Clyde and I purged his Packard of that season’s pink-and-gray masculine finery, the martini-glass and dice-motif accessories. We counted our Bible-list inventory into cardboard boxes. These had been created to hold canned pineapple and Tide detergent and still smelled sweet or eye-burningly clean. Then off we set. We left her before noon that Sunday I would understand then lose him.

I was freshly eight, quite proud of that, still squinting through the purpled eye. I “rode shotgun.” Bearing down upon our Clipper’s blue leatherette Owner’s Manual, I tried writing a story for third-grade English, the accelerated reading circle.

“Is it going to be a funny story, son?” “Probably bout as funny as I can make it.” “That’s a good thing to be. Funny keeps them glad to see you coming back,” and Clyde added with a moment’s strange bitterness, “Some of them.”

But quickly recovered: “Your mother is a wonderful woman. Grace remembers everything she reads.” Even she admitted this was just not true; she said so often. I looked over at Dad.

2.

It can hurt you, loving somebody that others you love keep punishing. This was April 15, 1956, near as I can tell. (I used to know a simple formula to determine which day of the week any date in history fell upon; but at my present age, I swear I think I’ve cleanly forgotten it!)

I do recall forsythias’ bursting out their yellow exclamation marks, upsetting the bell curves of otherwise modest farmyards. I recall how even the oldest trees looked younger—wearing an April green that is the truest green of all because it is the color of first trying.

Our car trunk was stacked with books enough to overcome a higher-than-usual number of sadnesses and thefts. Packing Bibles, I’d decided that they smelled of hot black rubber. But maybe I confused the vehicle with its merchandise, the Spare with the Saved.

Dad sang us well past Falls and out into brown baritone country: “‘I was sinking, deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore. Very stained and soiled within, sinkin to rise no more. Then the Master of the Deep heard my despairing cries, from the water lifted me, now safe am I.’ Join me on the chorus and feel better, Meadows? … ‘O love lifted me, when nothing else could help, love lift-ed me.’—Boy, but that shore hits the spot.”

Rubbery good news as black yet promising as rubber smells. I sat picturing Christ as a circling buoyant lifesaving inner tube, just in time, His bobbing by.