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“Yeah, at the church! I’ll tell Julie to put you on the payroll as soon as your community service is finished.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“You want to know a secret? Callings are overrated. If you think you know what you’re supposed to be doing, you just feel like you’re not doing it well enough. Like God has a grand plan for you and you’re failing to live up to it. If you don’t know what you want to do, you still think God has a great plan for you and you’re just not seeing it. Basically, I think we’re all doomed.”
“Doomed? You mean to fail God?”
“Failing God? Hmm. I’m not sure if that’s what I mean. I’ll have to think about that one.”
Ian and Paul talked for two more hours. Most of it was about nothing at all: television programs, movies, and the health of Fido, the fly-eating plant. They would have talked longer, but they were both starting to fall asleep.
The next morning, Paul drove over to Ian’s apartment to take him to the church for his community service. Ian’s familiar face took on new dimensions and personality as Paul reconnected it to the disembodied voice he’d spoken to on the phone.
The sermon topic that Sunday was “Failing God: Living Up to Your True Calling.”
Over the next few weeks, Ian and Paul spoke on the phone two or three times a week, never for less than an hour. It was almost always Ian who called. At first he introduced himself by saying, “Hi, it’s Ian,” and using the excuse that he was afraid he was going to drink. But soon the conversations began, “Hi, it’s me.” No reason for the call was necessary. Paul looked forward to the calls and planned for them, keeping a mental catalog of interesting anecdotes from his day. He started to view everything in his life through the lens of how he would recount it to Ian when he called. He found himself taking a greater interest in his environment and the events of his own life and examining them from an entirely new perspective.
Ian had no pretense. He rarely censored himself, and he could say the most outrageous things at times with complete innocence because his intention was never to be shocking or provocative. The material, physical, and sensual world delighted him. He liked to talk about foods and their flavors, recounted memories complete with smells and textures, and he was completely matter-of-fact about sexuality. (And wouldn’t an angel who descended to earth and took human form be delighted in the physical world around him?) He brought Paul out of the clouds, back to the Earth.
The church community came to know Ian as “that kid Paul is helping out.” Gossip t
raveled fast through the church’s unofficial news wire. Everyone knew how Ian had come to work at the church, that Paul had found him drunk in the pavilion and taken a personal interest in his recovery. It was obvious that Paul and the new custodian had a special relationship. Paul simply did not have enough craft to hide his affection. His face lit up whenever Ian walked in the room. His conversation was peppered with references to Ian, and Ian’s with references to Paul. The two had inside jokes and could communicate with facial expressions and gestures instead of words. But the few church members who made the connection between the young man and Paul’s newfound inspiration connected the events in reverse. They assumed helping Ian was a symptom and not the cause of Paul’s new enthusiasm. Everyone believed that Paul thought of Ian as the son he and Sara never had.
Paul’s CHildhood
If Mount Rainier is sublime in its nearly infinite scale, what do you call a place like Kansas? Farmland might have failed to capture the imagination of mystics and poets, but a state that flat creates its own infinity—an endless horizon. Kansas seems to have no end. When you’re in the middle of it, you can see nothing else at all.
Paul Tobit’s hometown, Faller’s Field, Kansas, was barely a dot on the map. In fact, had it been close to any other city, it would probably not have shown up on the map at all. Driving to Faller’s was a straight shot, three hours through the corn on two-lane highways from the next largest city. You came into town past a billboard for Bob’s Guns and Ammo, followed by another billboard advertising vacation bible school. Then you turned when you got to a barn painted with a huge smiley face. “Hi Joe and Gertie,” it said. (Paul always wondered if the message was to Joe and Gertie, or from Joe and Gertie.) Finally, down the hill to Faller’s single stoplight. The metropolis of downtown Faller’s Field consisted of one long road of little shops. There was the drug store, a sporting-goods store, a bar, a town museum—which it is unlikely anyone ever visited—a post office, and, of course, the stoplight.
Above it all, however, there was the one sign that they were part of the real world—the building. It had all the presence of the Sears Tower. It was a monolith, a huge brown square with “The Travelers” written across the top. It was called The Travelers because it moved. If Paul was on the school playground, it was there. When he looked out of his bedroom window, it was there. He truly believed that building was magic, and if it chose to follow Paul, there must have been something pretty special about him.
Of course, as an adult, he understood that his magic building had “Travelers” written across the top because it housed the offices of Traveler’s Insurance. He also came to realize that it wasn’t that big a building; eight stories, if that. And it never really followed Paul; it only seemed to because it was the tallest building around. It was nothing personal. Anyone could see it from anyplace in town. Just like the mountain. It follows everyone, regardless of who that person is or what he does.
Paul was the son of Joe Tobit, owner of Tobit Drugs. Joe, who had served three terms as mayor, was a serious, hard-working man who had never had much interest in children. He had planned to earn money to support his family, and he expected his wife, Mary, would take care of all the child rearing. When little Paul was only five, however, his mother’s life had been cut short by a guy working two jobs who had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Paul had only one clear memory of his mother. It was a cool afternoon in October. The fields were plowed down to mud, and it seemed like the earth stretched on forever. The sky was milky white. Paul’s hand was stretched above his head, where his mother held it. She crouched down beside her son and pointed to the sky. The birds formed a seemly endless parade of arrow-shaped formations.
“They’re flying south for the winter,” his mother said.
“Why?” he asked. He was at the age of “why.”
“Well, it’s warmer down there. Birds don’t like the cold. So they go where it’s warm, and then they come back in the spring.”
“Why don’t people fly south?”
“People have homes,” his mother said. “People have places they belong. And when they find one place they belong, they stay there even if it’s cold or rainy.”
Each year, when the fall came and the birds began their southward trek so visible in the skies of Kansas, Paul liked to sit on the porch and think of his mother. As the years went by, the details of the woman faded, first the sound of her voice, her warm scent, then her expressions and the color of her hair. Eventually all Paul could remember with any clarity was the image of the birds and the arrow they formed across the sky.
There was a ceremony that took place after his mother died. It involved lots of baked goods and middle-aged church women whispering to his father, “How is he?” This is what happens when a church community adopts you. The minister and the Sunday-school teachers paid special attention to the boy, taking up the slack for his largely uninvolved father. The church became Paul’s home. The minister was his surrogate father. Christ was his mother.
This might have been part of the reason Paul developed an uncommon ease with adults at an early age. History and tradition meant more to him than to most kids. He understood about past generations who now lived only in memory and ritual. In the universally awkward teen years, Paul retreated from his peers’ world of sports, fashion, and dating. Paul liked to tell himself he was above all that. He had a higher calling.
In reality, he was intimidated by the jocks, the trendy dressers, the budding rock stars, and the ones who partied and smoked. He couldn’t even stand near the pretty girls without breaking out in a flop sweat. He assumed 90 percent of the girls were way, way out of his league. He loathed the good-looking bad boys they always seemed to choose.
Paul’s response was to be anything but cool. If he wasn’t walking down the hall, he had his nose buried in a book. He especially liked the Bible and Christian-themed novels—the meek were the heroes! He could hide behind them and pretend that he was not sitting with the popular kids because he was too busy reading to care. In the real world, you’re always wondering if you’ve stayed too long or left the room too soon. Books are not like that. They’re neatly divided into chapters, and your relationship with the characters ends amicably when there are no pages left to turn.
Paul spent his Saturday evenings working at his father’s drug store in the hopes of earning Joe’s interest and respect. He never truly felt he did. His favorite part of the job was chatting to the old people who came in to fill prescriptions. Many of them lived alone in old farm houses, and the long journey to the store was their only real personal contact.
