At the end of my workout, I see Stephen Caleb coming down the hall. Inspired that now might be one of those rare opportunities to change his musical tastes for the better, I put my iPod buds in his ears. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feeling Groovy” is playing.
Caleb screws up his face into something like gentle contempt. “Really?”
Really. The way, in this age where literature is so unreal and unsuited for us that we put people on islands where they “survive” under the careful supervision of cameraman and medical technicians, to put something down is to question its reality. Really?
Really. When it comes to unconditional love, unforced grief, forgotten wrongs, any Southern writers born before 1945, homemade spaghetti sauce, Christmas music for the entire twelve days of Christmas, God born wetting Himself in a cave, the holiness of suffering, the holiness of new mothers, the holiness of hot chocolate after snow angels, kissing your wife full on the mouth even when she has a cold, weddings and funerals done in churches and not soul-less mortuaries, wordless prayers, God who is fully Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and yes, feeling groovy — Really.
The boy will come around.
