The Deadest of Ideas
When bad ideas die, do they go to heaven? What about the good ones? What about the ones that started with so much promise and then seem to slowly pull themselves in from the edges and wither?
The first person I ever knew who died was Gus Ray. It was a name that always sounded smoky and gritty to me, or maybe that's just how I remembered it later. Gus Ray. The boy who tried to kiss me on the playground in kindergarten. All I can remember is an outline of a round face, more gray now in my memory than it must have been alive, as if his very skin knew the way it would end. The boy who lived on the rented farm, who too often left us waiting on the kindergarten bus while he finished his lunch or found his shoe, and his mother, with her husky voice, would stand at the door of the bus and tell the driver, too loudly, what Gus was doing.
My mother told me while she was pulling my dress over my head, getting me ready for school. We wore dresses every day to school, even on winter days like that one, when we climbed the snow drifts on the playground and dug cave rooms in the dirty piles the plows had made. We wore pants underneath our dresses, that we took off after recess and hung up on hooks outside our classroom, never really drying before it was time to wear them home.
There had been a fire, my mother said, overnight at the rented farmhouse, and Gus and all of his brothers and sisters had died. And her face tilted at me like a question, like there was something she wanted me to say or do, but I didn't know what, didn't know what would be right, what would shed the idea of him away from me.
And then it was over, and the place where the farmhouse had been slowly grew over, until I could barely see the outline of the walls from the windows of the bus, and I don't remember ever wondering where his parents had gone, or thinking it at all odd that two adults had come out of that house, and six children had not.
Where is God in our bad ideas? The ones that started good? The ones we try to shed like lost children or playground mishaps? The dead ones? Is He bound by our ideas? By what we call success?
How dead was the idea of being us? Of wearing our dust, and grit, and failures like some never-shedding, eternally unshruggable skin? Just so we could go home.
The first person I ever knew who died was Gus Ray. It was a name that always sounded smoky and gritty to me, or maybe that's just how I remembered it later. Gus Ray. The boy who tried to kiss me on the playground in kindergarten. All I can remember is an outline of a round face, more gray now in my memory than it must have been alive, as if his very skin knew the way it would end. The boy who lived on the rented farm, who too often left us waiting on the kindergarten bus while he finished his lunch or found his shoe, and his mother, with her husky voice, would stand at the door of the bus and tell the driver, too loudly, what Gus was doing.
My mother told me while she was pulling my dress over my head, getting me ready for school. We wore dresses every day to school, even on winter days like that one, when we climbed the snow drifts on the playground and dug cave rooms in the dirty piles the plows had made. We wore pants underneath our dresses, that we took off after recess and hung up on hooks outside our classroom, never really drying before it was time to wear them home.
There had been a fire, my mother said, overnight at the rented farmhouse, and Gus and all of his brothers and sisters had died. And her face tilted at me like a question, like there was something she wanted me to say or do, but I didn't know what, didn't know what would be right, what would shed the idea of him away from me.
And then it was over, and the place where the farmhouse had been slowly grew over, until I could barely see the outline of the walls from the windows of the bus, and I don't remember ever wondering where his parents had gone, or thinking it at all odd that two adults had come out of that house, and six children had not.
Where is God in our bad ideas? The ones that started good? The ones we try to shed like lost children or playground mishaps? The dead ones? Is He bound by our ideas? By what we call success?
How dead was the idea of being us? Of wearing our dust, and grit, and failures like some never-shedding, eternally unshruggable skin? Just so we could go home.
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