most desperate situations after we finally surrender to ourselves and to God.
I never did find out who owned the blue sweater or how it got on my couch. My memory and experience of looking at it so intensely stands in for those memories and experiences forever lost to the darkness of my drinking days.
But, like Monica, I never drank again—she had her wine cellar and I had my South Side apartment. I suppose we’re all Monica in our own ways, with each of us having the metaphorical equivalent of a cellar where we hide and lock ourselves away.
But, like Augustine, I think I had a praying Monica, too: a person who understood my need in a sympathetic way, a praying Monica who noticed me, remembered me.
I believe we all have a praying Monica, even though she may be hidden from sight.
I’m sure that someone was praying for me: I had reached a place where only prayers could find me.
Suggested Questions for Discussion
1. What reaction do you have to the story? What feelings did you feel when reading it?
2. Is there a particular scene that stood out for you? Why did it stand out?
3. Mercy is mentioned at several junctures in the story—which is most interesting to you and why?
4. The end of the story mentions St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. How is she connected to the theme of mercy?
Suggested Questions for Private Reflection
1. If you saw yourself through the eyes of others, what would you see?
2. Is there a place you go—physically, mentally, or emotionally—where only prayers can find you? What would mercy mean there?
Chapter Two
Mercy and Reconciliation
Even now I don’t know, exactly, why I bullied Zach.
“Hey, Mat, Mat Schmalz—get over here!”1
I recognized Zach out of the corner of my eye. I was surprised to see him at our twenty-fifth high school reunion in the summer of 2007.
I never even talked to Zach during our time at high school. Zach was part of my more distant past: the early 1970s, a time when I wore Toughskin jeans, flared at the cuffs and lazily hanging over my blue Keds sneakers. It was a time when I watched Kukla, Fran, and Ollie on Saturday mornings after Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids; it was a time when my favorite pastimes were playing army and exploring the woods behind my home. Zach and I had grown up in the same small town.
And Zach obviously remembered me.
I wondered how vivid and accurate his memories were.
I wondered whether Zach was planning to punch my face in.
I have a love/hate relationship with barbershops. Actually, the hate usually comes first. I just don’t like how I look in the large barbershop mirror: doughy, with a dimple in the middle of my chin. I especially don’t like it when the small mirror comes out so that the barber can show me the cut along the back of my neck.
All I see is me—reflected back infinite times.
I really don’t like that.
But I do like the feeling of leaning back in the padded chair. And I do like the smells—dangerous as they are for me: the vaguely alcoholic scents of after-shaves and solvents mingling with the fruity aromas of newly cut, shampooed hair.
I went for a haircut before the reunion, anyway.
It was a barbershop by a gas station—the barber had brown coffee stains on his shirt, and I could see yellow tobacco residue on his fingernails as he picked up the shears. He moved vigorously and I closed my eyes to savor the feeling of falling hair lightly touching my eyelashes and clumping on my cheeks and chin.
“How does it look?” the barber asked in a raspy voice as he held up the mirror behind my head.
The haircut was shorter than I expected—shorter than I had asked for. I grimaced when I saw the moles and blotches on my scalp revealed for all to see. It had been third grade since my hair was that short.
Zach, he was the other guy in the class with hair as short as mine.
At the check-in at the hotel lobby, people started to recognize me. In making small talk, I had to maneuver around the memory of the last time I had actually seen most of them: it was at a party over winter break during my sophomore year in college. I use the word “seen” advisedly since I don’t remember much of the night apart from crushing paper cups in my fist and popping balloons by stomping on them in my snow boots.
I started to feel uneasy, and I separated myself from the group.
Beyond the lobby there was a nondescript room where the cash bar had been set up. I passed through a set of sliding doors and couldn’t help but notice how my crew-cut head reflected unevenly in the plate glass.
I wanted to put as much space as possible between me and the bar, so I went outside to the patio. There was a bar there, too—really a cart, with a beach umbrella more for appearances than for actual shade. I walked to where mortared gray stone gave way to a lawn and then long-grass fields, hills in the distance glowing blue and purple in the setting sun.
There was a railing separating the patio from the lawn—I hung onto it for support. I turned my back on the bar and kept my eyes on the hills.
That’s where I heard Zach call my name.
The desks in our third-grade classroom weren’t arranged in orderly rows. It was 1972, after all—and in Massachusetts, for good measure—and some of the experimental attitude of that time had filtered down to elementary school. Zach and I sat next to each other in a group of six desks that faced each other to make a kind of large table. The whole class was arranged like that—islands in a cinder block and linoleum sea.
Zach and I worked together in math. And I had something that helped us out—a special pen. I remember it clearly—its black cap and nib, and its fat green barrel. You’d just turn the cap and the multiples of numbers would peak through circular holes nicely arranged in a row. I shared the pen with Zach in class, and I think I even let him take it home once.
Zach and I also ran for president together. 1972 was an election year, and Zach and I were on the Republican ticket. He was Spiro Agnew to my Richard Nixon. I don’t think we had to give speeches. We didn’t know much about public policy or the Vietnam War, and Watergate was yet to come. But we had an election in class nonetheless, with a big map of the United States accompanying donkey and elephant stickers for states won by Democrats and Republicans.
Zach and I lost handily. Things were different for the real Nixon and Agnew—they won every state, every state
