Eef Barzelay – Jews for Jesus Blues (live)
“So, do you go to church in Seattle?” she asked.
I smirked. I knew what she meant. She meant, “Where do you go to church in Seattle?”
I was crashing a family dinner of a friend of a friend in the suburbs. Like usual, I had spent most of the evening refilling my wine glass and flirting with the mother.
Thus far, she had been duly charmed.
I fingered my glass of White Zinfandel and glanced out the window. Across the plots of potato and rolling meadows I could see a thin plume of smoke, probably from a bonfire.
“Burn this,” my mother would say every couple of months in middle school, handing me a box of papers. “And remember to stay and make sure it’s all gone.”
I would stand on my tiptoes to grab the box of matches from above the fridge, then head down the street to the unused plot where the neighborhood had set up a mini-dump of sorts. Letting the box drop heavily on the dirt, I’d make a tepee with Alliance Life magazines and start a flame. Steadily I’d add more paper.
Most of it was newsletters from the mission or other random information with potentially compromising personal information about the other missionaries in Indonesia. I’d poke the curling, blackening papers with a stick, making sure all the ink was seared from their pages.
I took a sip of wine, sizing her up over the rim of my glass. I didn’t know how to explain that somewhere along the line my faith had been seared right off, that I must have accidentally dumped it into the fire with the rest of the box.
“No, I don’t go to church in Seattle,” I deadpanned.
[Buy Clem Snide’s End of Love.]
