Lighting Up for Christmas

“Katie, this is your mother.  I’m at home, finally out of jail.”  It’s Christmas Day and while I stand at the stove whipping egg whites for my grandmother’s egg nog recipe, Mom calls my sister.  The time flies.  She makes calls, smokes cigarettes, visits with her next-door neighbor, downs her egg nog and runs her fingers around the inside of the glass to get all the cream, eats a huge plate of food followed by espresso ice cream and chocolate cookies.  When it’s time to leave, she confidently heads down the porch steps in the dark with her walker.  When settled back in “jail” (really the rehab side of a nursing home called The Pines on Warren Street in Glens Falls), she says, “Thank you, Mary Jo, you don’t know how much good this did me.”  Although I didn’t say so, I could see what going home did for her:  the color came back into her face.  When we’d arrived, she was frail-looking, pale and unsure: “do you think this is a good idea?”  “I’m not sure I can manage church,” “Who gives us permission?”  But the staff was laid back and supportive and many people were leaving with their families.  “It’s so easy,” she marvels as we wheel her past the front door.  We’ve opted for the wheelchair, “just to be on the safe side,” as she says, but that was the only time we would need to use it during our three-day visit.  Her confidence returned quickly, but even I was surprised by the way her spunk would express itself.

Christmas Day, sitting around the kitchen table, she laughed about the easy time she’d had birthing each of us.  “But when I was in labor with one of you, I lit up a cigarette in the delivery room and the nurses came rushing in and said, ‘there’s oxygen in here, do you want to blow us all up?’”  That story floats around my mind, as I rummage through the remains of past lives.  On a slip of paper is a quote from my grandmother, “I’d rather be having a baby right now than sitting here doing this” [she was probably trying to have a bowel movement]; my grandmother, Lillian, was old and senile but witty, and we grew up along with her, given the strange way in which the very old do become young again—almost newborns.  “Hey, look at these!” my husband calls.  He is sorting old photos in the darkness of the dusty dining room.  There are three black and white pictures of my mother (taken by a professional photographer).  She is thirty-something with cigarette in hand, looking very drunk and very happy, with three young guys flirting with her, ogling her, and almost cradling her in their arms.  “I can’t wait to ask her about these,” I say.  “Oh no, she’ll be embarrassed,” says Paul.  “No she won’t,” I say emphatically, hoping Paul catches my implicit defense of the desire Mom glows with in the vivid photo.  

Later at The Pines, when I ask her about the pictures, she is clearly happy to see evidence of this past self, “Oh, that was at Ridings.”  The bar is in North Creek, where she hung out in the years when, after recently moving to Glens Falls from South Jersey, she was skiing and getting loads of male attention.  Even at The Pines, she is still something of a flirt.  For instance, Ike, the Nigerian male nurse, is her special friend.  “The night I fell, Ike rescued me, and we sat on the floor and laughed and laughed.”  When Mom introduced me to Ike, I noticed that he bowed slightly to my mother and called her “Miss Catherine.”  I’m impressed by her ability to get the love she needs to thrive wherever she happens to fall.

We arrive late morning.  Mom did two sessions of physical therapy while we hauled trash into the dumpster she does and doesn’t know is sitting in her driveway, filling up quickly.  The plan is to take her out for a drive and go to a restaurant.  “Well, I just had a pain-in-the-ass call from Kim.”  I ask her what’s up, and I learn that last night, after we’d brought her back, she’d lit up a cigarette in the room!  “Really?  Why?”  She doesn’t know.  She just felt like it, I guess.  The nurses came rushing in, and Jill explains that she was surprised Mom would lie to her.  “The residents across the hall smelled it, and I found ashes in your water cup.”  We sit through another lecture after she has had several from various family members.  The punitive words, I suspect, go in one ear and out the other because it’s full steam ahead on our plan for the day.  She enjoys the old photos.  She laughs at her own misdemeanor but moves on quickly to important business:  “I need to get a check cashed so I have some money.”  I watch her shakily form the letters that spell four-hundred dollars and sign her name more confidently.  Empowered by her spirit, perhaps, I make a split second decision to include in our afternoon itinerary a trip to the tattoo and piercing studio so Katya can get her “snake bites”—a dual lip piercing she’s been obsessing about for years, and Mom had sent her money for Christmas. 

After the small uproar a cigarette caused and all chastisement, Mom is surprisingly nonplussed.  I sign her out with the estimated return time of 3:30.  But the girl at the nurses station looks at us slyly and says, “Why don’t I put you down for 5:30 in case you’re having a really great time.”  “Great,” I say, and we head down the elevator and move toward the door.  I walk slowly behind Mom with my hands lightly on her hips—just in case.  A woman who passes us in a wheelchair says, “you two look like twins,” and, although I don’t quite know what to make of that observation, I say simply “thank you.”  We pass the sign advertising this place as “Your Passport Home,” and Mom declares to the girl at the desk that she is “going out” with “my family.”  The girl smiles, and I suspect they all think this is about cigs, but it really is about so much more.  We’re crossing the border and entering some strange new country feeling the glee of shedding our old roles.  Even getting in the car each time is a new experience.  Mom doesn’t have a system but does what feels right at the moment.  “Good foot in; no bad one in first,” she says aloud, talking herself through it.  “Swivel your butt, Mom,” I suggest, and she lands perfectly, reaching to lift her bad leg into the car manually.  I pull the seat belt across her puffy down coat (she bought two—one for her and one for me) and hand her the pack of Kools.  “Now where is that lighter?”  Paul reaches over to light Miss Catherine’s cigarette, and we’re off on our adventure.

First stop is Glens Falls National Bank where we wait at the drive-thru and hope the teller doesn’t need Mom’s driver’s license.  Apprehension gives way to smiles when the envelope shoots back up the space-age tube filled with bills.  Mom spreads them on her lap to count.  She’s still trying to count out four hundred dollars when we’re parked in the lot of her laundromat on Broad Street.  I go in the tattoo studio with Kat while Mom and Paul smoke in the car.  We tell an actual bearded lady (“I liked her make-up”) that we (or she) want(s) “snake bites,” and Kat asks me to get off my phone (role reversal) and hold her hand because she’s scared.  Her hand is cold and clammy.  Ushered into a back room, I watch as the young guy with the tattooed head, mark the spots on her lip where the needle will be pulled through.  “I think you want them lower, don’t you honey?”  “Yes.”  It looks painful and I see her wince once, but my fifteen-year-old is a trooper, and she knows what she wants.  After it’s done, we bounce out to the car, and Mom thinks they look “adorable” and “unobtrusive.”  She totally approves with not a jot of judgement in her voice.  Somebody brings up the subject of Mom’s illicit before-bed smoke, and Kat yells, “because we’re rebels!”  Laughter lights up the car.

“Where to now?” asks my husband, and we head west, passing the kitchen showroom where we stop to inquire about contractors, who could renovate a pantry into a stacked washer-dryer, which is Mom’s vision for making what had become a hoarder house livable again.  Later Mom will tell me how nice and patient and interested Katya was when they sat in the car together and talked.  We drive out toward West Mountain in the late afternoon.  At Pumpkin Hill farm, the sun is descending toward the mountain and its rays light up the snow blowing in the air, making it sparkle.  We turn left toward Lake Luzerne, and I think how long it has been that I have been out with my mother.  Year after year, visit after visit, I’ve felt so trapped by the stuff in the house that has seemed to immobilize us all.  We are free now.  Katya notices a group of turkeys in the woods, walking uphill through deep snow.  I love the bareness of the mountains in winter.  You can see right down to the ground how the leafless trees stand “with their pants down,” as Mom used to say.  At home, I clean, I sort, I throw out junk, I feel down to the ground of good memories, and I even cook.  But by far, my single proudest accomplishment is that I let Mom stand her ground.

We stop at the base of West Mountain and watch the skiers glide down, and Mom has time to remember the feeling of flying down a snowy slope (she was a skier once upon a time), and as our ride winds through the late afternoon like a festive ribbon, we follow her directions and end up at O’Toole’s sports bar on Quaker Road.  My mother walks right in the bar and parks her walker at a booth despite it looking difficult for her to negotiate.  She glides with ease into a spot along the wall and confidently orders a Coors Light.  We toast to her full recovery.  I look around at the four of us, and it seems to me that our faces are shining, and I think of the blessing, “The Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.”  What made Moses’ face glow in the presence of the Lord, and what transfigures ordinary faces is, it seems to me, the gift of recognition.  Someone (God or a human other) sees us for who we are and sees that we are here for a purpose.  To live out our purpose we need others to give us the encouragement and space to express our selves.  I have no trouble making eye contact with my mother now.  In the past, I looked away from her gaze because I felt judged rather than recognized.  Now the self-consciousness is gone, melted away with the old roles. 

Mom has very few teeth but talks and laughs unselfconsciously.  I slip off my hiking boots and wet socks, and squeeze my cold bare feet between Katya’s thighs under the table.  “With me, you do not have to pretend.  I know you.  I knew you before you were born.  I know you because I made you, and I made you because I need you—or more precisely, because the world needs you.  There is a task only you can do.  Now, therefore, be strong and do it.”  This is what I imagine making eye contact with God feels like.  Sitting in the bar with my born-again mother, it feels like I am seeing her and she is seeing me for the first time.  It’s magical.  What people sometimes forget is that Reality is double, made up of both the actual and the possible; and the divine spirit that inspires each of us dwells in the realm of the possible, the kingdom of metaphor, the home of how dare I.  Children are born into families because families promote and preserve life.  But fostering life is about so much more than the provision of necessities—food, clothes, I-Phones, and shelter.  It really depends on how generously and graciously we make use of the stock of poetic resources every family group possesses:  do we remember the stories?  Do we share the songs?  Do we cry and laugh about the way things were?  Do we remind one another of who we used to be and who we hoped to be and who we still can be?  It is our serious responsibility as family members to give back what we’ve been given.  My mother gave me her curiosity, her love of learning, and her adventurous spirit.  “What do I have to give back?  What can I bring to the manger?”  

Weeks ago during a phone conversation I realized that the best gift I could give Mom was myself—the woman she’d raised.  I’d just finished watching a YouTube documentary on the famous English travel writer, Freya Stark, who rode a pony on a trek through the Himalayas up to 30,000 feet when she was 88 years old.  The doctors in Kathmandu told her that she shouldn’t go, that it wasn’t safe, but she went.  At 24,000 feet, the young man filming the trek asked her if she was glad she didn’t take the doctor’s advice.  Freya said, “If I live till 90, I might make a list of all the people whose advice I didn’t take.”  She lived 100 years.  After seeing that film, I thought of Mom’s plight in a new way.  With a new feeling of excitement, I phoned her at The Pines and told her about it.  “Listen to what Freya says, Mom: ‘If you knew yourself to be a part of something very immense it would be more satisfactory than to be a rather small little pinpoint of being.  That’s why we come back to our adventure because even the smallest adventure is a step, an experience, and that in itself is magic isn’t it?”  That very night, Mom tried to walk to the bathroom on her own and had a little fall.  But she laughed with her friend, Ike, picked herself up, and kept going.  The magic of adventure is the feeling of not knowing what’s around the next corner, but taking the step because we trust that somehow we are in good hands.  My mother gave me that trust when I was a little child.  If my return of her gift strengthens her faith, hallelujah! From my limited vantage point, I imagine I’ll be watching in wonder as Catherine Alice Walker walks with or without walker from one adventure to another further and further into that undiscovered country.

Ruinaissance in Flint

                Cities rise and fall, and I have been teaching hard for twenty years (since 1996) in the saddest of fallen beauties, Flint, Michigan.  A twentieth-century powerhouse of industry, she was proud.  Now, she lays by her riverbank … recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat.  We’re north and east of the center of America but might as well be at the end of the world.  Flint made the national news during the 2016 presidential campaign because of our lead-contaminated water, which many read as a sign of malicious neglect.  In fact, Flint is just like forgotten places all over the world where the only news is bad news:  war, contamination, genocide, birth defects, epidemics, and ruin.  From the time I arrived in 1996, I’ve never thought of living elsewhere—the idea of a nice suburb makes me physically sick, I haven’t been able to stop wandering through the ruins of neighborhoods, but I’ve also never understood my compulsion.  Am I here to be a witness?  Am I called to be an active sharer in this bleak reality?  Am I supposed to knock on doors and help?  Oh, Flint, what shall I cry?

Street after street of ruins on Flint's east side.

                I don’t think of myself as a poet, but I share the obsession of Renaissance poets (Italian, French, and English) with ruins of a bygone past.  When Petrarch gazed at the obsolescent grandeur of Roman decay in the 1340s, the dilapidated city was little more than sad farmlands: “As in our travels through the remains of a broken city, there too, as we sat, the fragments of the ruins lay before our eyes.”  In the cultural efflorescence of the fifteenth century, Rome’s gleaming churches, palaces, and monuments were built from stones pilfered from ancient buildings.  This salvaging of the past to rebuild the present seemed like a good metaphor with which to begin a course in the classics of the English Renaissance to University of Michigan-Flint students; it was a metaphor I hoped that would challenge them to figure out how the potshards of Renaissance texts could be collected and pieced together to mend the gaping holes in our city—a city whose emblem could be the Delphi plant, looking like an amputee, almost completely dismantled or the McDonald Dairy reduced to rubble, whose motto carved in stone used to read that “the farm is still the enduring base of America.”  My husband thinks that surely someone saved the engraved marble, but I know better. 

                For writers, the site of the ruin is the birthplace of poetics.  Why?  Because what Shakespeare calls the “dressings of a former sight,” ask us to remember and imagine the way things once were.  The biblical poets Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied and cried over the destruction of Philistine cities and of their own beloved Zion.  As I walk through neighborhoods that most people speed past, run from, or walk through as if nothing has happened or as if it always looked like that, I am grateful that at least the exoskeletons of houses exist for the sake of the historical record.  When General Motors closed factories, they tore down, with stunning speed, the massive Buick City and Chevy-in-the-Hole so that people didn’t have time to think, to be angry, to grieve.  They didn’t want to leave behind evidence that the corporation made and marred, that the corporation used and abused, that the corporation is nothing but a tyrant that took from the people, polluted the land, and left it desolate.  Oh, Flint, what shall I cry?  But it’s hard to feel angry at the faceless acronym GM and easier just to go about one’s day numb, stunned, walking as if drugged through a world of eyesores (chimneys standing awkwardly amidst weed trees) or a world where the eyesores are torn down.  It’s desolate either way. 

Buick City brownfield.  You can tell the date of the plant's destruction from the plants
growing among the ruins.

What really makes me mad are my university colleagues who commute from Bloomfield Hills, East Lansing or Ann Arbor.  What kills me are all those robots living comfortable middle-class lives in the nearby College Cultural neighborhood, in the mansions off Miller Road, or the suburb, aptly named, Grand Blanc.  Big white flight is largely responsible for making areas like the east side ghost towns.  But what happened to the people who once lived in these neighborhoods, those who lost jobs and aid checks and witnessed the death by fire of house after house?  Some live on in varying degrees of numbness with no places to buy food nearby—just churches, tattoo studios, and St. Vincent DePaul.  Others flew off to other factories, to other places, like starlings in their thick clouds of bird bodies, black clouds, that remind me of the black soot that fell on the backyards and discolored the curtains of immigrant women trying to keep house in the Saint John’s Street neighborhood.  Where’s that?  It is gone from a landscape wiped clean by urban renewal.  Give me the ruins.  Let them stand.  They are a call to action, to speech, to art.  “I know people who left Flint and did well, and I know people who stayed and did well,” says one of my students.  “What do the ones who stay do,” I ask naively.  “They’re mostly artists, musicians, or chefs.”  “Because that’s all there is to do—make art?”  “Right.  Or do drugs.”

If only people would stay.

It's been this way for twenty years

Making my rounds

Thirty years and out

GM time till freedom

And I’ve wondered why

I felt called here

“Here I am!”  “Send me!”

Like a little prophet

From Boston all the way

To Flint to bring water out of rock

With words.  I speak to the students

Gently but walk mechanically

Not sure what to think or say

And students flee the humanities

Because they are products on an inhuman

Environment.  Just thirty years till freedom.

Houses burned from the inside out

And I walk and walk, taking it all in

Counting the lives lost to greed

But what should I cry? 

I wasn’t born here yet I feel bleak.

I didn’t choose to live

In the outskirts, didn’t choose to look away

I chose this life; so Prophet, look:

Candles on a corner

Tents in Kearsley park

RIP Grandpa—gone but not forgotten.

Houses in ruins

A city in ruins

And my life, too

Wrecked by repetition

And numbed service with a smile.

No!  God I don’t want this

Give me a word to speak

To the people, a role to play

That matters.

I see the houses in flames

And sleepers rubbing tears away

Awake in the cold

Where are you in all this?

God!  The great “I Am”

Who spoke from a bush that burned

But wasn’t consumed like these lives

But not my heart.

And I’m crying out

For all the lost ones

Who fled and for the

Sick and out of work who

Stayed and for the dogs

That wander the streets

And it’s not enough

To notice the perfect gray

Tear of a hornet’s nest in a tree

Along the Flint River

Or the one domestic duck in the flock

Of water fowl who dip down into a river

That a half a mile away is being dredged

For toxins.  Clean-up is not enough

People have to stay and they have to cry

Even if they don’t know quite what to cry

And maybe God—up there—flashing rose

on this gray December day

Would deign to come down with

some soft rags of cloud and

wipe all the tears away.

In class I showed my slides of Flint ruins, many of which were taken along Lewis Street, Jeannie spoke up, “I lived on Lewis Street.  It’s my home.”  After class, I asked her if she’d be willing to meet me so that we could walk through her neighborhood together.  We’re over twenty years apart.  I’d known that she was an orphan and that her mother was murdered when she was just 14.  I didn’t know what to expect, but I never expected it to feel so happy, so good.  She got out of her car smoking a Marlboro and pulled down her big round sunglasses.  We headed north as Lewis parallels the Flint River, and the December wind blew strands of Jeannie’s purple hair around her face.  “I was born on Bennett, and I lived all over this neighborhood.  I was a street kid.  We rode bikes anywhere.  It felt safe.  It was home.  I knew people on every block, and there was a place up on Franklin where you could get a free bag lunch—bologna and ketchup.”  Along the way, she points out the churchyard where they “stole” forbidden apples, the substation on the river where she used to climb the girders and hide out, the restaurant side of Art’s Pub and Grub, that her mother owned.  We peer through the glass door:  “my mother laid those tiles.”  We moved into some pretty bad places and she rebuilt them.  She cooked, too.  I never knew what an instant mashed potato was until I went to my friend’s house over there.”  She points to a burned out shell of a house. 

All dressed up for the holidays off Lewis Street.  The shops,
 bars, and eateries are mostly all closed.

All but one of the houses Jeannie pointed to on our two-hour walk were either gone (empty lots) or burnt black caves.  She tells sad stories:  violent deaths, drugs, teenage homelessness, arson.  “I talked to a lot of the kids who burned houses.  They were anywhere from 9 to 14, and the landlords would give them a hundred bucks.  Kids will do anything for money.  When I asked them why, they said they didn’t like it but figured someone would clean the houses up.”  She told me about stealing bikes and selling them for 20 bucks a piece, about selling marijuana to get through Mott Community College, about sleeping in the empty houses and going to high school with frostbitten toes.  Her mother had died, and she was on the streets.  She remembers characters like Uncle Merle, who she once thought was the coolest, “Yeah, he’s still kicking around Flint somewhere, addicted to heroin.  I don’t talk to him anymore.”  With her nothing feels sad, and the neighborhood is not dismal.  It is what it is—alive with her memories and the energy of a young woman who resists psychological labels, whose character and mind were made here, who has been too busy surviving and educating herself and her kids to get sucked down the holes that take away Flint lives.  She owns land in Highland, Michigan, where her two boys can play outside, where she can fall asleep in a hammock pointing out constellations.  She’s proud of what she’s accomplished, yet she says, “Imagine.  This decaying city is still my home.”  She touches lightly on the inevitable shame but brushes it aside with cliché, “Flint’s a great place to be from.  It builds character.”  I’ve always felt that cliché is a way of covering up or neutralizing experience, and Jeannie resorts to it rarely.  Perhaps this walk gives her a chance to circle back into the past and avoid the amnesia that is, to some extent, necessary for those who get out, for those who seek to fashion new selves and better lives.

 “As strange as it sounds,” I venture to add, “I’ve always felt like these neighborhoods are my home, too.”  My words are like the inconsequential flurries of snow that blow around us.  I feel stupid making this claim.  After all, I did not have to live here; yet, here I am.  Jeannie doesn’t wear a hat, and her cheeks are glowing.  I sense an inward fire, and I feel like I’ve been invited inside.  But the last house she lived in with her mother is gone.  Even though there is no door to open, no kitchen table to sit around while drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, no photo album to flip through, I feel sheltered, clothed, and fed.  Then I think of poor Edmund Spenser and his incomplete epic which he wrote from the ruins of a castle in the west of Ireland in the late sixteenth-century.  Book One—The Legend of Holinesse—climaxes when the Red Crosse knight goes to a place called the House of Holinesse that doesn’t really feel like a structure at all.  He ducks in through a narrow gate, and then he’s engaged in talking and listening, repenting and suffering, walking and climbing Mount Contemplation.  What’s new for him is that he has a companion, Mercy, who helps him to the top, where he learns his real name and his purpose.  Jeannie and I walk for blocks, and at the very center of our walk, we are given something like a vision.  Two enormous greenhouses stand in a large space where four or five houses must have been removed, and a group of black men in work clothes, silently spread the frozen earth with metal rakes as snow swirls gently around them.  The world is at rest and is quiet.  Eden.  Gardening never ends.  Flintopia.  Bleak.  Tragic.  Missteps.  Mercy.  Home.

Coda

The day after kicking around the east side with Jeannie, I walked up the creek that runs alongside Mott Community College toward Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and Dakota.  I thought that I would feel loneliness acute with only a dog for company.  Instead I found myself thinking about Jeannie’s utopian suggestion.  “Look at all these empty houses!  Do you realize that there are more abandoned homes than homeless?  What if every person in need were given a house to live in for five years.  People would say, ‘oh, it isn’t fair because they didn’t work for it.  But it would only be for five years, and after that, they start paying on it.”  I’ve long known that we all have it in us to be prophets if we open our eyes and feel with our hearts.  Occupied with such thoughts, I see a man coming down the path pushing a walker with a plastic box attached to the front.  I can see from one hundred feet away that he is grinning broadly.  I think he just climbed down off a bus.  And Moses face glowed when he descended Sinai to speak to the people.  When I get close, he calls to Panda, who races up to him and jumps all over his legs puppy biting the work gloves he wears.  “Hey this dog bites,” he says and I’m not sure whether he is angry or hurt.  You should train him better.  But before I walk away with tail between my legs, he looks at me and brings back that broad smile.

 “You’re a teacher,” he says.

 “Why, yes, how did you know?” 

“Ya look like one.”  In response to the follow-up, “where?,” I say “UM-Flint.”  “English,” he guesses.  I laugh and affirm that he’s right.  

“But tell me what author you think I teach all the time?”

 “Shakespeare,” he says definitively, and I laugh harder.

 “Yes!!!” 

“Well, what do you know.  I’m psychic.”  Then, he looks me up and down, and says, “and you’re going to live one hundred years.  My name is Bob, what’s yours?”

What'd We Learn?

We were settling down to study for her history test—chapter 5 on the rise and fall of Rome.  “Do you want me to come to your room, sweetie?”  “No, Mom, I’ll come to you,” she says brightly, plopping her heavy textbook (unread) on the single bed in my office.  She hands me the one-page study guide, filled out with one or two word answers to very complex questions, penned in very childish script.  She is fifteen.  I only have two more years to work with her before the fledgling leaves the nest, and I’m often at a loss.  What will it take, I wonder, to make her feel that opening a book is entering a world?  What will it take to arouse real curiosity?  The text book may be boring and the teacher’s study guide nonsensical, but I wish she would care, even a little, about her schoolwork.  I ask the first question, and she answers correctly but misses the second one—“What style of art most influenced the Romans?”  She wrote “architecture,” and I laugh, “that’s not a style?  Didn’t you read this book?”  When I suggest she take it back to her own room and read it, she starts pulling her blue hair and pummeling her face as if she is a child with some kind of serious disability.  I speak calmly to defuse the situation.  I know my daughter knows things; moreover, I know she tolerates study because she enjoys sitting and talking with me.  I know this, but it is not always at the top of my mind.  It was Katya’s distress that sent it flooding into my brain.  The questions take us into what I suppose is familiar territory, “Who was the Jewish teacher that taught and preached in Judaea and Galilee?”  Jesus!, she says brightly. There is no way for her to miss that one: she was raised a Catholic, went to Catholic elementary school and Lutheran middle school.  And the next question, I think before I ask, should be easy for her as well:  “what was it about Christianity that made it spread so rapidly?”  Her face becomes serious while she begins to say what she knows, “Well, it focused on the person.  It was open to the poor and the lowly even more than the rich.  There were no animal sacrifices, and people didn’t have to pay a lot of money to be initiated.”  I scan the textbook and read selected pieces aloud to her, “and the fact that Jesus was a human being that people knew, made it easy to identify with him.”  She looks at me as if she is about to share a secret.  “So Jesus was real?”  “Yes, of course,” I say, surprised.  This, above all else, seems to matter to her more than anything we’ve gone over in her history book chapter, and maybe it matters even more than years of stories heard in church.  He was real.  If she remembers nothing else about ancient Rome:  the Etruscans, Caesar, the Goth invaders, and the causes of Rome’s decline, I think she may remember that Jesus lived and died.  What’s more, he lived in a very particular way—as strange as the Olmecs and Mayas, the Greeks and Romans and more like the nomadic Kazakhs.  He never had a place to lay his head.  He didn’t cling to things but gave everything he had away:  his cloak, his power, his prayers, his life.  She heard the gospel stories all her life, and I remember her saying once that she was tired year after year of celebrating the birth at Bethlehem to the crucifixion at Calgary.  Now I understand that she was bored with the story, thinking it was just a story.  An unusual college girl who tutored Katya in math, a girl who took pictograph notes in cartoon form, told me once that Kat was a kinesthetic learner.  So I have to hope that maybe after she sits with the knowledge that Jesus was real, she will get up and dance with it, letting it become the idea that Jesus could be real again, depending on what she chooses to do.  Ever since she stopped getting up to come with me to church on Sunday mornings, I’ve had the thought that it is because I failed to make real the words we heard together; I failed to bring them out of church because of my own confusion, my own lack of commitment and love.  If I do anything this Advent, I want her to re-experience the story of the virgin birth—it sounds like a far-fetched story, but it captures or contains the real experience of new life bursting out anywhere, in any person, at any time, even if Mary did not “know” man, even in the bleakest neighborhood of Flint—a city named for rock—water can spill from the faucets and be clear enough to drink.