Memphis, 1970
		
What could ninth-graders know about spiritual growth? But that was the subject we drew. 
We tapped our hippie preacher, probed your fallen mother, borrowed my father’s solemn 
books. You favored Webster's high-toned abstractions, the art of Christian living. I 
preferred the lowly lessons, a rusty bike half sunk in the Mississippi’s mud, the twister I 
watched amble across the delta from my ranch house roof. The cigarette machine rang 
like pinball as you pumped four quarters in and I pulled the winning knob. God was 
everywhere then, but mostly in hollow things—horse skull in the vacant lot, bullet hole in 
the sign on your street, the drunk well of your mother’s eye. We were young, it’s true, but 
they asked youth to preach for a reason. Training us for life, you said, for facing the 
roofless world. Envy, I said then, and still do, because we knew a love letter when we saw 
it: T-bird in the junkyard, littered with diamonds, boot on a riverbank of daffodils.