Benny Jay: Mother's Day

We go to our favorite Italian restaurant for Mother's Day. Nobody gets plastered, but we have a few drinks. Manhattans for my parents, beer for me. My sister and wife are drinking something -- can't remember what.

By the end of the dinner no one's feeling any pain. My younger daughter orders tea -- Earl Grey. "I don't like Earl Grey," my sister says.

"You're not drinking it," I tell her.

My mother tells a story about a girl she knew in college who stole a towel from a hotel: "They found the towel in her suitcase. I said, `You don't need that towel.' She said, `I always wanted that towel.'"

The conversation moves to a discussion of Key West in Florida. My father talks about the writers who have lived there. "Hemingway and Wallace Stevens once had a fist fight," he says.

I shouldn't say anything, but he has to be wrong. Wallace Stevens is too old to be a contemporary of Hemingway. The old man's slipping -- he's getting his poets mixed up.

"Stevens broke his fist when he hit Hemingway in the jaw," he continues.

I shake my head. "That didn't happen," I say.

"Yes, it did...."

"It couldn't. Stevens is twenty years older than Hemingway. That's like you having a fight with...." I try to think of a colleague or a friend who is twenty years younger than my father.

"They had a fight," he says. "You can look it up...."

The conversation moves to Pete Seeger. My sister says they just had a concert in New York City, celebrating his 90th birthday. "Bruce Springsteen was there," she says.

"But your friend didn't show," my father says to me.

"Which friend?" I say.

"Dylan...."

I think -- don't fall for it.

"He is your friend?" says my father, as if I've ever even met Bob Dylan.

"Dylan snubbed Pete Seeger?" asks my mother.

I fall for it. "We don't know if he was invited...."

"Why wouldn't he be invited?" says my sister. "You know he was invited. He's still mad at the folk singers for things that happened forty years ago...."

"We don't know he was invited," I say.

"He should get over it," says my sister.

I stop. Why am I falling for this? I'm a thousand years old and I'm still falling for this.

"The point is that one of them is a leftist and the other is a religious rightist," says my father.

I fall for it again. "Okay, Dylan's not a religious rightist," I say.

"But didn't he become a Christian?" asks my mother.

"That doesn't make him a religious rightist," I say.

"But why didn't he go to Pete Seeger's party?" asks my mother.

"Maybe he wasn't invited," I say.

"Of course, he was invited," says my sister.

"How do you know?" I say. "Did you make the invitations?"

Ah, weak response. I'm not up to my usual game. I should drink more. Maybe I'd be wittier if I drank more.

Later that night I go to my computer and look up Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway. I'll be goddamn -- there it is. They quote a letter that Hemingway wrote, and it's just like my dad said: "Mr. Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that. And this is very funny. Broke his hand in two places. Didn't hurt my jaw at all."

What an arrogant ass Hemingway was. Makes me want to hear Stevens' side of the story.

Oh, well -- I should know better. There are four arguments you will never, ever win: A baseball argument with Big Mike Glab; a basketball argument with Norm; an argument about The Beatles with my sister (she knows freaking everything about The Beatles); and an argument about poets and/or poetry with my father.

No matter how old he is....

Big Mike: Hey, I Wanna Be An Evangelist Too!

Young Joe, the kid next door, rang my back bell yesterday afternoon. As usual, I'd been pounding away at the keyboard in my underwear ala Hemingway (pretty much the only thing we have in common.) Without thinking, I dashed upstairs and answered wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of wind-whipped man-bloomers - white with red hearts, natch.

The kid had been waiting in the rare bright sunshine (this has been a lousy winter even in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky), shifting nervously from foot to foot in his gargantuan sneakers in the melting snow. When he saw me, I thought his eyes might pop out of his head.

"Sorry buddy," I said. "I always write like this." The explanation only seemed to confuse him further so I let it drop. "What's up?"

He handed me two copies of a book. "These are for you and your wife," he said, smiling shyly.

I put my cheaters back on and studied the top copy's cover. It was entitled "One Heartbeat Away: Your Journey Into Eternity." It was, of course, a tome on god and how I ought to get cracking on believing in him/her/it before the old ticker shorts out.

"Um, thanks," I said. "Why are you giving these to me?"

"I'm witnessing for my church," Young Joe said.

At this point I was already debating in my mind whether I should tell him not to waste the books on The Loved One and me or if I should soften the blow and say One will do, thanks. I mean, I didn't want to appear unneighborly but, you know, save a tree and all that. Before I could speak, he said, beaming proudly, "I printed your names in them for you."

"Oh. Fine. Yes. Fine. Very nice. That's awfully nice of you," I replied, now holding the books as if they were rare artifacts. With that, Young Joe bid adieu and dashed back home.

The god and Jesus thing has been a quandary for me since I arrived in Louisville nearly two years ago. Back home in Chicago, belief in god usually manifests itself in one of two ways. The vast majority of people in the city proper profess to be far too sophisticated for traditional worship. I'm not a member of any regular religion, they might say, I believe in my own way. Those who aren't apologetic for their religiosity often can be found shouting into bullhorns on State Street.

In Kentucky, though, Christianity seems to be the club everybody wants to belong to. My first weekend here, I was cornered at Barnes and Noble by some old bird who bent my ear about how I had to accept Jesus. Cab drivers, Chick-fil-a drive-thru clerks, convenience store owners, and the like think nothing of going on and on about how fabulous and wonderful god and Jesus are. Or, I guess, is. Sometimes it seems as though every citizen of the Commonwealth has a story about how he or she was saved from some crushing reversal of fortune or even sudden death and has The Big Man to thank for it.

I try to keep my non-believer status close to the vest in these parts now. When we first moved onto Murray Hill Pike, I met Young Joe as he dashed through my yard chasing a ball. We introduced ourselves and exchanged information. Puffing out his chest, he told me he attends a school affiliated with one of the biggest mega-churches in the region. I told him that was, well, nice. "You should come to service on Sunday," he gushed. "You'll love it!"

"Well, I'll think about it," I replied. Then, to fill in an uncomfortable silence that followed, I asked, "What denomination is it?"

Young Joe looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"Y'know, is it Methodist or Lutheran or something?"

"Oh," Joe said, "it's just Christian." Which is, as I understand it, a denomination all its own under The Big C umbrella - search me; as I said, I'm a non-believer

"So what are you?" Joe asked.

Uh oh. My mind shifted into fifth gear. What do I tell this 10-year-old about my atheism? I don't want it to sound as if I'm proselytizing. And I don't want his parents to think I'm polluting his mind. But he asked. "I'm, uh, nothing," I said.

Young Joe was aghast. "You don't have any religion?" he whispered, as if merely uttering the words would taint his soul.

"No," I answered, sotto voce, the way I used to speak in the confessional.

"Then you have to come to services Sunday," Joe concluded. In the ensuing weeks, his mother, Jan, repeatedly told me how terrific their church was and how we were invited to come anytime as her special guests. I thanked her repeatedly. She still doesn't know the exact nature of my beliefs although the language that came spewing out of me last summer when I hit my head on the Prius's hatchback latch gave her an indication I'm not a Baptist minister. Jan and her mother had been sitting in the swing behind her house when the torrent commenced. Even though It was a perfect evening, the two hustled inside as if my verbiage were a plague of locusts.

I'm rather touched that Young Joe hopes to save my soul. I appreciate Jan's invitations to church. And, honest, I listen politely when cabdrivers go on and on about how god's hand has guided their lives. I only wish I could figure out a way to tell them about my god-free world without thinking I'm gonna burn in hell.