Carlene Bauer - Not That Kind of Girl

She Who Has an Ear, Let Her Hear

The Age of Reason

Count It All Glory

Nice Prom Dress

Saturday Night

Lets Play a Game

The Voyage Out

Immanence, Arrival

Telegrams and Anger

What Are You Studying?

Where Are the Young Sisters?

Imagine Them Dead

Like Disaster

They Paid Him No Mind

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of the wise and foolish virginsfive wise, five foolish, all waiting with torches to light the way of a bridegroom to his wedding feast. The wise virgins have enough oil for their lamps, the foolish ones dont, but they all fall asleep while theyre waiting. Soon enough, the bridegroom is spotted in the distance, they scramble to their feet, and the foolish virgins realize how foolish theyve been. Please, they say to the wise virgins, lend us some oil! Wed love to, say the wise ones, but if we do that there wont be enough for everyone. Go out into the city and see if theres anyone selling oil at this hour. So the foolish hurry off. And, of course, theyre not there when the bridegroom arrives. Of course.

The wise virgins enter the wedding feast, and the door is shut. Here is how Matthew tells it. Later the others also came. Sir! Sir! they said. Open the door for us! But he replied, I tell you the truth, I dont know you. And then Jesus provides the moral to his disciples, which is that his second coming could occur at any time: Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

As a child, whenever I heard that story, I thought the foolish virgins deserved what they got. Later, the wise virgins read as haughty prudes. You could imagine them swanning into the wedding feast and the door slamming shuteven the doors slam sounding pitiless and proud. But you wouldnt want to be foolish, either, lolling about, too busy doingwhat was it you were doing again when you should have been filling that jar with oil so your lamp wouldnt go out?to miss the party. Or would you? The party, after all, being a metaphor for heaven, which had never been the point of believing to me.

Perhaps there was another story hidden in the parable, one that the church would never tell. One of the virgins might have showed up prepared, followed the bridegroom into the wedding party, and then said to herself, Im glad I planned ahead, but now that Ive been here a while, Im bored. And that bridegroom seems like an insufferable boorwho does he think he is, to say he wants nothing to do with those girls when tonight he has everything in the world he could want, and can afford to give them the gift of his pardon! Where are those foolish virgins? Are they keeping each other company? Making jokes, linking arms? That might be its own party. This young woman would be a curious virgin, lets say, in both senses of the word, in that she was genuinely curious about the life she was not living but was also something of an anomaly, an anachronism, okay, a freak. She could see the value of prudenceit was a prophylactic against most of lifes painbut she would want to see what life was like in the dark, when, her lamp sputtering, she would have nothing but her wits to guide her. She would shut the door quietly, leaving a room swelling with hope and safety behind her, and take the lamp out into the street, wondering where to begin. She would stand in the streets of the city, wondering when shed catch up to those girls. How long would it take?

My mother says she cant listen to love songs anymore. Whatever men and women have to say about love is meaningless, she says, when she thinks about all that God has done for us.

But when you go to a Goodwill and see all the Andy Williams records, and think Who could have possibly owned these? picture my mother: Mila Ann Phifer of Haviland Avenue, Camden, New Jersey, Audubon High School, class of 1965. My mother owned more than one record by Andy Williamsand more than one record by his lady friend, Claudine Longet. She also owned records by the Association, the Turtles, Chad and Jeremy, and Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66. French girls in minidresses surrounded by daisies. Suave, smiling Brazilians holding paper parasols and cocktails. Bespectacled, turtlenecked young men with guitars looking pensively at a lake in a glade, coming to call on your secretly sad daughters. The green record case that was the reliquary of her girlhood contained records by the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Beatles. Before they started to do drugs, she always made a point of telling me and my younger sister. After that she switched her allegiances to Motown.

The first thing my sister and I knew about her life before us was that it was filled with music. We did not know who shed fallen in love with before she met our father or what she wanted to be when she grew up, but we knew the names of her favorite bands. She told us that she gave my sister the middle name Justine because it was the name of one of the American Bandstand regulars, and she liked the sound of it. She told us that she used to dance with our Aunt CarolAudubon High School, class of 1968and Aunt SusanHaddon Heights High School, class of 1976in the kitchen to the radio while they washed dishes. That our grandmothers favorite song was Misty, as sung by Johnny Mathis. That our grandfather had taken her and Carol to see the Supremes at the Latin Casino in Camden, where they gave you small wooden malletsshe still had one, in a shoe box in the top of her closetto drum on the table instead of applaud. And when she worked at Woolworths and the Beatles released A Hard Days Night , one shift, while stationed in the record department, she commandeered the store stereo and played the album three times in a row.

To live, my mother was teaching us, was to love music, and I learned very quickly. When I was six, riding around in the car with her on errands, I heard on the radio that some planet or other was on course to collide with Earth. My stomach pitched, but when the radio went on to say that wed passed out of danger, I announced to my mother from the back seat that I was glad we were still alive because that meant I could still listen to her Beatles records. Although I had a flair for the dramaticAll right, Sarah Bernhardt, my mother would say to me when I took to the stairs in a huff or sighed too loudlythis wasnt something I said for effect. I was addicted to their jubilance. It drove me to corral my sister and the girl across the street into forming a band that played badminton rackets on our front porch.

Our mother told us that Mama Cass died by choking on a sandwich, but she did not tell us much about God, at least not when we were very young. We did not know that my mother had earned an enameled pin for perfect Sunday school attendance in junior high, or that the workbooks from her Sunday school lessons, pictures carefully colored with crayons, also resided in a box at the top of her closet. She and her sisters had been raised largely Baptist but occasionally Methodist in rented houses and apartments with Warner Sallmans Christ Knocking at Hearts Door hanging in the living room, and, since they were granddaughters of Spiritualists, sometimes swore there was someone in the room with them when there was no one at all. As a result, my sister and I were familiar with Jesus, but not overly so. Our mother sometimes took us to church with Aunt Carol and our cousins, and my grandmother taught us to sing Jesus Loves the Little Children, but we had not yet heard that we needed to formally ask Jesus into our heart for him to recognize us as his own.