Now, Juxt a Minute!

I love this photo my neighbor Gary took--the beer in the foreground, the nuns and Calvin and Allie and soon-to-be Theo in the background.  I love it because of its juxtaposition--things that a person might not normally fit within a single frame.  And yet, here they are, tucked in together.  No wide-angle lens necessary.

As an ex-Catholic living on a very papal street, the fencewalker in me feels fine enjoying my nun neighbors and my now-UCC religious roots.  Certain that I can happily have both, just because.

I can't decide if my love of odd bedfellows and my tendency towards fencewalking are reasons or excuses for me.  Do they inspire my actions or explain away my inaction?  Chances are, the answer falls somewhere in between.

And yet, I have a handful of beliefs that are anchored in certitude.  For instance, I fervently believe that the only way we will get through these dark times is if we walk out together--nuns and ex-Catholics, believers and deniers, Democrats and Republicans, white and black and everything in between.  Odd bedfellows make powerful communities.

That said, you'll understand if the thought makes my stomach a little queasy . . . .

I mean, I wasn't the greatest Catholic and am hardly anything to brag about at work or at home or sitting in the back pew with a handful of other religious orphans, quietly composing my grocery list.

But I'd like to think that I'm willing to show up and give things a whirl.

Considering all of this, then, I'd say that odd bedfellows generally inspire me to act, even in the midst of my discomfort.  And that is a good thing.

As for my well-developed fence-walking tendencies?  Yeah, I'm pretty sure I lean into these when I don't want to lean into anything else too terribly far.  Or when I want to kind of fake it.

When I was what my friend Matt and I referred to as a "bastard lovechild " in the English Department (what else to call someone who only taught journalism and pop culture?!), I'd use my fence-walking skills to try to fit in.   Hungry to be mistaken as an intellectual (a highly-prized label in a literature-soaked environment), I'd feign excitement about polysyllabic words, philosophically-driven mission statements and heady discussions about the "why" of things, despite being a who-what-when-where kind of person.   Soon enough, though, the jig would be up, when a true scholar would ask me to look over her rough draft and I'd find myself drowning in commas and compound sentences, not knowing how or where to even begin.

Alas, it turns out you can't teach an old Strunk-and-Whiter Faulknerian tricks.

Still,  I  appreciate the different ways all of my English bedfellows teach and speak, despite my continual return to the comfort of a 20-word paragraph.

How can I explain this love of diversity living next door to a tendency towards the non-committal?  Look in the mirror and tell me yourself.

We are all much messier than the shiny slivers of selves that we portray on social media.  We are hypocrites and hypochondriacs, yet also capable of being deeply moved in the presence of beauty.  Maybe--just maybe--our truest selves are found at the antipode of purity--living at that furthest point from the clearest thing, muddied and relieved, and certainly not so easy to understand.  Juxtaposed from within.

You know.  Beautiful, in a sloppy sort of way.