Like many writers, I have long had the habit of keeping notes about future story ideas. I was probably 17 or 18 when I had an idea for a story about man whose many siblings are one by one being picked off by an unknown assailant. The man grows increasingly paranoid and isolated as each one dies, until at last he is the only sibling left. We come to understand that the story has unfolded over the course of a lifetime, and the only assailant is implacable death itself. My note for the story was probably something along the lines of "Brothers and sisters murdered one by one."

Like many fathers, mine long had the habit of going through my stuff from time to time. So it was that my father sat me down one night with a solemn look on his face, waved my story notes, and said, "Are you planning to kill your brothers and sisters?"

As the eldest of eight kids, I admit that I did not take much interest in my family, and I did keep to myself as best I could and keep my many creative pursuits secret. But was that chicken or egg? Was I like that because I had to put up with stupid questions like that one?

I think my father died without ever honestly understanding why I didn't like to talk to him. Which is a shame because he was a smart, interesting guy, and I could have learned a lot of things from him. I mean things besides the ones he taught inadvertently.

I think I'll still write that story someday, though.

The face is the biggest shock
after the name—
your name, almost.

The face you knew from childhood,
mischievous, wry, handsome,
now stony as battered granite,
the young features punched up
and pounded like wet clay
then fired hard in a thousand-degree kiln.

The face discovered with "burglary tools,
methamphetamine and more than 100 stolen items
belonging to more than 30 people."

The face leaps out from the article
from fifteen hundred miles away,
like a fugitive in a game of
hide-and-go-seek, flushed out
from the shadows of the chicken coop
when you'd forgotten you were even playing,
racing to make it home free.

What could you have done?
Returned more of his phone calls?
At some point you knew, somewhere
in those twenty years of rob arrest repeat,
you had to keep your distance.
He was your cousin. It wasn't like
he was your brother.

But you weren't there yet
at that first apartment
where you lived on your own,
when you locked your keys inside,
when that confident, capable face
you'd known from infancy said,
"I'll get in." And did.

And you thought that was so cool.

You thought I was done with Christopher Bigelow's post, but I was only taking a little breather. After declaring that it's probably too late for him to change his ways anyway, even if he wanted a new lifestyle, he makes this judgment:

And it sounds like Bill's dad was a real jerk, so he's got more of an excuse than I do to reject his parents' lifestyle....  [full post]

I have a lot of complicated responses to this. First is regret at the realization that I probably haven't done a good enough job in public at pointing out that my father was not only a jerk while I was growing up. He was sometimes kind, loving, and supportive. He was independent and often questioned authority. He was smart, though he tended to downplay that and fall back on received wisdom and kneejerk responses, and he was unfailingly discliplined, hard-working, and generous. He was also argumentative to a fault, controlling, and psychologically abusive, and his temper was severe. He correction could be violent, but physically it was only ever targeted at our scrawny behinds. He tended to spank first and never ask questions later (though he had pretty much stopped corporal punishment entirely by the time my youngest sisters were growing up). Admitting when he was wrong was not a strength. He did, however, teach me many invaluable lessons, the one I've taken most to heart being one he probably didn't intend—how to think for myself and make up my own mind about what I believe.

He's a complicated man, and he set a lot of contradictory examples for me. Most of all, he was a distinctive individual in sea of conformity. It would have been impossible for me not to have rejected his lifestyle in some way; in fact, rejection was exactly what we were taught. We were encouraged to become whatever we wanted to be (though doctor and lawyer were pushed harder than any other profession), so long as we didn't become teachers like he was. (Inevitably, at least one sibling did exactly that.)

We could argue all day about whether or not my rejection of Mormonism was a direct rejection of my father (and I would say that was only a small component of it), but it remains a fact that I lived a more rigorous Mormon lifestyle, by conscious choice, than practically anyone else I knew right up through the age of about 20. I tried to live like I believed the tenets, even while I fought private doubts that extended all the way back to age four or five (well before I could have made sense of the idea of rebelling against my parents). And still, it wasn't until nearly the age of 28 that I finally made the decision that much of my misery derived from clinging to a set of spiritual beliefs that contradicted what I had come to know about the world intellectually.

If that was a rejection of my parents' lifestyle, then it was also a rejection of the lifestyles of practically everyone I knew. I had no lack of good, kind, loving, generous teachers and friends growing up. I sacrificed many of those connections when I left the church, and it hurt. We have our differences today, but I remain on good terms with my parents. They may wish I'd return to the church, my father probably more tenaciously than my mother, but they haven't rejected me, and I haven't rejected them. They could not be more warm or welcoming to my lapsed Catholic and unlapsed Christian wife. We had our hard years after I left the church, but through love, work, and forgiveness we still manage to act like family.

I hope none of this sounds like an attack on Chris, who is one of the more tolerant and open-minded Mormons I know (a statement that could certainly be read as damning with faint praise). I also know this discussion is not explicitly about religion versus atheism, but it leads me directly to thoughts about the assumptions, both explicit and implicit, that religious people tend to bring to their mental portraits of atheists. That discussion, however, will have to wait a few days, until I have time to take on Ben Stein.