Status Updates From Closing Time

He was convinced that he was beyond forgiveness, incapable of understanding that while forgiveness cannot always be earned, it can always be granted.

Then and there, the topography of our lives shifted. From the moment he came barreling into the living room, he was a different person in my eyes. What I saw was no longer a dangerous man armed with his fists and a belt. What I saw before me was a paunchy, middle-aged drunk who couldn’t take me in a fair fight. What I saw was a bully getting a taste of his own medicine.

Though [our dad] did not really want us to grow up to be like him, warning us to avoid the mistakes he had made—dropping out of school, going AWOL, emptying every whiskey bottle in the Delaware Valley in the hopes of eventually finding the one whose contents would bring him happiness—he begrudged us every step we took away from him.

My sisters and I had not always viewed our father as a menace, as our implacable enemy. It had taken years to get to that stage. But by the time I was in my early teens, that juncture had arrived because his continued existence threatened ours. Our attitude was simple: We wanted him dead or we wanted him gone. The only positive thing he could do for us now was to walk in front of a truck or slit his own throat.

Willa Cather once said that there are only a handful of story lines in all of human existence, yet everyone acts as if his or hers is unique. Only later in life do we learn that many others have trod an identical path, that our lives are largely generic.

He was a voracious reader, but, like many men who embark on a lifetime program of self-improvement, he rarely read anything worth reading.

…it is pointless to hate Christ merely because of Christians…

Poverty goes far beyond not having money or food. Poverty means that when you do have money and food, the money gets spent unwisely and the food is not nutritious. Poverty is not simply a matter of being unable to buy certain things; it’s about buying the wrong things, or the things that nobody else wants…nobody who has ever been poor physically ever stops being poor emotionally.

I hoped that the residents of the cute little town houses would be happy there, that they would maintain their homes, that they would never take their good fortune for granted. Otherwise, a few years hence, it might be time for more dynamite.

I never fell prey to…the notion that if you assembled all the pertinent data about a malefactor’s childhood and reviewed it dispassionately, you would come to understand the forces that had shaped him and assign the blame, or at least a good portion of it, elsewhere. This put the victim in a position where absolution, previously an act of charity, was now deemed morally compulsory.