A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

accosted in any way, and who, despite great gifts in describing the
tender mercies that befall us in our lives, did not dispense very
many of them personally.
How bad was the blow? I could never again speak to my
friend Kathy P. I felt supremely ashamed to have used her as a gobetween,
and for her to see me trashed that way.
And, of course, my heart hardened against my hero. When he
died ten years later, I thought, may God have mercy on that cold,
dead soul. And I grieved to still be so misunderstood, and so
indifferently discarded by a man I had idolized.
Another father figure, soot and smoke rising to heaven!
This story happened almost twenty years ago. Powers died in
1999, at 82.
The years have done a number on me. Today I am older than
Father Urban in the story. And I see the same things happening to
me as to him. I was so promising, so full of myself, and so
oblique in my attitude toward God.
In the end of the book he surprises the reader by losing all his
specialness and blending into the know-nothing camouflage of the
institutional church.
I did not know what it meant, to be honest, but I sensed its
irrevocableness, its mysterium.
But every day last week, after walking my two dogs at
Arkwright Park, for no reason I could articulate myself, I stopped
at the big cathedral atop the hill in St. Paul, and went in.
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