“I wonder if you guys would read a story I’m writing.” I remember the awkwardness of my first words to Andrew and Kevin. They were regulars at the coffee shop where I had taken to hanging out. I had overheard their discussions of ideas well waxed with all things deep and philosophic.

Ella, in her way, had chosen their group to make friends with, so by extension I had become acquainted with them. Yet getting the courage to actually attempt that fearful task of relationship initiation – small talk, took too much caffeine and my near completion of a story about a pre-Socratic philosopher. I was so excited by the resonance of espresso and a good idea that I had to share it with someone. I paced back and forth a couple times and then, approaching them, gesticulated the awkward sentence. They agreed, but I didn’t know what to do next. I gave them the web address for the story and left it.

They were to become dear friends. I only realized how much I loved Kevin and his girlfriend, Liz the night before they left for Marquette. I talked with them late that night, long past closing, and then while I was still cleaning they came back and brought me a slice of pizza from the Atrium.

From the time I met Andrew he was already one with Amanda, a girl who worked at the coffee shop. We sometimes called them Amandrew. They too were my kind of people. Coffee culture, academic, bohemian. Tonight, I said goodbye to them. Over the past couple years they have become some of my dearest friends, more than that, they are a brother and a sister to me. Their farewell party was bittersweet. I will miss them, and I desperately hope and pray for the grace of sharing our lives again. But sweetly I also praise God that he allowed me to love them for the time I have. Even if my great desire for them is not met, it is enough that I have known people so pure and dear.

Andrew’s parting words to me were that he would email me his comments on a revision of the story I asked him to read when we met.

Naked Nihilism

I saw coke-bottle bespeckled Bill, today, riding his old-man bike downtown. He had his shirt draped over his handle bar. It struck me as significant. Looking at the wrinkled manflesh of a naked nihilist is too much for the human mind. For when nihilism is laid bare, it is like looking into the the dark abyss of nothingness.

I sit at a booth at a sidewalk sale during the Sugar Festival. It is the heat of early afternoon and people have already left off shopping the dwindling downtown. Up and down the sidewalks, elderly shop keepers and artisans are packing up their wares. The air is heavy with the humidity of resignation and happy disappointment. The Festival congers up nostalgic images of the community those elderly patrons and purveyors once knew.

The main source of traffic is the steady stream of young people cruising center. In defiance of the nostalgia, car after car vibrate by, the bass too strong for Detroit steel to handle: it buzzes rather than resonates. The urban beats and hip-hop expletives hit the farm town streets with a hard insurrection. Even I, perhaps the youngest curb sitter, nearly 30, am reproached for my age.

I recall a family vacation to Branson Missouri when I was a teen. The country music atmosphere and senior tour busses made me feel like I was in an assisted living twilight zone. We went to what, in retrospect, was a great concert by violinist Shoji Tabuchi. Shoji fiddled to just about any kind of music, jazz, bluegrass, and Broadway. Before intermission, he pointed this out and challenged the audience to try to stump him with another music style. My brother and I looked at each other with a crooked smile. There is no way, we thought, that a place like this could produce the music we were listening to. We were wrong, after the intermission he did a rap version of “The Ballad of Jed Clampett.”

After the concert, my brother and I went to our van, thoroughly disgusted with the world’s lack of sensitivity to youth. We popped in a tape of, dare I admit it, gangster rap? We blasted it to the parking lot of smiling seniors, inflicting our fierce youth upon them.

Perhaps it is the way young people respond to a world that doesn’t understand them. Perhaps it is their way of saying that they don’t feel apart of the community. Hopefully we can smile like the seniors in the Branson parking lot and find ways to embrace their youth making them part of the community the Sugar Festival celebrates.

A story about "Quantum Theology, Revised Edition : Spiritual Implications of the New Physics"

Quantum Theology, Revised Edition : Spiritual Implications of the New Physics

by Diarmuid O'Murchu

This is a mind tingling book. I find I have to be in a highly caffinated state to get into it. I love it when I am… into it. Glenn loaned it to me and he wants it back pretty bad. So I guess I’ll have to hit the coffee.

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