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I am sitting here trying to say something profound. But all I can do is sit here...affected.

Why?

How?

I'm not sure. But I am affected somewhere deep within myself for reasons I cannot articulate. Maybe because at times I've been David and at other times I've been Foy. Maybe this has put me in touch with all those people I have ever mistreated in my life. Or maybe it puts me in touch with all the times I have been terribly mistreated.

Yes, I am affected. Thanks for the piece.

Scott

Gordon, as a young man I am amazed at how connected you are with the truth of the adolecent world, and how vividly and perfectly you describe it. I have been in David's place, entering a trance to drown out the jeers of my fellow students. I have also been in Foy's, rejecting the friedship of others for fear of what may come of being seen with them.

I truly hope that your middle daughter is doing better and is making friends she deserves in school... Is she? I dont know her, but I feel a kinship with people like her, for I once lived in the same world of teasing and agony. I pray she is doing better.

I also think on another note, that these glipses into Foy's childhood add alot of depth to the adult stories. Maybe one day we will get to hear about high school and college...

The thing that you cannot atone for...

The one that just sits there, accusing and indicting and never getting to the trial and punishment phase. That thing can eat at you. It makes the grace and redemption and justification of Christianity all the more beautiful and welcome.

Old Poet

I love these Foy stories. They offer me an insight back into my own world, through someone else's eyes. I feel like I know Foy, I recognize him. I'd like to invite him over for dinner, or a coffee, or a beer. He feels mighty real to me.

This story is particularly poignant to me, for a variety of reasons. So I thank you.

***
"Why write unless you praise the sacred places?" -- Richard Howard

I get a sense you know exactly what those two boys are feeling....

Junior high is the pits worst years of my own life for many reasons, and I am sure for others as well.

becky

Yes. A bit of a modern day parable without the annoying analysis tacked onto the end. I loved the cultural context and the sense of time-lapse. My heart is disturbed and my head is chewing on the whole series. I wish there was a little more about the hard-edged pragmatism of Foy's theology. I can guess at it.... and I can imagine the sermon on the page.

People do stay with us-- but mostly, for me, it is my actions around those people that really mark my memories.

Thank you RLP, again, for another moment of on-line grace.

Orangeblossoms

That was very good. The ending, especially - the stuff about being a victim of the system, redemption, and balance. Really good.

I feel stupid pointing this out, but a knight moves one and two spaces, not one and three. At least, that's the only way I've ever played.

Yep, the periodic reemergence of David in Foy's mind is familiar to me--I think about Annabelle, the black girl who was given the job of integrating my 6th grade North Carolina classroom, from time to time, always with that same slight feeling of nausea followed by a kind of empty sadness. A couple of years ago I asked my Dad about his work with the Human Relations Committee, the group that steered our small town through integration. Did he remember a Baptist minister whose daughter was sent into my 6th grade classroom? He wasn't sure (that was forty years ago). We looked at old papers and tried to reconstruct who it might have been, but I don't think we identified the person. So she remains my gentle, knowing accuser.

Thanks for writing this story.

The beauty of your writing is that you paint the picture as it really is, not as we want it to be.

My fifty year high school class reunion is coming up, and I have been sifting through the memories by looking at the year book. Our class was relatively small, only 150 or so.

How many of those lives were affected by something I said or did, or some slight or neglect driven by my adolescent egocentric attitude? Foy's David disappeared into the recesses of his memory. How many of my classmates have also disappeared never to return except in my reverie?

tough, hard-blinking pragmatism

Your inner Hemingway is coming out. *g*

I was glad not to see Foy become David's one true friend, or to see David marry Julie. Did you know the approximate tone of where it was headed when you started?

I like this very much. I remember studying and discussing systemic sin, being caught up in something beyond one's own control. I recognize that reality, but I fear allowing the "it's bigger than me" rationale to become a way of excusing our own culpability. Your story has me thinking about a night that continues to haunt me, in which I was a mere bystander, but for which I still carry a measure of guilt that doesn't feel forgiven.

Please explain in simple terms what the queens gambit is? I looked it up on wikipedia and I couldnt understand a damn thing!

Thank you!

Paul

How much of what we insist is "pure theology" is tainted by our experience? A lot, I'd bet.

As I read this series, the funny thing was that I felt a sense of jealousy--that boys who were so terribly unpopular in high school just got beat up or canned or whatever. Physical violence seems so minimal in the face of what girls do to each other.

Then again, I never got beat up, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. :)

As always, your knack for telling truths has touched me deeply... Thank you.

I have a problem with your 'mathematical balance in the Cosmos' in that I don't think there is one. Moreover I wonder whether your, and at times my, need to believe in it is not linked to your (my) depression. It sounds like the childlike longing for a Just World where every evil is offset by a compensating good. I have come to think that this kind of theology can be sustained only by underestimating the real pain and cost of my (and your) personal suffering. I am helped by Wittgenstein's advice. Let what is ragged stay ragged.
Thanks for your blog. A lifeline.

I was David in High School - beat on to the point of hospitalization twice, told by principles to drop out because I would never survive. In the end, it was faith that carried me through to college where I flourished. But this story actually gave me hope - hope that my tormentors may think more kindly of me now, that they may indeed wonder what happened to me. Its like a kind of closure.
Thank you.

Thank you for this. There was an event in my young life when I didn't take action to help someone and I've wished ever since there was a way to atone for it. I do feel the stab of pain every time I think of it. I will welcome that pain now as my atonement.

Goodness, I hated being that age. It's different for girls: I don't know if we have it worse or better, though. I remember reading Margaret Atwood's _Cat's Eye_ a couple of years later, in my mid teens, and feeling that that conveyed it all very well. Have you read it?

M

I love the way you leave the ragged ragged. The temptation to tie things in pretty little bows is hard to resist. To live into the tension, to find yourself living in the conflict -- that's good. It's the way life really is.

I've asked my 13 year old to read this -- it's not an easy year for her. To be the one brunette in the class of bleached blondes; to have a healthy amount of muscle (1st Degree Black Belt) in a culture that seemingly worships those who look emaciated. Hard year.

I enjoyed it...but I'm also somewhat uneasy with the story, but in a good way. See, I was David, and I *want* my tormentors to be monsters. I don't want them to feel remorse, yet I want them to go on with their lives as I've gone on with mine. No easy answers.

http://bigumuse.blogspot.com

I found the bit about Googling interesting, because I happen to know the anarcho-capitalist professor somewhat. I'm curious to know how you chose the name "David Friedman".

As I was scrolling over your main page I came across 'The Queen's Gambit' and I wasn't going to read it all but once I got started I just couldn't stop. I guess we all have 'Davids' and 'Foys' in our lives; we just don't care enough to reach out and help them. Very touching story.

What is interesting is how in the early days of education, harassment and abuse are the hallmarks of the downcast. I was a David in elementary school and some of middle school. I'm ok with it now; mainly because I've been able to forgive my tormentors and mostly forget the horrors of it. What's been granted in place is a purely empathetic feel for those social outcasts that, Thank God comes with no memories attached. I still see the pain in my Mother's eyes, however, whenever that time is brought up.

Now, in University, what shames me now the fear of just talking to those who are downcast. I can find ways to rationalize my way out of conversations with those people by telling myself that I don't have anything to talk to them about. There is no fear of being unpopular or anything of the like; simply a fear of their metaphorical leprosy. Then I leave and I know I've done to them what abuse and harassment did to me. Isolation is just as horrible a thing to propagate, in my mind.

Thanks for the stories,

Will

wkinchlea.blogspot.com