Still, I think this stuff is pretty cool: re-purposing common household items. My favorite is the repurposed CD case.

About the time I was writing my first book, I asked my mom for a picture of herself. She had become a character in my novel and I wanted something to dream on, an idea of her at another part of her life.

What she sent me was amazing: a picture of herself at 23 holding me at less than a year. She was gorgeous – I never think of my mother as gorgeous – and that was only one wild thing about the image.

I was in my mid thirties at the time and I had just started teaching college courses, and I realized that if I had met her on the street or in a classroom, I would have treated her like a child. At 23, she was a child. I wouldn’t have asked her on a date, and I wouldn’t have done anything but try to ease her way through the world. I would have had to stifle the desire – as I often do with my own preciously young students – to call her “sweetheart.” And yet there I was, in her skinny arms, less than a year out of the womb.

This was a really complicated moment, looking at that picture, full of tenderness and forgiveness and just straight up wonder at the way we walk through the world without ever for one second suspecting who we are. Here’s my own mother as a child and there I am, completely in her care. How do you explain something like that?

Here’s what The Quiet Man teaches me about women: When you think it’s about money, it’s not about money. And because almost everything that goes on between men and women seems to be about money, this is an important thing to know.

When a wealthy retired boxer played by John Wayne returns to Galway and meets a red-haired force of nature played by Maureen O’Hara, at first he’s amused by her insistence that he secure her dowry in the form of some furniture and cash.

Then things turn sour with her brother – a man-mountain played by Victor McLaglen – Wayne figures, “Let him have the damn money. I’ve got plenty of money.” Big mistake because, as the movie vividly teaches us, when you think it’s about money, it’s not about money. In fact, as this movie demonstrates, it’s about almost everything but the money.

And then there’s The Birdcage. That God hid this information in a movie that features Nathan Lane as a fat transvestite is, well, pretty cool of God. Here’s what The Birdcage teaches me about women: Women are insane, and there’s nothing you can do about that but surrender to it. But if you do surrender to it, they will enrich your life beyond measure.

Robin Williams, who plays Nathan Lane’s “husband” in the film, does one of the most convincing jobs of “manning up” that I’ve ever seen in cinema. At one point, he even does an impression of John Wayne which points out the precise affinity between John Wayne and gay men in Florida. His character entirely capitulates to his spouse even though he knows that “she” is capricious, unreasonable and possibly even certifiable. He admits to her – with some manly regret – that his life without her is not a life, and so there’s no use in even talking about it. She gets what she wants always.

Among the thousand amazing aspects to William’s character’s is that he was earlier married to an actual woman, with whom he had a son. The “real” woman is played by Christine Baranski, and during the movie they reunite for a fun-filled afternoon of nostalgia.

The contrast between Baranski and Lane is stark. Baranksi is reasonable and fun, and Lane is a phenomenal pain in the ass. But then you begin to understand that’s because Baranksi never really was his wife, and Lane is.

Let’s review:

Women are insane, and there’s nothing you can do about that but surrender. But if you do surrender, they will enrich your life beyond measure.

When you think it’s about money, it’s not about money.

For weeks now, I’ve been trying to imagine what I can say.

Anyone who has talked to me (or even walked past me) knows my preference. Barack Obama is a politician who can unify our nation by ending our current addiction to polarization; he will not exclude our Republican friends and neighbors from the table. Can you imagine an Obama administration with Richard Lugar as Secretary of State? I’m so ready to put the bitterness behind us and get busy. The America that I believe in does not shy from any challenge. Heroism and peacemaking and innovation belong to all of us.

Let me just say two more things:

1. If you’ve been wondering what you can do for me, on birthdays and Christmas, for the rest of my life, this is it.

2. If you will decide, right now, to vote for Senator Obama, I will put you in the acknowledgements page of my next book. No kidding. This offer does not extend to those who have already been Obama supporters for months or years. Those folks only get my undying gratitude.

My own heart is so full right now. This is the vote we get to tell our grandchildren about. I am so proud of us all. My prayers, almost all of them, are here in Indiana for the next two days.

Love,

Dan Barden

Footnote: only one voter took me up on the acknowledgements promise, but he was a Republican and I will be proud to pay my debt to him.

But there was another emotion present, more interesting than any of those: tremendous anxiety for MYSELF. It was so disturbing that I didn’t tell my wife about it for several days. An unfamiliar anxiety, but not entirely remote. It was that night-before-the-S.A.T. anxiety. It was applying-to-college anxiety. It was first-real-job anxiety. Maybe even will-she-marry-me anxiety. In other words, it was stepping-off-into-maturity anxiety.

Barack Obama is one year younger than me. We are both almost Baby Boomers, but not. This isn’t the first time that someone our age has done something world-changing, but it’s the first time someone our age has done THIS.

You know what that test-taking anxiety really is, don’t you? I wasn’t afraid of a poor performance. I was terrified, in fact, that I would do WELL on the test.

I became an adult when I figured this out.

This is what an adult knows that a child doesn’t: a good performance on a test only assures the imminent arrival of other, much more difficult tests. I was scared of the S.A.T. because it promised college. I was anxious about college because it opened the possibility of a demanding career. I was terrified of a career because it meant that one day…I might have to decide the fate of my country.

You think I’m kidding? Maybe what I admire most about Barack Obama is his willingness to tell the truth. About himself, primarily, but also the truth about us all. He uses words like “we,” he talks about “this moment in history,” not because those phrases make us comfortable, but because they are the truth.

I’ve got to decide if I’m ready for what I’m now certain is coming: the candidacy of Barack Obama. But don’t think that such a wonderful event will solve anything or complete anything or even make the world a better place. We can talk about what it will mean to have the son of a Kenyan in the White House (and I will). We can talk about what it will mean that an interracial face will lead the world (and I will). But those aren’t the REAL issues, which is why Senator Obama doesn’t speak about them so much himself.

The real issue is whether we’re all ready to grow up.

Growing up is not about power – it’s about sacrifice. It’s not about perfect faith – it’s about stumbling, incomplete faith. It’s REALLY not about proceeding in airtight confidence of perfect righteousness – it’s about the completely absurd instinct that compromise and love of our fellows will somehow get us through.

I have spent a long time waiting for power and certainty to be conferred on me so tht I might meet the challenges of my life. The news from that precinct has not been good. While I was busy wondering how to avoid being a citizen of his beautiful but terrified nation, we lashed out at the rest of the world, betraying everywhere our most sacred principles.

The news from other precincts, however, has been VERY good. Out of the crucible of this awful decade, a leader has emerged: maybe Barack Obama IS inexperienced and charismatic and full of the naive and unsupportable belief that America is still a great country and capable of great things, but I think I’m just about as inexperienced and charismatic and naive enough myself to support him with all my heart and soul.

And I will never call his vision of America – a nation innovative and undivided, a nation whose huge power can be wielded for the good of all nations – a fantasy. It is not a fantasy: it is what I pray for when I’m holding my wife and son. It is the true flag that I pledge allegiance to. And, from now on, it is how I will vote.

I’m really enjoying talking with this priest who works with my son’s preschool – a good guy, a smart guy, the kind of guy who makes Christianity seem DOABLE – when, suddenly, it occurs to me that this is a man who believes he can forgive sin, that forgiving sin is, in fact, in his job description. So I stop the conversation because, no shit, I could use a little bit of that:

“Excuse me, Tom, but let me ask a question: Can you Episcopal guys take away my sin the same way the Catholic guys can?”

I wish I had said it better than that, but I probably said it worse.

Tom laughed – Father Tom laughed, rather – and said, “Sure. You want to do it now?”

He built up to the sacrament by saying that I could just as well do this myself, but that he understood why I would want someone else to do it. And then scooted his chair closer, leaned forward to hold my hands, and he blessed me.

I don’t even really remember the words so much as the fact that he was holding my hands and he seemed completely earnest. When it was done – it lasted, maybe, a minute – I didn’t feel much until I felt A LOT. I took a sharp, deep breath before I realized that my chest seemed looser, my capacity to breathe much bigger, and there was this mysterious vacuum at the center of my being like, well, BEING FORGIVEN.

I started writing about the experience to my friends who, I have to imagine, responded with “whatever, Dan,” but mostly I was writing to them not out of concern for their souls so much as an attempt to relieve the weirdness I felt at the experience. Was it possible that human beings like my friend Tom were given this power by God? What seemed more likely was that I was so desirous of a general forgiveness that I created the effect that I was pretending to be the object of. But that idea was almost as unsatisfying as the first. If I was so suggestible that a priest, with the wave of his hand, could make my anxiety over my behavior go away, what the hell else could he do to me? Actually, that was the freakout on both fronts: I felt vulnerable at the same time that I felt, well, HAPPY.

After dropping off my son a few weeks later, I took a detour by Tom’s office, and he was packing his briefcase for some preacherly duty, so I said, “You got a few minutes to cleanse my soul?” I’m sure that at some point I may see myself to be as obnoxious as the friend who asks for free medical advice from a doctor or free massages from a masseuse, but I’m not TOO worried about that. Although it’s hard for me to imagine that a guy like Father Tom is overwhelmed at the moment with requests for absolution. I’ve also noticed that, even in the church of my childhood, once the world-wide leader in absolution, the schedule for “the Sacrament of Reconciliation” is often buried near the bottom of the bulletin, and you know that’s always a good time to find an empty chapel. Psychoanalysis seems to have supplanted that ritual pretty effectively, and most people I know – even the regular churchgoers – are skeptical of the idea that they are, in fact, guilty of anything. 

I’m with them on that, of course. I’m not looking to go back to the time when I could work up a guilt trip over the falling of a rain drop. Still, there’s one pertinent principle that I think is applicable here: IF THE CURE WORKS, THEN YOU’VE PROBABLY GOT THE DISEASE. 

Him: You want to know why you feel that way?

Me: Yes.

Him: You feel that way because you are poised over an abyss, with a trap door beneath you that could open at any moment and you could lose everything in an instant. Do you have any more questions?

Me: No.

After my parents’ split I spent summers in my father’s cabinet shop. Dad’s life had been so blasted by divorce and quitting drinking that sometimes it hurt just to look at him. One day he told me that he’d gone to see The Last Waltz, my favorite movie for the entirety of high school.

“Alone?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you told me it was good.”

I turned away and went back to work. He was telling me about fifteen hundred things, and I was hearing them all. He was saying how lonely he was. He was saying how much everything hurt. He was saying that he wanted to be my friend, but he didn’t feel like he could insist on it, after all he’d done to make my life difficult.

I should have wrapped him in my arms. I should have grabbed him right then and taken him to a movie. The fact that I didn’t is a precious gift to me now: I hope I remember every day that failure and what it could have meant to both of us.

Seeking out and finding Milch’s informal lectures on art and spirituality is the unguilty pleasure of many Hollywood writers, for whom he has become a sage elder statesman. Milch considers it his mission (and maybe even 12 Step work) to share about the intersection between writing and spirituality with anyone who asks, and during the recent writer’s strike, he was filmed at the WGA West giving several days of these talks, which are available through a blog (theideaofthewriter.blogspot.com).

Watching Milch is like stumbling into a corner of a party to discover a raconteur who makes the rest of the party disappear. He’s a bipolar Socrates crossed with Lenny Bruce crossed with your favorite English professor. In fact, Milch was an English professor before coming west from Yale to write for Hill Street Blues, and he has that wonderful ability to weave a story that starts about writing and veers into Saint Paul, takes a turn through horse racing and yet never once seems to be about anything less than exactly what it’s about. Talking about Saint Paul’s “whacking” Christians as a way of explaining why writers shouldn’t outline is not even his weirdest connection.

Since a big New Yorker profile, he’s been beatified as the patron saint of OCD-ridden, headcase writers, but the truth of him is even more weird and delightful: I continue to go back to the videos for courage, entertainment, and a deep understanding of not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be that special kind of human who writes sentences.

“The percolating coffee was becoming important to him.”

from Atticus by Ron Hansen