todd of tacoma

1. The most banal song lyric you will ever hear is from Mr. Jones and Me by the Counting Crows: “We all wanna be big stars, yeah, but we got different reasons for that.”
2. We probably do got different reasons for that.
3. The songwriter takes for granted that we all wanna be big stars, and that irks me, too. The vapid presumptuousness! On top of the anodyne part.
4. Different reasons? Don’t include me in your different reasons.
5. Let’s hear a story.

Sadie Cook found a rock by Camp Creek the shape of a discus and half the size of her hand. It would have been too big to skip for most kids her size, but her thumbs were big, gangly things just right for holding skipping rocks level.

But she was beginning to think she shouldn’t be so reckless with stones.

Thinking she shouldn’t be so reckless with stones started this morning, when there were twelve and three rocks on the table, three in a straight line and twelve congregating in a semi-circle before the three. Discerning eyes, like the eyes Sadie had, could see the twelve were nervous and chattering. She could practically hear them rattling on the table.

Are you gonna take a swather to that corner by Braaksma’s? a voice entering the room said. Or am I?

The voice paused.

Someone’s gonna get killed coming around that corner, it continued. It’s blind enough around here without six-foot grass.

The rocks were trembling.

It’s natural to tremble in the company of the Triune God.

And Mom.

I’d ask you to burn it, but then you’d set the whole valley on fire, the voice that was Mom’s said. As much as you’re paying attention to anything these days.

Sadie looked up. Mom’s face was red.

I can handle fire, Dad said. He was at the table suddenly, and arranging his disciple rocks. He was hopping them over each other and weaving them through each other, like a shell game with loud, heavy cups.

Clack! Clack!

They were deciding something important.

The side of the road’s the county’s job, Dad said.

And Mom said nothing. She stopped Dad’s hands from working his disciples. She picked one up and shook it. She held it to her ear and pleaded wordlessly that she heard nothing.

Sadie can hear it. Can’t you, Sadie? Dad said. He wasn’t asking her, though, only saying so. Rick is going to be here in fifteen minutes, he said. The decision has already been made.

Mom had water in her eyes.

I’d like to bring some cookies out for his family, Dad said.

The cookies are for Sadie, Mom said.

You can make more cookies, Dad said.

You can make them. The recipe’s on the back of the bag. You want me to read the recipe? Mom said.

She had never mentioned before that Dad couldn’t read. Now, she’d mentioned it twice in two days.

Sadie felt wounded for him.

She did that for everyone, like Jesus.

Last night, Dad felt compelled to explain that Peter and John were ignorant and under-educated and were ordinary men answering Jesus’s calling and the fact he, Dad, had a hard time reading must not stop him from heeding the call of the Lord. The call to sell thirty head of registered holstein and be a pastor in six months’ time.

And where you gonna learn to read? Mom had said.

The disciples said by the creekside, Dad had said.

You’re gonna learn to read by walking up and down Camp Creek? Mom had said.

God’s word is just as clear in natural revelation, Dad had said.

Maybe you wanna join Sadie at school, Mom had said. Sit there with your dirty face and your creaky knees, towering above the class with a dunce cap!

Sadie could picture it.

Sad things are pictures you would laugh at but you can’t.

I can’t help what the Lord God told me! Dad said this morning.

He picked up the three rocks of the Triune God and he held them out for display like there was a blinding light busting them open and he shook them like they were hot potatoes.

Sadie went outside so Mom and Dad could keep talking.

Rick was there in the cab of Dad’s swather, in the machine shed with his hand on the ignition. When he saw Sadie he turned the ignition over. It sound like a hundred trumpets in a car crusher.

6. I used to play trumpet. Until one day playing in church I felt sick and threw up into it. You don’t recover from a thing like that. Not that a dream died that day or anything.
7. Let’s get back to the story.

Trudy was there in her Silverado. Sadie didn’t like to talk to her anymore. She used to run to her and jump in her strong arms to be hoisted up to the sky. Trudy was stocky once and barrel-chested and beautiful like a young farmboy. With muscular forearms covered in black hairs that never moved, not even in the wind or when she had goosebumps.

Now, Trudy was hairless and looked like a goblin. Her chest was flat like Sadie’s and she said things like, you don’t have to look at me, but you have to see me.

Trudy called Sadie over.

You don’t know what’s about to happen, do you?

Sadie shook her head no.

Your momma never told you.

No, she said. It was her first word that day.

That’s the first thing you said today, ain’t it? Trudy said.

Sadie nodded yes.

You have a pretty voice, Trudy said.

Sadie didn’t know what to say. She didn’t like what she was hearing, or at least how she was hearing it.

Them trees you like to play in, do you know what I mean? Where you can see my house? Trudy said.

Trudy stood still.

I know, no one likes to have their spot pointed out. It’s ancient ruins when it is, Trudy said.

Sadie thought of rocks and skipping stones.

There’s a cow path from there zig-zags straight to my feed door. Wonder if I can’t hire you a few bucks a day to feed my hens.

Trudy husbanded twenty chickens.

For a few bucks more you can help me gather eggs, Trudy said. Need to clear it every day. Them eggs are like nasty thoughts. You gotta clear out the whole batch or they’ll grow up someday outta control.

The conversation in the house was getting louder.

A sheriff’s car drove into their yard and stopped.

Then another.

The chaplain who sometimes cried when he spoke his sermons stepped out of the second car. He took his bible from the passenger seat and caught Sadie’s eyes.

You know your momma loves your daddy so much, Trudy said. Love has to make hard decisions sometimes.

Sadie remembered that God so loved the world he killed his only son for it, and Abraham almost did something similar some centuries before.

8. Even dumber than the notion of true love is the idea that the purpose of life is to go out into the world and find it, and if you don’t find if you have to find yourself instead. What you’re hoping to find when you find yourself is a better, more impressive imitation that’s a distant second cousin to your true identity. And that person sucks and you know it.
9. Dumber Than Love would make a great band name, or an album. I’m not going to google it.
10. I once knew a manager named Love. He got himself fired for passing around a sextape that featured himself and one of his direct reports. He forgot the old proverb: forty people can keep a secret if thirty-nine of them stop showing up to work and stay off social media. But that’s just Love for you, isn’t it?
11. I want to follow up on Sadie Cook.

If you want a lot of skips, you’re looking for a stone that’s flat and smooth and the size of your palm and convex a little. The most skips Sadie had got so far was seventeen, but she was on her way to twenty-three or twenty-four or thirty one day, before the car hit her at Braaksma’s.

If you want a big skip, you have to find a rock the shape of a potato. Something that’ll bounce off the water like it’s rubber. You gotta have it weighted right, that’s the thing, like a plate or a cup, not a coin, and it’s got to fit snug in the crook of your hand relaxed. That’s a good skipping stone.

When you squat to throw, bend over to your strong side. Don’t wind up like a pitcher to throw. Don’t catch or snap, just wave like a blade of ditch grass and release the stone like one smooth cast of a fly rod.

12. Harold Bloom wrote that Juliet was intellectually superior to Romeo, especially in her language. While Romeo is in love with the idea of being in love and is purple and hyperbolic, Juliet is pragmatic and realistic. She is able to cut through his bullshit to plainly state what he is plainly trying to overstate.
13. Consider the balcony. Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? he asks. What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? she says to him. The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine, he says. I gave thee mine before thou didst request it, she says. Then she goes on to acquiesce a little to his need for validation. But we can forgive her for that. She’s young.
14. Had their story not ended prematurely with so much woe, Romeo and Juliet would have eventually become the most famous example of why’s she with him?
15. Juliet practices self-overhearing and vitalism and she outgrows the play she’s in.
16. That is, according to Bloom, Juliet matures by hearing herself think out loud and she lives in the plot of the play as a complete person and is not simply a victim of fate. Whereas Romeo, he’s such a victim of fate he makes everyone around him a victim of his fate, too.
17. Spoiler alert. Juliet kills herself because Romeo just cannot for the life of him seem to understand what’s going on.
18. Why’s she with him?