Two short stories

Why Chuck Wouldn't Get Out of the Car

by William McKeen

Copyright© 2007, William McKeen.
Not to be reprinted without permission of the author.

We said grace in my family, but not for religious reasons. We did very little for religious reasons. This was unusual, considering that both my parents had traditional, church-going, Midwestern childhoods. But Sunday was nothing special around our house. When I woke up, Dad was already making his rounds at the hospital and Mom was in bed with The Miami Herald. We never went to church.

I suppose Mom finally began to feel guilty about all of this, because one summer when we were visiting her parents in Indiana, she called a minister and asked if her sons could be baptised. The minister balked. These things should be handled by her home parish, he said.

"But my husband is in the Air Force," she said. "We don't really have a home parish."

And so the minister consented. My brother was 14 and I was 8. I think the minister was startled to see two uncomfortable boys wearing suits on a sticky afternoon, rigidly marching down the aisle. Before Mom had arranged the date, I hadn't known what a baptism was and when it was explained to me I became intrigued by the idea of someone pouring water over my head while I was wearing my good clothes. But the minister disappointed me with only a moist palm. My brother, a fan of the German philosophers and a fledgling agnostic, was a less-willing participant and chose to denigrate the ritual. When the minister removed his hand from Chuck's head, he rubbed his fingers together, as if trying to remove something. "Greasy kid stuff, huh?" my brother said.

We said grace because my mother wanted everyone at the table before we started eating. She spent many dinner hours rounding up Chuck, or me, or Dad, while trying to keep whoever was already at the table from finishing dinner before the latecomers arrived. She was also upset about how we dressed. We usually came to the table wearing only shorts and often carrying reading material: Hardy Boy mysteries (me), Neitzsche (Chuck) and Annals of Surgery (Dad). We were such slobs.

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