Know Your Adversary

Chapter 11: A Knife in the Dark

Today I have two stories to share that showed up late, derailed, then dominated my drawn out conversation with Chapter 11. They couldn’t have shown up if not for having spent last week packing and this week unpacking our treasured belongings in preparation for possible evacuation from the Black Cove and Deep Woods Wildfires that burnt 7,431 acres of beloved wilderness less than a mile from our backdoor.

The thing is, though, I’m learning to discern what of my personal spiritual work and writing is suitable for sharing with strangers, and what’s gotta stay between me and God, which is why you’re gonna get these two stories detached from any context around what they have to do with the company’s narrow escape at the Prancing Pony, their trudge through the Midgewater Marshes, and Frodo’s fateful encounter with the Witch King on Weathertop.

Here’s the first: prioritized during Wildfire Prep was a plastic tub of schoolwork, certificates, and letters from my high school boyfriend I’ve been dragging around for decades. In it was a composition book titled “Connie Coady’s Religion Notes and Lent Journal,” a graded assignment for Ms. Wassil’s 7th grade religion class at Chaminade College Preparatory, a Catholic school in the Marianist tradition, still located in Chatsworth, California. Chatsworth, by the way, once proudly held the title of Porn Capital of the World before the spread of the Internet Empire.

“I Love God! I Love Jesus! My most treasured gift God gave me is my creativity. I love to write and I love my religion. I am very athletic and I love exercise. My favorite teacher is Ms. Wassil and I love school,” I wrote and wrote and wrote. It’s clear on the page that I really fucking meant it.

Ms. Wassil had a Pretty Woman auburn blowout, rouged cheeks, and a full chest she kept buttoned-up in silky cream-colored blouses with ruffles and lace. When Lent was over and I could go back to being mean to my brother and eating candy, she handed me back “Connie Coady’s Religion Notes & Lent Journal” with 110% Great Connie written in the back (see above for proof). Pride puffed up in my chest like a pigeon. That’s a feeling I don’t so much remember in that singular moment as I do continue to experience anytime anyone whose favor I seek recognizes my good work.

I did love God, and I loved Ms. Wassil, and I loved Religion Class and myself and my treasured creativity, and I really loved getting A++s. I loved it all so much that when Ms. Wassil told the class she was getting married that summer, I gathered shells at the beach, used my teeth to let loose an old string of pearls, ripped a dingy ribbon off a metal barrette and used Mom’s hot glue gun to make her a pearly seashell hair accessory I hoped and prayed and then felt certain she’d wear on her wedding day. The confidence! Sweet girl.

One day late in the school year Ms. Wassil said we’d be watching a movie! I was (still am) a front-row seat sort, and I remember my chin in my palms, the pleasure I took in my good view of the screen, the room going dark in the middle of day. The movie opened with Jonathan Taylor Thomas’s voice coming from a disembodied orb that I recall being purpley-bluish swirling about on a black screen. I recognized it right away as JTT becuase his voice is unmissable, The Lion King was still fresh in the zeitgeist, and because JTT also went to Chaminade College Preparatory and had given me and other quivering prospective sixth graders a campus tour two springs before¹. I’d heard that voice come from his mouth and into my own two ears!

The disembodied swirly orb with JTT’s voice was the soul of a fetus in utero pleading to his mother not to abort him. I’ll love horses, fetal JTT says. And the color yellow.

In an instant the rotten insides of the whole wide man-made world flashed before me like a glimpse of the Wizard in the Emerald City pulling levers, knobs, and cranks, blowing smoke and casting shadows. There’s no way babies that haven’t been born know what they’ll love, I remember thinking. This has nothing to do with God or Jesus. That was the first day I recognized propaganda as propaganda—though I couldn’t have named it that yet.

It was the day I lost my faith.

The second story is about a mouse and is a little gruesome. I’m back to reading Thomas Merton, who’d planted seeds last April on Iona that I forgot to water but somehow still shot up this spring like resolute tulips, impossible to ignore. I’ve been up at 5 for 25 days, writing my Morning Pages and getting acquainted with what the cat and mouse get into before the house wakes up. The mouse had been leaving all the usual signs of itself since January, but had evaded my Have-a-Hearts and was living quite comfortably in the neighborhood extending from the compost bin under the sink to the toaster crumb tray in the pullout drawer. A couple mornings ago I took up my pen and saw in my right eye the mouse on the open floor, trembling as they do. Moving slowly I sat down in front of it and together in the light of a single candle we sat—me so big and it so small—and my heart broke wide, wide open for it and its frozen fear and all the little mouse feet ever stuck on those horrid sticky pads and all us humans absurdly shrieking and jumping on chairs, snapping mice in half with little guillotines and smacking them with blunt objects and all the rest. Oof, in that moment I was so in love with this little mouse and the God we shared—it was really quite profound!

The cat came through his cat door and the mouse ran to the stairs but couldn’t get up them. Still under its spell I cornered it with a dust pan and scooped it up in love and let it out into the wild, wild wood. Profound Mouse Encounter!—I wrote in my journal. Spiritual Motion!

That night with the kids asleep I sat in the same spot and watched the cat come in with the mouse in his teeth and a little bit of blood. I shooed at him, he dropped it, I didn’t see where. I couldn’t find it. Had it gotten away? In my journal I wrote, Cat found the mouse I saved. Punctured it, but maybe it escaped. I hope.

The next day I woke up feeling wretched—Alex away for work, impatient with my girls, daunted by the task of putting my house back together now that the fires were contained, ashamed for being daunted by the task and not just grateful that my house hadn’t burned down. I’d almost made it through to bedtime but remembered I’d washed my sheets—hastily, stupidly with the dish towels—so dragged my ass up the hill to get them from the dryer. I opened the door, the mouse fell out.

I’ve really gotta go now, as unfinished as this is. Writing words for public consumption have felt like having to outrun the Nazgûl on foot, but we’ll get to Rivendell soon enough, and I’m banking on finding some resolve there.

Below, flowers in bloom, the night sky just before the mouse fell out of the dryer, hyacinths and pussy willows and the reset altar, a rather disheartening LED-lit concert that I’ll tell you about later, me in chainmail and gridlock on that night that didn’t go as planned, and a turning point for Frodo.

Yours in the circus and outside of it,

1. I searched for footage from this video and found only vague references to it on a couple of blogs. r/tipofmytongue helped me find the name of the video, The Right Choice, and a link to purchase it on VHS, but I got reprimanded by the mods there for not promptly marking my posting solved. I hadn’t been looking for the name, rather for others who might have also seen this video and could confirm, deny, or elaborate on my disjointed memories. The fetal orb could have been orange, or red. I can’t be sure.