Back in time

I want to share some experiences from a trip I took a month ago. These scenes may seem weird, but for me they were refreshing and encouraging. I think I’ve lived in the city too long.

It’s an overcast Labor Day in Quanah, where the panhandle meets northeast Texas. Nothing is moving in all of historic downtown except me and a kid on a bicycle. Nowhere here looks like anywhere anyone would want to go, even on a business day. The department store has closed down. The bookstore has two empty shelves straddling the floor at odd angles. I finish my sandwich and drive back towards the highway, past the courthouse square. As I pass the courthouse on my left, I see three men come out of the police station on my right. The first one is a tall sheriff in a ten-gallon hat and long dark brown pants. I don’t remember anything about the second one. The third is a prisoner, without handcuffs, in a baggy black-and-white-striped suit, glaring at me.

It’s late afternoon and it’s raining now, 100 miles from Dallas. I pull off for gas but the pumps are all taken. I park and wait in a long line for a sticky blue bathroom while flies and small kids circulate around me. When I get to my car again I see that the gas station next door is completely free. I guess it’s because the three gas pumps, one for diesel, one for super unleaded, one for regular unleaded, are exposed to the sky. So I drive over. The lower half of an inscription (“after 9 p.m.”) is taped to the pump, written on a lined piece of paper in blurred magic marker. It’s not raining too hard. When my tank is full I remember the amount and go inside, where the clerk puts her cigarette down in the ashtray and smiles at me. There are a couple of families waiting for their food in the next room over, a warm, ugly old diner. “$18.93,” I say, handing her a $20, since the sign in here says they don’t accept credit cards. There is a jar full of black plastic combs on the counter by the register, 49 cents each.

Legolas, Galadriel, and God

Legolas used to annoy me a lot, with his superior Elf ego, and Galadriel too, while we’re at it. I didn’t like how they seemed to have such an advantage over everyone else. Everyone just naturally adored them without questioning anything. If I hear someone uniformly raved about, I am automatically suspicious.

But if you get to know the history of the whole thing better, you realize that Legolas is pretty low on the ladder of elvishness. He is a low Elf, an Elf of Mirkwood, of all places. He has never visited the Blessed Realm. He has never seen Telperion or Laurelin, the trees of Valinor that seem to bestow so much significance to all those weird Elves.

Having Legolas represent the Elves on the Fellowship of the Ring is kind of like having an American teach English literature in China. Maybe people who don’t know any better will respect her, and she certainly has some advantages over a Chinese person, but chances are she feels sort of like an imposter when explicating Shakespeare and Keats. So when you know that Legolas isn’t really on the inner ring of elvishness, you can deal with his smarmy singing and keen vision and everything and start to admire his positive attitude.

So back to Galadriel. She seems like the noblest, purest, loveliest character ever (and thus seems completely bland to me) unless you know her history and know that she is a major historical rebel, actually forbidden to go back to the Blessed Realm because she scorned authority. Once you know that, you can reread all that nauseating stuff about her singing from the boat and actually sort of feel some sympathy for her.

This seems to distantly resemble the problem lots of people, including me, have with God. Since no one is allowed to say anything against him, it sounds a little bit like party-line propaganda all the time. We wonder deep down if people aren’t being completely straight with us when they talk about him (and of course lots of times they aren’t).

But what is cool about God, if you know him better, is that he is kind of the anti-god (if I’m allowed to say that). If you really pay attention, you notice that he survived some humiliating and embarrassing things and continues to do things we don’t really expect from God, like giving other people credit they don’t deserve and like forgiving everything, which is the metaphysical equivalent of cleaning the bathrooms. Is there anything more humiliating than giving up ever mentioning the bad things people have done to you?

Tolkien chooses not to mention Legolas and Galadriel’s history in the entire Lord of the Rings. He’s content with the possibility that you don’t entirely understand them. But if you care enough, you can go to the other writings and find all that stuff out. I think that God might be like that with himself. He lets us be oblivious if we want, and it’s all OK, because he’s gracious. But I’ve heard people talk about our own pain as a gift from God, and maybe the gift part of it is getting to understand him better. We forgive because we are forgiven, but we also learn how much it means to be forgiven when we forgive. I don’t really know any of this from experience. These are just guesses.

I can’t really compare my experience to God’s in any meaningful way, or Galadriel’s or Legolas’s for that matter, but what I’m trying to express is that they all seem to have interesting and unexpected character depths, and there’s a good chance we misunderstand them if we don’t know their history. That’s all.

Feels like spring

During the past weary months, Shelley’s lines changed seasons in my head:

If summer comes, can fall be far behind?

We Texans are coming out of our caves to breathe the fresh air and sunlight after weeks and weeks of over-100-degree temperatures. So, even though fall is what we expect to happen next, can you blame this poor mole for sniffing spring?