Strong faith may not be enough Nov. 11, 1985

  

Mary Kay is about 25 or 26 these days, having left college about two years ago, a Connecticut child who came to New Jersey to escape home and parents, shocked when she finally confronted the real world – much the way kids like her learned about reality in the 1960s after having been hoodwinked by ideologies of oppression and racism, thinking that they can solve the world’s problems without first having had lived in the real world.

I suppose that’s why she came on the march in Newark, assuming she could help end the evils people tell her are going on in places like South Africa.

She believes we can end Apartheid the way equally gullible kids like her thought they could Jim Crow, not at all aware that the battle had almost nothing to do with Apartheid or Jim Crow, but a radical agenda using those things to advance itself.

She is so full of faith it’s scary.

Her Christian charity boils out of her like smoke from a volcano, hinting of something more serious to follow, but never does.

I met her at a speed-reading campus during my first semester at college – I was a decade older than the other students, having already experienced much of the real world as a common laborer. She was the slightly plump girl behind me spewing definite opinions on the state of the world.

Her plumpness actually made her attractive, an old-fashioned girl, the good old American next door neighbor girl with eye glasses foggy from the steamy second floor of the college library.

I told her I was a poet and gave her a copy of what I thought then was my best poem.

The poem didn’t hold up, but Mary Kay did.

She showed up the next semester with another poet named Roland with whom she was secretly in love, but he was too aloof, a die-hard Latin lover who later turned out to be gay.

They were part of the poetic crowd I hung out with at college,

Mary Kay is the warmest human being I know, and I hurt her with neglect when we might have gone off together. She remained a friend and was always there when I needed her, usually when I was getting over some other woman.

She was always in search of purpose and envied Roland’s amazing poetic talent – as did I. She envied me because I knew exactly what I wanted to be and stuck to it.

When Roland left school to pursuit Satanism and to embrace his homosexuality, this seemed to offend Mary Kay’s Christian sensibility, although she continued to remain loyal to him, even when I feared his risky life style might expose him to AIDS.

Hurt by both of us, Mary Kay married about a year ago to a born again Christian and moved to Clifton. She discovered purpose by helping and preaching to people in a particularly rough section of Paterson. But this also scared her. She was never prepared for the violence and hatred of the ghetto, the self-destruction mistakenly blamed on white people, but manifest itself in black people killing other black people, often building a community off of making victims of other blacks in other ways.

I’m not sure Mary Kay’s intense faith is strong enough to survive the shock. It may not be enough.

 

 1985 Menu


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