Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting by Eric Poole

Author:Eric Poole [Poole, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781101187784
Google: nJBZhQT4DxUC
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-05-27T07:00:00+00:00

WHEN WE ARRIVED at the Roosevelt, Dad handed me the ice bucket.

“You wanna?”

I shook my head and climbed into bed.

I had been looking forward to watching a special with Dad, a TV concert starring Marlene Dietrich. I had no idea who she was, since in the commercials she appeared to be foreign, roughly nine hundred years old, and unable to sing her way out of a paper bag, but she wore furs and long gowns and was rumored to be a legend, and that was good enough for me.

Dad turned on the TV. I stared at the image of the old woman in an evening gown, and wondered if she, too, would die in a car accident. There was, apparently, little I could do to stop it, if so.

Dad turned to me. “Something wrong?”

“No,” I said flatly, turning on my side to face the wall, which, conveniently, was only about four inches away, since the rooms at the high-class Roosevelt were roughly the size of a casket. I was silent for a moment. “I just don’t get why those people died.”

“Me either,” Dad said.

Of all the words of comfort and reassurance I somehow hoped he would offer in this moment, these were absolutely not it. They filled me with anxiety.

“I guess it was just their time,” Dad said gently, as he tore open a bag of pork rinds and offered me some. I pushed the bag away.

“But how do you know when it’s your time?”

“You don’t.”

“They were probably bad people, right? So God decided it was time to send them to Hell?”

“We can’t know for sure. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.”

“Well, that’s not very fair. What if those people had kids or something?”

“I guess they’ll go to an orphanage,” he replied. “Or maybe there’s a relative who can take them in.”

I envisioned having to move in with my aunt and uncle and five female cousins in Kansas City. One sister was bad enough, I thought; six would be hell on earth. My mind reeled. Could this really happen to just anyone, for any reason?

“God has a plan,” Dad said. “But he doesn’t fill us in on it. We just wouldn’t understand.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“’Cause there are too many things that are just beyond our human comprehension. God loves his children very much, and sometimes he sees fit to bring them home. When we get to heaven, we’ll understand.”

I was silent the next morning we began the three-hundred-mile drive back to St. Louis. Dad beamed with pride at our now pimped-out Pontiac Catalina, its shiny new rotors, pistons lathered in grease, and freshly waxed paint giving it, in his eyes, the look and feel of an Oldsmobile 98.

But I couldn’t muster up his enthusiasm. Two people were dead. How is it that the world could just go on functioning as though nothing had happened?

Dad looked at me. “Are you still upset about the accident?” he said kindly.

I nodded as I sat turned away from him, staring out the window at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.