Dolores

Dolores smiled as she entered the book store. She always smiled. Twenty-seven years after escaping her parents' grasp, her mother's words echoed as if they'd just been spoken: No man will put up with a woman with a sour face.

After her father died when she was eleven, her mother had changed. And the man who became Dolores's step father had accelerated her mother's descent. The insanity of her parents became the air Dolores breathed for so long that she no longer recognized their effect.

So Dolores smiled in spite of her losses. The house was empty now. Jeff, the man she'd fallen in love with that first summer out of the house, had left her for a sports car and a personal trainer who looked amazing in Spandex. The kids had left to build their own lives in California and Michigan. Dolores was stripped naked of her life's framework and purpose.

But she still smiled. No man will put up with a woman with a sour face. Or, as it turned out, a smiling one.

After her shower this morning, she'd stopped in front of the mirror and studied her body. Gravity and forty-five years of being a mother and a wife had left their mark. Things that used to be firm now sagged. The battle with gray hair progressed each day toward inevitable defeat and the box of Clarol that went with it. And the face that had once been smooth and innocent now bared the creases of time and disappointment.

But she was forty-five, and maybe she looked good for her age. She was a little thicker around the middle, but she wasn't fat by any means. And the kid at the deli counter almost seemed to be hitting on her yesterday.

So she smiled as she entered the book store, in spite of the internal battle between the part of her that viewed herself as a sagging old maid in waiting, and the part who dared to hope about her new-found freedom.

The first part of the writers' group meeting buzzed by like a drunken, muddled dream. She felt as if she were naked and she waited for people to notice. These people, the ones she'd met with since before Jeff left, seemed to like her well enough. But wait until they got to see the real her, the sagging failed housewife who couldn't keep her husband.

Who cared if she'd been promoted three times in two years. Her Lexus didn't mean anything about her personally. Your value as a woman is based on your value as a wife. That's what her mother had said.

And so she waited and smiled. And when her name was called and she stood up, she smiled in spite of feeling she'd either pee her pants or vomit. She wore the loose-fitting tan khakis that clung just enough to show off her butt, and an oversized white blouse with a light blue t-shirt underneath. Her friend Kerri told her it was her best outfit. She'd spent an extra twenty minutes on her make-up and hair this morning. At the last minute, she decided to wear the pearls Jeff bought her for their twentieth anniversary.

"Now," said Henry, the venerable writers' group leader said, "Dolores will honor us by reading from her novel. I've gotten a sneak peak, and I think you're all in for a treat."

She stepped forward encouraged by Henry's gentle smile. He reminded her of her father, the one whose death had pushed her life off course. But when she turned from him to face the others in attendance, she felt for all the world like her carefully selected clothes didn't exist. Still, she smiled.

When she opened her mouth, the only sound that escaped was "Uhhh."

Count to ten, she thought. You gave birth to two kids; you can do this.

Then she heard herself speak and time snapped forward. She read and finished and received the applause everyone got when they read. Then she sat down and noticed the man watching her. He was younger by about ten years and rail thin. She must have something on her teeth because he kept looking at her. Maybe her lipstick. She died inside and cursed herself for not checking the mirror one last time before she left.

After the meeting, after all the compliments from fellow group members, he approached.

"Dolores?" he said. His voice was deeper than it should have been, but his eyes were a breath-taking light blue.

"Uhh, hi," she said. Without thinking, she tucked her hair behind her right ear.

"That was fantastic, what you read." He wore a wedding ring.

"Gee, umm, thanks." Idiot, she thought, you sound like a moron.

"I'm Glenn Hurley. Henry said I should come and listen to your work. He said that you're a very talented woman with a beautiful soul," he said. "I'd say he's right."

When he held his hand out, it contained a card with the word agency on it.

"If you can e-mail me the first fifty pages, I'd love to read them."

She put her hand to her chest and fingered the pearls. "Uhh, sure." The smile, her phony one, fell away. And still she smiled. Her heart fluttered and then caught, like the lawn mower the day before, when she mowed the lawn for the first time in her life.

She talked with Glenn for the next twenty minutes. When he said he had to go, the rest of the group had left, except Henry. He sat at one of the tables and read something by Dean Koontz. As she approached, he looked up.

"So?" His voice was like warm chocolate.

She sat across the table from him, touched his hand, and told him everything. When she finished, he patted her hand.

"In all the time I've known you, this is the first time I've seen you really smile."

She blushed.

"And if you want my opinion, Jeff is an ass. You're better off free of him."

They talked and sipped coffee until he said he had to go. Later that night when she looked at herself in the mirror, she still sagged and the creases were still there. But the smile extended from her mouth clear to her heart.

Assignments

We all have assigned roles in life. Child, leader, follower, husband, father, genius, guide, schmuck. The only trick is figuring out which role is the right one, who's the appropriate assigner of roles, and how much of each role you have to accept.

The Hidden Cost of Living in Florida

When I first moved to Florida, I saw all these signs about Deed Restricted Communities. More than once, I wondered aloud what they were. Ten years later, having moved into one, I know what they are: developments with homeowners associations. HOAs, as we call them, are necessary evils. They prevent your across-the-street neighbor from replacing the shrubs in front of his house with old appliances, a car on blocks, and live poultry. They also leave notes in your mailbox telling you to fix things.

This year, I worked at home as the lady from the property management company--the HOA cops--wrote us up. I watched through the window as she sat in the car and noted something, then drove to the next house. This week, I got the anticipated nasty-gram. We had too much mildew on the driveway and sidewalk. Previously, I borrowed the next door neighbor's pressure washer to take care of that. Unfortunately, he moved. So I cleaned the driveway the cheap way: with bleach.

In a related topic, cheap sandals hurt my feet. So earlier this year, I dropped thirty-five bucks on a pair of Tevas. As a result, I didn't want to wear sandals to clean the driveway. And I hate wet sneakers, so I eschewed footwear and set to work.

Unless you're as stupid as I am, you know the rest of the story. I didn't finish the driveway, and I spent much of Saturday in bed, off my feet. And yesterday, too. My wife got to do the universal wifely activity of shaking her head in awe at the lack of neural activity between my ears.

I've had to do a number of irritating things because of where I've lived. I've shoveled snow just so I could shovel it again when the second foot fell. I've raked leaves to no significant gain (my dad had a talent for picking the windiest day of the fall for leaf-raking). And I've used the ice chopper to carve a canal in a sheet of ice so the rainstorm wouldn't flood my grandmother's basement. But I've never burnt my feet with bleach. And I've never queued up plywood next to the windows. Not until I moved to Florida.

Winter is optional. Driving in it is irritating. But so is bleaching the driveway.

Saving Grace, Religion with sex, guns, and rock and roll

The first episode of Saving Grace opens with Holly Hunter's character straddling her partner on the Oklahoma City Police Department on the edge of her bed, writhing in ecstasy. It's not the opening you would expect from a show arranged around religion and redemption.

The scene vividly establishes that Hunter's Grace Hanadarko is careening out of control toward a bad end. And it looks like she's found that end when she hits a black man while driving drunk after a long drinking session at a local bar. As she squats over him and tries to apply first aid, she says "Dear God, please help me." Suddenly, there appears a disheveled man in unkempt clothes who tells her that God sent her. He turns out to be an angel named Earl and he tells Grace that she's headed for hell and that he's there to help her avoid it.

But instead of the typical "goody two-shoes" approach to salvation where the condemned decides to be nice and everyone lives happily ever after, Saving Grace goes far deeper than that. Grace is a complex character, deeply noble and good, but deeply flawed. She has a self-destructive streak that runs as deep as her commitment as a cop and a hard-boiled sweetness that manifests itself more often than you'd guess.

As the series unfolds, Grace lies, drinks, and screws practically every man in the state of Oklahoma. And the layers are slowly peeled back to reveal that Grace, has good reason to be messed up. She was raped as a child by her priest. That set her on a course of rebellion and slow-motion self-destruction, and with each step, her guilt rose and her self-worth fell. When her sister asked her to help out on morning, Grace was too hungover. As a result, her sister wound up in the Murrah Building when it was attacked and her nephew, whom Grace adores, has no mother.

It's not Grace's actions that condemn her, it's her view of herself as beyond redemption. She engages in high-risk behaviors, living on the edge, because she's running from her past and the pain of her decisions. God's not choosing to condemn Grace; Grace is choosing it for herself. God is just obliging.

Earl's counsel to Grace is softly judgemental, but rarely condemning. And at the end of the day, Earl is more concerned with healing Grace's soul than listing her sins. It's a slow tedious process, and Grace's choices aren't likely to endear the show to those who loved Highway to Heaven. Many would view it as profane and blasphemous, combining the vulgar with God's goodness.

But if I didn't find myself in the profane and the blasphemous, I wouldn't find myself needing God. If I were good, Jesus wouldn't need to have died on the cross. The coarseness of the show is required to provide a counterpoint to the grace. Grace isn't grace if it exists everywhere.

God is always knocking at the door, but we have to answer it. This is a basic premise of redemptive religion. Augustine was a party boy before he found God. Grace is a contemporary version of that story.

Jesus in the media

It's become fashionable among Christians to complain that popular society is antagonistic to Christianity. Actually, it's been fashionable to register this complaint since before the Beatles proclaimed that they were more popular than God.

And in fairness, it might have been true then, but it's certainly not true any more. A number of instances make the anti-Christian argument difficult to defend, including, but not limited to:

• The ongoing success of U2, one of the most prolific and resilient bands in the rock and post-rock eras. U2 has been charting singles since 1980, and the themes of their songs, and sometimes the content itself, is blatantly Christian. Many of its biggest hits, including In the Name of Love, One, and Vertigo have Christian references. Another well-known U2 song, 40, is based on Psalm 40. The bands members, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr., have all publicly opined on their religious beliefs.
• Saving Grace, starring Holly Hunter is about a hard-living female cop in Oklahoma City who's been given one last chance to avoid hell: assistance from an angel named Earl. Grace is a gritty character whose life is dominated by sex, drugs, booze, and more sex. But she's also a very good cop and a caring person who can't quite accept the grace to leave behind the emotional scars of her past.
• In the late 1980s, a band called Depeche Mode charged a hit called Personal Jesus. Included in the lyrics: Your own personal Jesus, someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares. The song has been covered by Johnny Cash and--irony of ironies--Marilyn Manson.
• The Passion of the Christ, in spite of its graphically blood climax, is one of the top-grossing movies of all time.
• The Chronicles of Narnia have been released in a series of mainstream movies with good actors and advanced special effects.

In short, while there is resistance to Jesus and Christianity in current American culture, there's also a set of contemporary efforts to treat religious--often Christian questions with honor and care. It's my intent to investigate some of those efforts, expound on their meaning, and let you decide.