When we left home,
\nleft our preacher fathers
\nfor the parochial school my mother,
\nalso a preacher, had attended,
\nwe knew nothing.<\/p>\n
That’s not true. We knew a lot.
\nWe could quote the Bible.
\nWe knew the words and melodies
\nto dozens of hymns and choruses
\nand spoke Spanish well enough
\nto spend a summer on the mission field,
\nyou in Costa Rica,
\nme in Mexico.
\nWe knew how to read people.<\/p>\n
We found each other in the hall
\nof our first dorm. For all our similarities,
\nwe were different.
\nI was a scholar.
\nYou were a cheerleader.
\nI rushed headlong into trouble.
\nYou sauntered into the mess.<\/p>\n
What we learned that year
\nhad little to do with algebra, history, or religion.<\/p>\n
I learned to avoid the preacher’s sons
\nand the preachers to be,
\nthe former sent here by their parents,
\nthe later by hopes or a calling.
\nThe local boys, just back from Viet Nam,
\nwere safer and more fun,
\ndespite their bags of weed and white crosses.<\/p>\n
The school didn’t appreciate our off-campus education.
\nThe letter I received at the end of semester
\nasked me to choose another fine Christian institution to attend.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure what they determined were our sins?
\nWe went to our classes.
\nWe turned in our homework.
\nWe were in the dorm by curfew.<\/p>\n
Maybe it was the questions we asked.
\nMaybe it was our brashness.
\nMaybe it was the basketball player I’d started dating.<\/p>\n
Her daddy blamed me.
\nMy daddy blamed her,
\nand kept the letter secret from my mother.<\/p>\n
You and I kept in touch.
\nWe married.
\nHad children.
\nMarried again.
\nLearned what couldn’t be taught in church.<\/p>\n
You never lost your faith.
\nI gained a new one, in nature, in critical thinking, in love and kindness.<\/p>\n
Then the pandemic. My son told me you were sick,
\na blood clot. Not a stroke.<\/p>\n
I wrote to you, and you called.
\nAfter all those years, and it was just like always.<\/p>\n
Not Covid, you said,
\nbut you didn’t know what had caused the clot.<\/p>\n
Jenny lost her husband to Covid, I said.
\nMy daughter, a widow, the daughter
\nyou helped me raise when I left my first husband.<\/p>\n
Two old ladies.
\nDecades of history, of education, formal and informal.
\nAll those years, some happy, some tragic.<\/p>\n
And somehow, we had survived.*<\/p>\n
*from The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When we left home, left our preacher fathers for the parochial school my mother, also a preacher, had attended, we knew nothing. That’s not true. We knew a lot. We could quote the Bible. We knew the words and melodies to dozens of hymns and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":665,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-half-marathon-poem","category-official-marathon-prompts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/665"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90980,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90366\/revisions\/90980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}