construction. Not much is going on, except for the people who show up to fill the empty space.

Small packs of people rove here and there. Oldsters do laps. Groups of straggly teenage girls guffaw when older boys walk by on their way to get a slice before the movie starts. A group holds hands in a circle in the central open area, either praying to bring the mall down in a puff of dust, or to keep it up so they can continue to have a place to perform their rituals without being in the weather.

I see a beleaguered mother pushing a double stroller and corralling two toddlers while hollering into her phone. A very young couple gently clasp hands and then nervously look about to see if anyone is watching. Grandpas sit on the benches, looking paunchy, bilious, and fed up. Grandmas with hair like the atmospheres of gas giants gossip around a table by the Chick-fil-A. A little kid is wailing. A security guard is talking to a man with a mop and bucket. A woman with sunken cheeks and feverish eyes barks at her boyfriend, who has a neck tattoo of a female devil and an unwashed mullet.

All of this happens within the air-conditioned safety of our neighborhood shopping mall. There aren't many stores, but the people still gather, wander, hang out, loiter, and live their lives. Behind it all, that deep aroma of buttery popcorn. Over the low-level speaker system, "Drops of Jupiter" by Train is playing. Of course it is. It's the theme of all malls everywhere.

Once a symbol of capitalism, a pillar of the American community, an institution of unbridled consumerism, a festival of food, pop culture, acquisitiveness, materialism, and gangly teenage independence, the American shopping mall is a pale shade of its former glory. As if the organism is breaking up, the parking lot periphery is now full of standalone shops, dentist offices, retail coffee stores, banks, and a Chipotle well away from the infrastructure that once drew thousands per day. Those stores and the businesses downtown now drag people out and away from the mall.

I see an empty building, dank, dark, conduit hanging from once glowing lights, dry fountains, stained rugs, pigeons roosting in the skylights. It is a dim prophecy of a time when all malls are extinct. It might be better that way, but it makes me sad, nonetheless.

Micki walks up and startles me from my deep reverie. “I'm going to get my nails done,” she says, gesturing to a large purple neon sign near where I'm sitting. I nod. “I'll be at the bookstore,” I say.

It's not much, but it is our mall. For now.

Secret Happy Mondays

For years, I have been the beneficiary of a schedule that requires each employee to work a closing shift one day per week. Each one of us comes in at 1 and works until 9 on an assigned day. We only close late Monday through Thursday nights, and my night is Monday.

This might sound unpleasant, especially considering the negative buzz that Mondays get as the first day back after far too short a weekend. Monday mornings for most people are part of the cultural lexicon of unhappy things working people have to endure. The alarm always goes off too early on Mondays. The urge to have a lovely lie in and skip the rat race is at its strongest. Deeply melodramatic feelings of nostalgia for the last two days off develop their own potent emotional gravity. We pine, we long, we ache for Saturday's independence and Sunday's gloriously unfettered lack of office grind.

Well, not for me the unmitigated ballyhoo. While other people are sobbing into their grits facing the new work week, I've already been to the gym, and am sitting in my recliner, feet up with the dogs watching my shows or reading or tapping out my draft for that week's essay. While other people are combing their inboxes for the email that Jane sent at 5 p.m. on Friday or totting up that week's to-do list, I'm shamelessly adding a few hours to the weekend's leisurely respite from the last work week and pleasurably deferring the next one.

When I moved into my current position, more than a decade ago, I was informed that I would be closing on Mondays. Up to that point, Tuesdays had been my night, which was awkward and unpleasant. It was so odd to start the week off normally and then get to have the morning off the next day. Then, after getting home—it always takes me the damnedest time to wind down after a day at work—I sit there staring straight at the ceiling waiting for my eyes to whack closed. So, I gladly accepted the new Monday shift, seeing that lovely extension of the weekend before me like a weekly snow delay to be coveted and enjoyed. Ever since then, I have jealously protected my priceless closing night from others who would pry it from me.

The other nice thing about closing Mondays is that occasionally one gets a respite from the late close shift when a holiday makes for a long weekend. On those weeks, unlike the poor saps who have to close on the other nights, I just get another day off and the rest of the week breezes by. They, meanwhile, have to dread the disruption of the week by having to stay late on Thursday or something.

“Monday, Monday,” sang the Mamas and the Papas, and they had no idea how right they were. But Monday mornings are not all rose petals and cream. We Bares are pragmatic and sensible folk. Rather than take time off work for a doctor or dentist appointment, I have traditionally scheduled these medically necessary events for Monday mornings since I am already off. Like unhappy blips on the radar screen of life, these sparse but no less pressing interruptions of my Monday joy disrupt and dismay.

When the dentist office called to remind me of my biannual cleaning recently, I noted with chagrin and disappointment that I had scheduled the oral torture session at 1030 on a Monday. It was so situated that I didn’t have much time after the gym before needing to be in the cleaning chair. Under other circumstances, this might seem like a pretty good set up. However, things are a little more complicated for me.

I have a genetic heart condition. This requires me to take a strong antibiotic an hour prior to going to see the dentist. Once I have swallowed the horse pill, my innards begin a complicated process of vacating my system of everything I have ever eaten. This can leave me feeling rather like the local farmland gentry are having a hoedown just beneath the belt buckle. So, having chugged the pill with a gallon of water, I started the dicy process of waiting for the signal for me to fly to the loo. This is not a relaxing scenario for my habitually calm Mondays.

A secondary problem arises when it becomes apparent that the dentist's schedule and mine are not aligned. They are thorough and careful with my teeth, of course, but ultimately, I'm always a little pressed for time to get home, change and head off to start the work day. They schedule my time and I'm always early, just in case they're ready, but they are perpetually behind the eight ball. Add to this the Cossacks doing their Russian kick dance in my lower intestines and things can get a little fraught. This last time, I was so unhappily affected by the antibiotic, that I had to scamper straight home after seeing the scheduling lady. I made it just in time. I felt robbed of my usually calm Monday and perturbed about the potency of the medicine.

Then, of course, I had to switch on the bath and have a wash and dress for work. For the rest of that day, I was worn out and more than a little digestively haggard. I also had a sore jaw from having the mandible propped open like a screen door on a cool Autumn day. When I got home that Monday night, I was shattered, a little unwell and more than a little irritable. I lay down and turned my face to the wall. What, I asked myself, is a man to do?

By the time the next Monday rolled around, it felt like the last time I'd had a relaxing pre-work chill was months ago. This could not be borne. What is the point, I asked myself, if I have a morning off and cannot enjoy it? In the depths of that night, while I tottered around the dark house, I had an unusually hot idea. I resolved to take the whole day for the next dentist appointment, so if my innards started giving me the elbow, I could just go straight home and rest. I rarely take a day off for my own health issues, but it seems that when I need them most is on the days I set my appointments.

We Bares pride ourselves on going to work every day. Not for us the almost constant use of sick leave of our younger peers. Being that I hail from the X Generation, I am bound by the vows of that venerable era to go to work regardless of what ails me. Arm off? See you at 9. Cholera? Remember we have that meeting with Jane about that email! I've worked through severe musculoskeletal pain, wounds, fever, colds, the ague, sore throats, roaring headaches and intestinal dysregulation that would make lesser humans fall to pieces. Well, we Bares are not lesser humans. We set our teeth and muddle through. We are about the best through-muddlers there are. My maternal grandfather once paved an entire back porch while one arm was broken in a sling. If I'm not mistaken, he also had a bad toothache. Sterner stuff about sums it up. 

I have for years looked on with something approaching paternal disappointment when my youthful coworkers take their leave because they had a hangnail or split ends or, gods forbid, they needed a mental health day. To show up, even in less than ideal fitness is, for mine and previous generations, a point of deep pride. However, I think that I will take a page from their play books and start using my sick leave, as necessary. I will never be able to just call off because “I just can't quite manage today”. But, anticipating the dyspepsia associated with having to take those dentist meds, I could plan on being out the whole day on a Tuesday or even a Thursday without feeling like I was a malingerer. 

If I take the whole day off, even if I'm feeling like the wreck of the Hesperus, I can get something done around the house and be close to the bathroom as needed. I have built up enough sick time to allow the whole 82nd Airborne two days each with enough left over to “take the cure” for myself for three more months. Best of all, it saves my beloved Monday mornings. 

Could there be anything more wonderful? Four glorious hours between gym and having to step in the rain locker to scrape off the outer crust and don the uniform for work is enough joy for anyone to be getting along with on a Monday. I sit in my chair  joyously imagining my coworkers grunting and sweating under the cruel lash of workaday strain as I scritch our pups behind the ears and yawn contentedly. My work day won't start for ages, I think, as I stare off into the near distance. Life seems like one grand, sweet song.

Those Monday hours are far too valuable for my mental and physical wellbeing to load them up with doctor appointments or other nonsense jotted on my calendar. Nothing will go to pieces at work if I take a day. Even if it does, I'll find out about it when I get in. Its all worth it to save my blessed Monday mornings!

Never Flinch: A Review

Author’s Note: Any time I review a book, I feel that the author might just come across my work in a preliminary search of “what the critics are saying”. If this is the case and Stephen King reads this article, I always like to make sure he knows that I’d read stereo instructions or biomedical information from a pharmaceutical company if he wrote them. While I might be overly critical of Never Flinch in this essay, as an unpublished writer myself, I’ve got no stones to throw. The following is an exercise in literary criticism more than anything else. 

I like reviewing Stephen King books, as it accomplishes two things. It challenges me to write criticism, and it gives me an excuse to burn through his latest novel. Both reward me, if I'm lucky. Sometimes, though, I read a book that doesn't sit right, or feels a little out of tune. Like anyone who knows the notes, can tell when something is off. Stephen King is a national treasure, and we must revere him as such. Though it hurts my heart to say it, his latest book, Never Flinch, was just very okay. As I progressed through the novel, I had the very serious feeling that our Stephen might be losing a step or two. As one of his Constant Readers, it may be that I've been spoiled by so many years of stellar production. Everything he has written for the last two decades or so has been very good. That wasn’t always the case.

In the mid-nineties, King went through a very hard time personally, and his work reflects this fact. He wrote three books (at least) in that period that were dingers. Desperation, Cell, and The Regulators were books that I came back to after a significant hiatus from reading his works, and I felt as though we had lost a genius prematurely. The Master of Horror turned it around, though, and put out some real walk-off home runs after that. The story of his decline is now well-known and extant.

I’ve read almost everything the week it comes out for years, so I read Never Flinch almost as soon as it hit the newsstands. I had high hopes, and honestly, the book wants to be as good a novel as the books that have come before. It wants to be compelling, and it even starts, as one friend put it, with an intriguing premise. By comparison with his last few books, though, it just feels like a rickety puddle jumper rather than his usual F-18. Understand, these are King characters, King ideas and plot lines, even King storytelling, which far surpass others in his field, but I never felt Never Flinch achieves its potential as I had hoped it would, and that feels like a let down.

The story, like so many of King's novels, involves a host of characters, good and bad, all doing different things in different places. At the foundation of Never Flinch, though, is the familiar and now beloved Holly Gibney. Holly is, as King has admitted, one of his favorite all-time characters, which is saying something, based on the entirety of his pantheon.

Holly first appeared in the book Mr. Mercedes, which I have touched on before. In that book, the timid and traumatized wunderkind helps Detective Bill Hodges find a psycho called Brady Hartsfield who is committing mass killings in Buckeye City, Ohio. Holly continues to grow in the two subsequent books of the trilogy, Finders Keepers and End of Watch, then shows up in The Outsider, If It Bleeds, and most recently in her eponymous title, Holly. Never Flinch is Holly's seventh book, and like King has said, she is compelling and fun to read, and unlike any crime fighter in modern fiction.

The latest book finds Holly as the head of the Finders Keepers private detective agency, with the help of Jerome Robinson, another character from the Bill Hodges novels. When a man falsely convicted of possession of material exploitative of children is stabbed to death in prison, a mysterious note appears threatening the deaths of 12 innocents and one guilty person as a means of regaining justice for the murdered man. The note is signed by Bill Wilson.

Immediately, Detective Izzy Jaynes, now a friend of Holly's, is on the case, but soon the bodies start piling up. The only hint is that the name signed on the note refers to Alcoholics Anonymous, which leads Izzy to call Holly to lend her brilliant mind and unique detection skills to the mystery. 

Then the story goes through mitosis and splits into a secondary plot line where Holly winds up on her own adventure, as a bodyguard for a firebrand feminist polemicist called Kate McKay who is on tour through the heartland of the country. McKay and her assistant are being stalked, threatened and attacked by a different but no less dangerous crazy person. Holly heads off to help McKay, while also helping Izzy to discover who Bill Wilson really is before he can murder again.

Another subplot arrives as Barbara Robinson, now a published poet, is invited to sing one of her poems with a mainstream gospel artist called Sista Bessy in Buckeye City. When McKay's venue in the city is bumped to the day before in deference to Sista Bessy, tensions rise, as once again, the city's park and auditorium complex becomes the focal point of the mad men (or women?) looking to gain vengeance with their nefarious plans.

As usual, King's bad guys are fantastically well drawn. Trig, the murderer using Bill Wilson as a pseudonym, is slowly understanding his descent into madness, even though his carefully maintained professional exterior fools everyone for far too long. His internal dialogue, replete with A.A. aphorisms, adds depth to an otherwise one-dimensional baddie who understands at last that murdering people is equally addictive as drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, the other bad guy, a child of the militant religious anti-abortion ideology, has been promising worse harm to McKay and her assistant, Corrie. As the plot advances, the main park in Buckeye City, Ohio, the fictional “Second Mistake on the Lake” becomes the setting for a double-edged climax, as the unknowing citizens, lining up for a strife-filled charity softball game between the city police and firefighters, are moments from a nightmare calamity spurred on by unbridled madness and hatred.

King definitely manages the cast of characters well and adds some of his storytelling magic to liven up the terror. The book is not supernatural (although Holly has certainly faced those kinds of monsters before), but there is an aspect of spine-tingling to it that makes it enjoyable. Like in most of his strictly crime novels, though, King cannot help but reference both the previous real monsters, or hints at his larger universe.

Another writer friend made the point to me that, in the same way that some famous actors want to be rock stars so badly they can taste it, King wants to be a crime novelist, despite his main superpower being the King of Horror. After reading Never Flinch, it has never been more clear how much King admires Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, maybe Elmore Leonard.

Where the book falters is its lack of real oomph. By the middle of the story, as the two plots are converging, the pressure doesn't seem to be adequate to provide the seething tension typical of his usual crime thrillers. Even the characters seem half-hearted, hesitant, doubtful, ambivalent, unnecessarily reflective. Trig acknowledges to himself in a tepid way that he is a serial killer and the bifurcated religious maniac went from compelling to bland. King has some of the most terrifyingly scary bad guys in modern literature, several of whom, like Chet Ondowski, The Outsider, Holly has faced and defeated. By the time everything's coming together at the end of the novel, the story feels wobbly, half-hearted. It never loses its readability, it just seems to fall flat—which for a King novel is saying something. 

After the main events of the novel reach their understated climax, King does a quick hot wash, rounding off and tying up the remaining loose ends, with a hint for another novel coming. Mostly, though, I felt like Never Flinch didn't know what it wanted to do and it left enough of the story unresolved to feel incomplete, sort of truncated.

After the audio version of the book (which was incredibly well-performed by Jessie Mueller) a self-recorded message from Steve to his Constant Readers gives some background notes to what even he acknowledges was a rough one.

After giving his wife, novelist Tabitha King, a draft of the manuscript, she handed it back and told King, “You can do better”. That gave him a smart lash, he admits. But it didn't help that as he was putting down the framework of the story, he was undergoing hip surgery. The surgery and the recuperation process took it out of him and the book suffers as a result. We cannot blame him, mortal that he is, even though his normal output is usually divine.

It is nevertheless a good read and miles better than the next-in-line crime authors one can find scrawling fiction today. King is still a master, he just didn't quite get all of this one. I hope he will keep swinging for the fences in coming years.

One thing that I feel redeems this book and makes me hopeful for the future is Holly Gibney. Holly has finally come into her own. From the small, terrified, bullied, and brow-beaten woman that Bill Hodges first takes under his wing, Holly has spent the interim novels figuring out who she is. Well, she has now arrived. After facing the “It baby” in The Outsider, battling a lesser “It baby” in If It Bleeds, and finally learning how to be fearless as she fights cannibalistic oldsters killing and eating young people in Holly, she is now at her full power and is more formidable than anyone reading Mr. Mercedes could have dreamed.

This most recent book proves that she is now one of King's most considerable characters, up there with Roland Deschain, Danny Torrence, and Andy Dufresne, full of untapped skill and potential. The way she fearlessly faces a bat-swinging would-be attacker in defense of Kate McKay proves that she is now really ready to face something truly terrifying that only King could think of in his next book featuring Holly. I sure can’t wait for that.

If nothing else, Never Flinch makes a good beach read, especially if you don't want to deal with supernatural monsters but are okay with the natural ones. If there is one thing that King's novels prove time and again, he has a unique perspective and a keen ability to make sure we never forget that the real monsters are really within us. That skill remains undimmed. 

I highly recommend Never Flinch because even his less-than-perfect work is fantastic compared to other writers, and if, like me, you're invested in Holly Gibney, then you have to make sure you've read the entire Holly series.

Adventures in Pedagogy

In 2003, having gone back to school and looking to finish my degree in English so that I could become a teaxher, I was hired on as an assistant in the Exceptional Children's Department in our local school system in a lateral entry position. I still remember where I was when the principal called me: the loading dock of our town hospital, where I was working as a cook. The principal told me that I would be working in a “pull-out” classroom, where students in the elementary school would arrive throughout the day to get help with reading, writing, and math. 

That August, the Friday before schools would open for teachers, I went to the director of food services and handed him a note of resignation. I was so excited. I had dreamed of becoming a teacher since my middle school days, and though I wavered early on, as all kids do, deciding what I truly wanted to do professionally, I nonetheless felt as though I was embarking on the first days of a thirty-year career in education. At twenty-six, I could be excused for being both naive and a little too enthusiastic, having no deeper experience with primary education than my own.

The first few months were thrilling. I was helping kids learn to read, and the teacher I worked with, if a little ‘country’, seemed to know her business, at least about getting kids up to speed with their reading. As Christmas rolled around, though, I started to see cracks in the idealistic view of my new career. Things seemed to be going well one day, and the next, everything was not okay.

Most professional jobs have a period of probation, usually sixty to ninety days, where a new employee can, if necessary, be terminated or at least set back on the right path if they have strayed. The place of work and everyone else are on a sort of probation with the new employee as well, when a new hire begins to see reality about their peers, and my eyes had certainly been opened. In those first few months, it was brought home to me just how woefully inept the teacher in my classroom really was. Not only that, but how devastatingly Sisyphean our work was. Every day, we helped kids learn to read, but it was never enough. They were perpetually behind, and no matter how often we got them up to their expected goals, their regular classrooms had already moved on. 

This was only one piece of a series of realizations that shook me. For the next three school years, I labored, like the students, under the delusion that things would get better. If I just kept at it, put my head down and dug in, I would eventually get beyond the breakers. It was not the case. 

Meanwhile, each semester I was also laboring to get my degree, only to find that going part-time was not nearly enough to complete the required hours anytime soon. The oasis of hope that fueled the dream of becoming a teacher was feeling more like a mirage. While we were raising our small family, I was working part-time at other jobs in the summer and evenings, taking classes part-time, and every day facing the unbelievable and unbearable personal and professional problems of my lead teacher. It was all starting to tell on me, I think.

In year four, the director of our department, a diminutive and domineering woman called Dr. Dinah, moved me to another classroom, much against the principal's protests. It was a sort of promotion for which I was grateful, but the job proved to be a step down into the intolerable. I was now well away from the marital and professional collapse of the other teacher, but I had been moved to self-contained functional skills classroom with children who had severe and profound disabilities. 

I didn't mind this at all. Many were nonverbal, most were very young and unable to do much at all except cry and scream when they were unhappy, but, most of the time they were sweet and wonderful. I immediately loved each one of them and worked hard to help them accomplish their goals. My problems were never the kids so much, but with the adults who made things so difficult. The lead teacher was a nice enough and capable person, but her team, of which I was the newest member, was savage and cutthroat at best. At worst, they were a daily nightmare.

Immediately, I was given the most challenging children, forced to take on “bodyguard” roles for other kids with behavioral issues because I was the only male on staff, put in scenarios where I was expected to do the impossible with very little backup, like escort 6 kids to lunch in the main cafeteria by myself, each one of them going in different directions. For four years, I was made use of in these and other humiliating ways, through three school buildings. It was during these second four years that I was assaulted three different times by three different students.

The last of these incidents was the one that set me over my tolerance, though. The child had severe intellectual delays, but her parent allowed her to scamper through the neighborhood in her birthday suit and sent her to school most days filthy and frothing. Part of each week, I was scheduled to work with this child, and little did I know she would be the forecaster of my future.

Lyca (not her name) needed her diaper changed about three times daily.  On the days that I supervised her, I was expected to be responsible for this duty. My predecessor in the position had been accused by a different parent of indecent liberties with their child several years before and had been summarily fired. Despite being exonerated later, this man's life was essentially ruined, and I was absolutely not going down the same path. 

I starkly refused the diaper changing on these grounds, which were well-known if unspoken in the classroom and the school. I was written up for not following directives, but the write-up was soon taken off my record when the school attorney was asked to review the disciplinary action, and they vindicated my assertion that, if there were female staff in the classroom, they were to do the diaper changes as needed. 

Dr. Dinah and the female teachers that I worked with and especially the head teacher of the class were angry at me for this, and it was made clear to me that I was only getting away with my “disobedience” because I was a male. One of my coworkers was a particularly unpleasant person, and she said this to my face one day. In one of the few times in which I was actually able to muster the courage to say what I was thinking in the moment without losing my temper, I responded, “If I were a woman, then this wouldn’t be a problem for me.”

Two weeks after this intense and exhausting battle, Lyca bit me on the hand while we were waiting for dismissal on a bright Friday in mid-May. I was told to go to the urgent care to be treated (she broke the skin). I got a tetanus shot, and had a raft of blood tests, heavy-duty antibiotics. The next week I was directed by the school to go back to the doctor for more blood tests to rule out that I didn’t have HIV/AIDS or any other bloodborne pathogens. This wasn't to verify that I was okay but to make sure Lyca wasn't infected by me. 

No one, not the principal (different from when I started) or her assistant, or any coworkers, asked me how I was or if my hand was okay. After the battle to not change diapers, I had lost the respect of my fellow educators. Meanwhile, I was physically exhausted, mentally drained, and burning out hard, what I got was more crap assignments.

When I reflect on my time in the school system time, now I feel something akin to bitterness. Admittedly, working as a representative of the county government at my public library has healed many of these feelings, but what never really healed was the sense in which I was merely a tool, to be dropped when no longer needed. For eight years I was called to deal with troubled students, or—again, because I was a male—to restrain children who were acting out and a danger to themselves or others. Students frequently ran out of the school doors and out into the surrounding neighborhoods always had me in pursuit, because my job was reduced to a glorified bkuncer for special needs kids. I worked with a fourth-grader who had such violent and vicious tendencies that on more than three occasions, had I not been there, one of his fellow students would have suffered damage to life or limb or worse. 

Every time I felt overwhelmed, under appreciated, exhausted, I would double down remembering my childhood dream to become a full-fledged English teacher. And yet, the more I tried to help, the more I cooperated, the more I put myself in harm's way to make things better for students and staff, the more I found that my stress levels were becoming uncontrollable. I was angry, resentful and felt bullied by an administration that had no concern for me at all. 

When the results of the bloodwork came back clean (as I knew they would), I received a curt email from the new director of the EC department, who made it clear that had the child been infected (even by the student’s bite), I would have been dismissed. In shock, I told Micki that once summer arrived, I would be looking for another job. Luckily, I found one and also, fortunately, I was hired. 

I made an appointment to speak with the principal in late June in 2011. She could barely take her eyes off of her computer when I went to speak with her. We spoke of this and that, but soon enough got down, as I have heard it said, to brass tacks. “So,” I said, signaling that the small talk was over. “Please don’t say that you’re resigning,” she said. If I remember correctly, I laughed right out loud. “That’s exactly why I’m here.” The womans’ face fell so fast that I was startled by the change. I didn’t know if she would cry, but it certainly seemed to upset her. “May I ask why?” “I’ve found employment with the county.” The rest is history. I wanted to say so much more, but to what avail? Me complaining to her wouldn’t have changed how badly I was treated.

But it wasn’t really history. To this day, I carry within me the stress and trauma of those eight, ever-worsening years, as if each year I went down to a new, deeper level of hell. I came away with a mantra response when people asked me why I left. I never had a problem with the kids, even the worst ones. It was the adults, and especially the administration that was intolerable. I have many good friends from those days and I’m grateful to say that will likely not change.

When Micki told me that she was resigning her position with a local nonprofit to start the process of becoming a middle school teacher, I had a relapse of sorts. All my stress came back in a rush of what was for me real PTSD. The thought of starting work again in the schools gave me actual nightmares that I was going back. I muddled through those feelings, perhaps not very well. 

She handled her experience much better than I did and while teaching, she also went back and got her master's in education. She graduated in December of 2024. I've rarely been more proud.

Our career paths in the school systems (our county has one system for our town and one for the county; she worked for the latter) were very different—she taught social studies and language arts. Even so, she experienced much the same systemic problems. That story is hers to tell, but I will say that, rather than changing my mind about the public education system’s raft of problems, her experiences reinforced my feelings of doubt and disappointment. Despite having her master's degree and previous experience, she never got paid anywhere near what she was owed. She spent an enormous amount of money on her students to help them with school supplies. In her three years, she experienced a clear view of how the public education system has failed not just students but our whole society. 

I’m pleased to say that, as of this writing, she is working in a different field, still in education, but not as a teacher or administrator, and she is, it is obvious, much happier. Again, that’s her story to tell. The only time I was ever happier for her, in terms of her career choices, was on the day that she came home from her last day of school, never to look back with the promise of a better job in front of her.

When I was a kid, I admired my teachers deeply. It is safe to say that they made an incredible difference in my life. One of my middle school teachers is someone I still have fairly regular contact with, thirty years later. I’m the man that I am partially because my teachers gave a damn about me. 

Micki gave more than a damn about her students and I know she made all the difference for some of them. Like me, she said it wasn’t ever the kids that were the problem. It was a structurally flawed administration from the superintendent to the school staff. The disease has traveled far, though. It now comes from the US Capitol and trickles down to the students in the schools near you. 

I have no solution to this, except to say that, as for me and my family, we won’t ever work in the school system again. There are other ways to participate and aid education. And, my heart goes out to those friends and former colleagues who, despite the horrors, continue to go back year after year and face the nightmare. There are good schools, good principals, and good teachers, but the system is failing now, and likely beyond hope.

I wrote this essay because, as a former educator, I’m one of the lucky ones. I got out while there was still time. No parents accused me of harming their children, thus ruining my reputation forever. I have scars. As I said, I’m not one to hold resentments, at least not since I got sober, but in the years since my nightmare ended, I’ve never been able to shake the bad feelings I have for the people who failed me and failed my family as a result. I wasn’t a perfect employee. No one ever is. I had a lot of growing and learning to do, but I was willing to do it. Instead, I got run through the meat grinder. As I put these final words down, I am witnessing a power structure in our local schools become a serious cult of personality rather than an organization for teaching kids. It is more of the same. I’m glad Micki got out when she did! My heart goes out to her friends and colleagues—and our family members—who stay every day and fight the good fight.