More Mary Oliver--The World I Live In

Long, long ago, my dad used to have a look at the walls in the living room. not purposely, I suppose, not as if to snag the sinners, but simply because the house he built with his own hands started to look a little tough with all those nail heads emerging from the walls, bulging where they were meant to be flush.

Those nail heads bothered him greatly, not only because he'd have been much happier if they hadn't bulged, but because he guessed that they were starting to break through the paint because there was far too much bouncing in his living room. His family life didn't really engender that much frivolity. It could only by his daughters.

And they almost had to be dancing. 

Dancing was anathema in his day. The son of the preacher in the church downtown, he grew up next door in the parsonage, where, I'm guessing, no one danced. The church warned against it too--dancing, that is, because dancing. . .well, who knows where it might lead? 

I had dad's way in me too for a time. When I was a high school senior, I sort of told a few others I was against it and therefore refused to go to the senior prom. I told myself I was standing firm. My feet would not be moved. It was as simple as that--yes to sin, no to righteousness.

My sisters are older than I am, and the truth is there were times when dancing happened right there in the living room, my parents out somewhere far beyond earshot, probably at some trade show hundreds of miles away. Somehow by the time I got to be their age, I'd adopted my dad's moral compass. 

Later, I taught at a college that, like most evangelical colleges, once banned dancing. Being agin' it was in the founders' blood. Dancing was a neon sign of abject worldliness. Good Christian evangelicals might occasionally square-skip, but anything else was sure as anything a prelude to fornication.

That's some of the background, I guess, that I bring to Mary Oliver's "The World I Live In."

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
     reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
     what's wrong with Maybe.

You wouldn't believe what once or
twice I have seen. I'll just
     tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
     ever, possibly, see one.

My grandfather, the dominie, would buy that idea about angels, but I don't know if he ever lived in a world of Maybe. I think my dad eventually came to, but not without some kicking and screaming.

And there's a little more to the story. My grandmother--my mother's mother--who'd been brought up in the big church, not the little one--ours--thought Dad somewhat overzealous about his daughters dancing. Once upon a time she told her son-in-law that he it might be a good idea to lighten up on his girls. 

But then Grandma, like Mary Oliver, had seen a lot. She lost her only brother in World War I, and more often than she'd ever care to admit, she had to go into a tavern to retrieve her besotted father and bring him home. She knew what the darkness looked like.

All of which made it easier for her to tolerate maybe. 

Eventually, of course, the girls left the house and nails stayed in the dry wall. Eventually, I think my dad mellowed. 

But then all of us do, don't you think? Most of us anyway.