More from St Patrick's Day

I passed along Jess’ message for Ben: ‘love and hate and an exchange of drastically different wisdoms.’ Also her word for Keri if I saw her, for good measure and since, not expecting to see her, I figured I wouldn’t get to use it otherwise—‘to describe my bosoms in elaborate detail.’ I just said that, instead of doing it, but in this case it was enough. We had the NJ diner experience and hot on its heels the NJ bagel experience. In the distance the St Patrick’s Day parade is still going on, drums and snares and the tented din of people and bagpipes if you listen close. Not many streets away from the ballpark, a kid learning to pitch and still a bunch of people wearing green wandering around, though the serious drinking is further down, all through midtown to the park and fifth avenue where it actually was, the parade seemed to be there anyhow in the confused milling and wandering hordes of young scumbags, in potentia. But even just the train was enough of that, for me, about to fight over some stupid thing that started with comparing hats and shouting with delight. The U-S-A chant and other shitfaced medleys, since apparently no one knew any Irish drinking songs, or otherwise. So that’s something else for the school. And on that, the French classroom, the painted wall and ceiling tiles, the courtyard they fixed up and maintain, and kids saying hi like they know you—all that is something. But the first thing she kept saying and when we were out for Moroccan coffee and deserts, the administration has changed, they’re cutting the French program, and they can’t even sell cupcakes for a bake sale, and by next year maybe she’ll be out of a job and they’ll have to sell their house. But that isn’t even so much what makes Ben worry about going to Boston and paying more and more in loans for the master’s program with the professor whose essays he’s been reading, from research of his own or maybe a tip from the locally legendary priest—what really makes him think twice these days is the suspicion he’s doing evil by asking too many questions of the bible, and might not be believing the right way. But what also used to worry him was that the academic route wasn’t real and stable for supporting a family—which maybe isn’t such a concern anymore, if his family has been edging towards a bohemian-christian anarchy of a kind he can enjoy. We watched Inception and talked a long time about bible stuff, how it seems important to try to make up one’s mind what to believe about it, how to act and argue, since it demands your attention, once you know about it, and the more you start to think about it, the more difficult it is, doors closing behind, dreams within the dreams, the combination of Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, Job and Jonah, the opposition of subjective-relative and objective-absolute truths, and the ways these tend to play out in what you might term in the broadest sense education—colonization, crusades, proselytizing, epistles, gospels, forgiveness, love. Blaspheming against Paul but never against the Holy Ghost, not rejecting the free gift of life and relationship with God, but striving to understand the nature of it, of the fall, of suffering, of how it is possible to understand and have a meaning to life, to act as if, and to be sympathetic to other standpoints. For peace, for the democracy of heaven, instead of kingdom or republic or anarchy. Actual democracy, discussions where people listen to one another because they feel the possibility of being the other, of loving, of seeing themselves again. Nor does globalization have to mean homogeneity, or progress in technology supplant humanity—even if it could be generalized throughout the rest of the world. Somehow the west has something to offer, and America does, and it’s not just facebook and twitter.