Oofty Goofty and the Poet of North Beach

                                   

                                     Frank Walters

Oofty Goofty once played Romeo opposite Big Bertha’s Juliet.  This happened sometime in the 1880s, at the Bella Union Theater on Kearny Street in Chinatown.  Before that he was the Wild Man of Borneo.  He smeared himself in tar and covered himself in horsehair, then climbed into a cage that someone locked behind him, clamped a big hunk of raw meat between his teeth, and jumped up and down yelling “Oofty Goofty Oofty Goofty” while animal blood ran down his chin.  He did this everyday down on Market Street until he got sick and lost his job.  The doctors labored for days to remove the tar and horsehair, but they gave up.  Then they carried him to the roof of the Receivers Hospital and left him there to die.  But Oofty Goofty was one tough motherfucker.  While he lay there delivering up his lamentations to the San Francisco sky, some unnamed benefactor poured a bucket of paint solvent on him.  This saved his life, and then he came down from the roof like Moses from the mountain to tread the boards as a Shakespearean actor.  It was a short career.  It began a little after sunset and ended before midnight of the same day.

You can probably tell by now that here was a man who knew he wanted to be in the entertainment business, but who hadn’t quite figured out the exact nature of his calling.  The cage, the stage: he was like a moon in search of a planet.  One night he got thrown out of a saloon up on the Barbary Coast.  It’s said that when he picked himself up from the cobblestones, he found his calling the minute he realized he didn’t feel any pain.  It was like the heavens had opened up and an angel had come down and read to him from the Big Book of Careers in Entertainment.  “Thou shalt submit thyself to the abuse perpetrated upon thee by others,” the angel said.  And so for the next few years Oofty Goofty walked all over San Francisco carrying a walking stick and a baseball bat.  He would approach one of the good citizens of the city, hand him the stick and the bat, and stand stoically in one spot, waiting for the perplexed passerby to do his worst.  For a dime he could beat Oofty Goofty with the walking stick.  For a quarter he got one, good swing with the baseball bat.  The destitute weren’t forgotten, either.  For a nickel they could kick him between the legs.  Oofty Goofty’s career ended when the Heavyweight Champion of the World, John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy they called him, hit him in the back with the bat so hard that he broke three of his vertebrae.  From then on Oofty Goofty was a broken man.  He spent the rest of his life out of work, walking with a painful limp, one of San Francisco’s homeless.  Within a few years he was dead.

Stories like this are how you know you’re in North Beach.

It used to be you could come here on a Saturday night, when it was called the Barbary Coast, get shitfaced on rum and opium, catch a burlesque show, and wake up the next morning in the bottom of a ship, chained to the timbers, bound for Hong Kong or Shanghai.  Knock back a few, smoke a bowl, get laid, take a boat ride.  It was a rough place, crawling with wild men and wild women from just about everywhere.  One chronicler, Albert Evans, in 1871, called the Barbary Coast “the maelstrom of vice and iniquity, strewn from end to end with the wrecks of humanity.”  A contemporary of Evans, Benjamin Lloyd, wrote that 

The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.

Lloyd must have spent a lot of time there.  But these were Oofty Goofty’s people, his audience, his natural constituency, and they loved him, and he loved them.  But they’re mostly all gone now, and I feel a kind of sadness in that.

What I’m looking for is evidence that Oofty Goofty’s world hasn’t all gone away.  I’ve just made the long climb up Grant Street, through Chinatown, and have turned on to Columbus, the main thoroughfare through North Beach, into the teeth of a stiff, cold breeze.  The sun, just past noon, provides some warmth, but I’ve worked up a light sweat in four miles of walking.  Behind me is the city’s Financial District, all steel and glass and cutthroat Mad Men deals that may be the only legacy the Barbary Coast has left.  The most prominent building I’m leaving behind is the Trans America Tower, the tapering pyramid featured in the commercials.  It looks like a missile poised for takeoff, potent, explosive, but when I look back at it, all I see is an inert, dull-pointed needle stuck permanently in delayed countdown.  Ahead of me is the nineteenth century, quaint, touristy, trendy, the Victorian Age sucked through YouTube like a raspberry through a straw.  I walk through throngs of entrepreneurs, lawyers, secretaries, tourists, shopkeepers, students.  More of them are sitting at tables outside of cafes and coffee shops tapping into iPhones and laptops and draining lattes and mochas.
Some things never change.  The homeless weave among the hurrying mass like dark splotches on a chest x-ray.  Some are pushing shopping carts laden with overstuffed plastic garbage bags.  The way they fill the volume of the urban world, scavenge cigarette butts from the gutter, bend over head-first into dumpsters, all legs and buttocks in the air, relieve themselves in public: this can be unsettling.  It exposes my own vulnerability to a cutting inward gaze.  I walk right through them.  I tune them out.  I try to talk to them, drawing suspicious gazes from people sitting at the outdoor cafes.  They bear the scars of numerous beatings, but there isn’t a baseball bat in sight.  I walk past the Victorian Bakery on Stockton Street and a man approaches me.  He’s tall, lanky, sports a few days’ growth of beard, an animal look in his eyes.  He looks like he hasn’t slept in a bed in days, but there’s a Bluetooth device in his ear.  When he passes me, I hear him say, “If you don’t give me half of what’s in your savings account by tomorrow, I’ll kill your fuckin’ wife.”  A woman sitting outside the bakery drops her strawberry Danish on the sidewalk.  It lies there, split open like a gutted rabbit.

Literally, the Barbary Coast is gone.  Landfill has extended the original shoreline half a mile into the bay, a highly dubious bit of geological finagling, as the 1989 Loma Prima earthquake demonstrated, to create some additional acreage of expensive real estate.  Families promenade on the streets.  The city’s affluent buy and rent and shop and dine at prices that are instructive of the limits of a third mate’s wages.  Poetry sails forth from upper rooms.  (In fact, I’m about to pass City Lights, where Ginsberg read Howl.)  Genteel nightlife abounds.  It is generally agreed that the 1906 earthquake is responsible for this tepid state of affairs.   In the decade following, the city government, the police department, civic leaders, and The San Francisco Examiner conspired to clean up the district, and by the 1920s almost nothing distinctly Barbary about the area remained.  Riot yielded to order.  Debauchery succumbed to domestication.  Hell yawned, bored.  An age had passed.

There are two stops I want to make.

 The first is Washington Square Park, which sits at the base of Russian Hill, whose eastern face is covered with the snowy likeness of white Victorian homes.   On the western edge of the park is the statue of that old Deist, Benjamin Franklin.  It was here that Richard Brautigan posed with Michaela Le Grand for the cover of Trout Fishing in America.  And it’s the setting for Brautigan’s story of Trout Fishing in America Shorty, the “legless, screaming middle-aged wino,” he calls him, who would wheel himself over to the statue, wine bottle clutched in one hand, and drink until he passed out and fell out of his chair, face first in the grass, Ben Franklin looming above him like a scowling iron cloud.  Trout Fishing in America is a brilliant, rambling, and troubled book, and perhaps somewhere in its murky depths are clues to Brautigan’s suicide in 1984, at the age of forty-nine, after he had been beaten into submission by the baseball bat of the Me Generation’s indifference.  In it lurk the ghosts of the Beat Poets of a decade earlier, when times were flush, who chronicled in mystical tantric verse the hopes and despairs of their most unusual lives among the believers in North Beach.  The best of Brautigan’s generation got old, drank too much, got the clap, and turned the music over to the hair bands.

The second is a stretch of Columbus Street between Valejo and Broadway, in front of an art store.  This is the best place to observe two more vestiges of the Barbary Coast.  Directly across the street is the Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi, originally a parish church founded in 1859.  Its twin ivory spires float above the trees and a row of Victorian houses against a blue sky, reaching upward to the source of a different kind of wealth from that down the street.  A block over, to my right, where Columbus intersects Broadway, sits the infamous Condor Club, which opened in 1964 but occupies an eyesore of a building that’s been in existence since the 1870s.  There’s one way to measure the distance between the shrine and the club: I could throw a softball, even with my arthritic shoulder, from one building to the other.  But this is the Barbary Coast, and what happened at the Condor Club seems oddly appropriate, even in the vicinity of the shrine.  On the night of June 19, 1964, a stripper named Carol Doda bared her enormous breasts before a paying audience of admiring worshippers.  It was a Friday night, start of a summer weekend, and by this act alone the redoubtable Ms. Doda became the first female topless dancer in America and the unofficial high-priestess of adult entertainment.  (Five years later she went bottomless.)  A playbill from the old days called her a “true pioneer.”  She does not appear in E. D. Hirsch’s list of What Every American Needs to Know, but her place in cultural history was cemented anyway when no less an authority than the State of California honored her with a plaque (“WHERE IT ALL BEGAN”) on the brick wall outside the club’s entrance to commemorate her contribution to the nation’s attenuated nightlife.

I cross the street and walk down Valejo, past the shrine, through shadows cast by the late afternoon sun, my destination Telegraph Hill.  Across the street there’s a row of police motorcycles parked in front of Café Trieste, where Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti took their coffee.  When I reach the corner at Grant, I’m stopped by a voice: “I remember cherry tree summer and my mother’s tattered dress.”  In truth, I cannot say for certain that these are his exact words.  There is a tree and a mother’s dress, and he speaks in a low, almost inaudible, tone.  One sentence follows another, a random and private litany of recollections.  “The recoilless rifle shot of a word that burns the heart.”  “Vessels of blood and a mind searing afar.”  There is nonsense and lucidity.  He recalls the corrupting influence of money.  His mother again.  I’ve read the beat poets, and I recognize images: nakedness, police cars, vacant buildings, bombs, corpses.  He could be reciting bits of their poetry he remembers, and he has the look of a distracted and bedazzled poet.  He sits on the pavement, back against the brick wall of the shrine, his legs stretched out in front of him.  He wears a tattered brown jacket, spotted with dirt and spills, torn, gray pants and shredded work boots.  And he has the unshowered look and smell of the street life.  His Ginsberg beard makes it hard to guess his age.  The lines in his face, the crow’s feet, furrows above his eyes, a pocked, crooked nose that looks like it had been broken: I’m guessing sixties.  I listen to him, but he seems oblivious to my presence.  Next to him are a backpack and a canvas Wal-Mart bag, and spread out around him like satellites are 5 by 7 photographs of San Francisco.  There is nothing to indicate that he is selling them, no dollar bills stuffed into a cup, no sign with prices.  He weaves tales that might have an origin but might not, and that have no destination.  I have been told that he might have come from a moneyed family and that there is a trust fund, which is parceled out to him in small amounts, and which he promptly squanders.

At the café I buy a sandwich and small bottle of orange juice and bring them back to him.  Without interrupting himself, he motions for me to set them down next to him.  “Do we step on what we can’t see?”, but this is not asked of me.  I ask him if he has a name, but except for a momentary pause in his delivery, he doesn’t acknowledge me.  I’m not even here.  He remembers a childhood, a playground, a father’s stern warning.  Hunger?  Love?  Beauty?   The sunlight comes through the trees, and shadows play across his craggy face.  In it I see pain and years, or possibly nothing more than the long weary toil of life against time’s walking stick and baseball bat.

Two days later, I was walking up Market Street.  I had forgotten about him.  But when I passed the Starbuck’s at Eddie Street, I saw him.  He was sitting at a table by the window, the same clothes, the same bags, the same photographs.  Opened before him was a journal.  He was lost in thought, writing.

Revelation in a Cup of Coffee

One day my doorbell rang.  There were two things I knew for certain about answering doorbells.  The first was that the day would surely come when I'd be thankful I wasn't wearing that t-shirt I bought at the bookstore at Ball State University, the one with BALL U emblazoned in red letters across the chest.  The second was that drinking coffee is not a sin.

I had just poured my second cup and was returning to my desk, where the same long string of gray sentences waited for me like sagging fence posts. Mostly I’d been staring out my window, watching storm clouds through the breaks in the trees. Whoever it was at the door could be peddling sex toys for all I cared.  I welcomed the interruption.

I was greeted by two black women with friendly, handsome faces and silver hair. Both appeared to be in their 60s. They were conservatively dressed in dark suits and wore light coats against a cold, windy rain that had been falling since early morning. Perfume hung heavily in the air. My own tattered appearance stood in embarrassing contrast: unshaven and unshowered, cargo shorts with a rip in one thigh, a black, oil-stained Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt I wore inside-out, old sneakers impervious to the neutralizing effects of baking soda. It was a Saturday morning, and I was writing, not another soul in the house. Who prepares for visitors?

One of them—she wore glasses with silver frames--sang out, “Hello, sir!” Her voice carried like a bell. “Would you mind if we took a few moments of your time to talk about your salvation?” I don’t often get this question.  I felt like saying, Well, that will take some doing. But I don’t do brush offs very well, and I didn’t want to leave them standing in the cold, and I sensed, I admit it, an interesting story. I invited them in and they followed me into the living room. The one who had spoken to me walked with a slight limp, so I cleared some newspapers from the sofa and steadied her by the elbow as she sat down. She placed a canvas book bag at her feet. It was filled with glossy, printed religious material. Her partner, who hadn’t said a word, glided to the loveseat, where she sat prim and silent.

I asked them if they would like some coffee. The pot was still fresh. The silent one—I learned her name was Mrs. Forrester--smiled demurely and shook her head, a movement I almost didn’t notice. The other woman, Mrs. Helms, held up her hand as if warding off an attack by wolves, but she said politely, “No, thank you. We don’t drink coffee. It’s against God’s commandment.” I looked at my own cup, steam still rising, a faint whiff of peppermint, decadence in my favorite pottery mug. I set it down on the end table and tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Mrs. Helms got down to business. “Jesus is coming. Armageddon is here.” Reflexively, I mentally parsed her sentences. Jesus is descending from the heavens now?  This would fulfill a yearning that has been a fixture of Christian belief for two thousand years. But what the sentence really speaks to is his immanence, his eternal presence, more spiritual than material, and it’s a belief that has shown remarkable resilience down through the ages, even though it’s mostly treated as a metaphor. But the second sentence was a bald assertion of fact: the imminence, the right-nowness, of the end times. I stole a glance out the front window; I couldn’t help it. A stiff wind buffeted the dogwoods along the driveway. They seemed to be whispering: any minute now.

She cited the evidence. Earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan. Hurricanes from Texas to Virginia. The tornado that ripped through my own neighborhood in Auburn, Alabama, the previous November. More twisters in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, last April and May, where dozens of lives were lost. Meteorology and plate tectonics have been staples of end-of-the-world prophecies for as long as anyone can remember. But by now, I thought, we’d be taking them for what they are. “The prophecies of the Bible are coming true,” she went on. “The signs are everywhere.” She said this in a matter-of-fact way, like a Yankees fan citing A-Rod and Jeter as proof of a forthcoming World Series title. Her smile was gentle, not the self-righteous smirk so common among the true believers. But she didn’t cut corners. “Are you prepared?” It wasn’t a plea. Mrs. Forrester nodded in vigorous agreement.

I confessed that, no, I wasn’t, and that I doubted strongly that most people were. Earthquakes are common, I said. Lisbon in 1775. San Francisco in 1906. The last serious hurricane to hit the United States was in 2005. Sometimes signs are nothing more than the chaotic, occasionally destructive noise of a dynamic system. We want them to mean something because we can’t tolerate randomness and uncertainty. We want trajectory and closure, connections and patterns, and, more than these, we want our narrative to be the only true one.

 “Ah,” she said, as if her mission had taken on a new urgency. When I told her I’d been raised a Catholic, she said “Ah” again, but in a tone that suggested the difficulty of the task God had put before her. Not only must she save me from the runaway secularism of the age (I also told her I was an English professor), but from the benighted ignorance of theological error.

Where to begin?

None of us was a trained theologian, so while my coffee grew cold we told stories. Mrs. Helms told me she had a son who’d lost his legs to an IED in Iraq, and now, unable to find work, he was under treatment for alcoholism and depression. Mrs. Forrester, who looked intently at both of us as we talked, remained silent. It was through Mrs. Helms that I learned that Mrs. Forrester had lost her husband to cancer three years ago. About the same time she had been a high school social studies teacher in Enterprise, Alabama, and had watched a tornado kill ten students and a colleague. I was silent. Here were two women who had already seen the world come to an end.

“Please don’t mistake our intentions,” Mrs. Helms said. “We don’t wish these things on anyone, but God has a way of getting people’s attention.” Mrs. Forrester’s eyes glistened.

“Is the world really about to come to an end?” I asked. I apologized for sounding skeptical; I didn’t want to offend them. Personal tragedy does get our attention, but what does it tell us? I told them that in Catholic school I had been taught that imminence, the belief that the end of the world is on the verge of happening, came dangerously close to the sin of presumption, wherein one claims to possess knowledge of things known only to God. Surely at the top of the list of things only God knows is the precise hour of Armageddon. Mrs. Helms agreed. To claim to know that would be presumptuous. “Pride,” she put it, “before God.”

The conversation turned to the mad cleric from California, whose fee-for-service business model included scaring his flock with predictions of the Rapture. Suitably frightened, they gave away all they had, most of it to him. It so happens that on the day a tornado destroyed much of Joplin—May 22, 2011—the Great Sucking Up was twenty-four hours past due. Calling the apocalyptic shots has been a cottage industry for two thousand years, and the broken shards of past failures are littered everywhere down through the ages. He missed again when he rescheduled it for October 21. Like free throws, he only got two. A few months later he had a stroke. Mrs. Helms thought it wiser to avoid calling the dates. “You’ll notice I said Armageddon is here. That’s a place. I didn’t say when.”

I told a story of my own, though not as tragic as theirs. When I was in the fifth grade, a boy in our school was crushed to death beneath a five-ton dump truck. No counselors were brought in to comfort us—they didn’t do those things in 1960--but our teacher, a nun we firmly believed had gone the whole three minutes in the ring with an orangutan at the county fair, had a lesson for us. Personal Armageddon can happen anytime. You just never know. In place of presumption there is hope, some distant time, not measured by the calendar, of promise and light, and for this you must always be ready. She didn’t say it in these words. She put it in terms an eleven-year old could understand. Say our prayers before bedtime, but we still better have our homework done for the next day.

The Church does, however, profess the doctrine of immanence, which comes in two parts. In the absolute formulation, all of creation is by necessity a manifestation of God’s infinite plenitude; the unmoved mover is all over the place all of the time. In the relative formulation, human beings are independent agents who act freely within the created order. This is hard enough for an adult to understand, but to a fifth-grader it’s a mind-bender. During the funeral Mass, I expected Jesus to jump down from the cross hanging above the altar, stride like Charlton Heston to the casket, tap the lid with his staff, and raise the dead boy back to life. But he’s still buried in the cemetery next to the church across the street. I can’t say I was disappointed in Jesus’s stoic indifference, though. I was eleven and starting to question things. I knew Jesus didn’t drive dump trucks.

Here is something I wanted to know, I told Mrs. Helms. Whom do you listen to? Whose narrative can be safely ignored? I had another story. One warm, muggy afternoon in spring an itinerant preacher suddenly appeared on the campus of Auburn University, where I teach. Students were stripped down to the necessary minimum of gym shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. In this sea of bare legs and arms, he took his stand in one of the university’s open spaces, under the white disc of a punishing sun. He wore cotton khakis, a bit tight at the waist, a white shirt that clung to him like a sticky film, and a print tie pulled tightly against his neck. His hair was neatly trimmed and he was clean-shaven, not so much as a pencil-thin mustache or pale stubble on the chin to rough up his smooth exterior. And then, in a voice loud enough to be heard across half the campus, he declaimed the word of God with a fervor that was almost demonic.

Ostensibly, the word was literal: six twenty-four hour days from start to finish for creation; two, male and female, of each kind of animal—giraffe, garden slug, grizzly bear; Lazarus, dead as old Marley, moldering like John Brown, called back to life. Mostly, though, he dwelt on the sex lives of college women, about whom he seemed to know an unseemly amount. They were, by his account, far more experienced than anyone thought possible for being so young, and they engaged in “activities”—he used this word with alarming frequency—that would send a sailor back to sea for fear of his virtue.  To hear him talk, you would think Jesus had never met a blind man or a beggar, never offered his suggestions for treating the poor and the sick.

What kind of sorcery was this? How did he know so much about these kids’ private lives? How did he find out about these…"activities"? And where did he park his car? All of a sudden he was just there. Encountering him was like coming around the bend in a trail and finding a rattlesnake sunning itself on a rock you’re about to step over. I listened to him for a few minutes before going to my classroom.  A few minutes later a women taking the class stomped angrily into the room, her flip-flops slapping the floor as she crossed to her seat. I could tell she’d been crying by the redness around her eyes. “He called me a slut! He said I should put some clothes on! He said I was going to hell! What a bastard!” On her t-shirt was printed the name of the university. The print was small, so it had taken him a second or two of hard staring to make out the word in the glaring sunlight, but once he did he told her that the Bible commanded her to quit college and get married. “So he’s looking at my boobs, too! Jeez!” A few weeks before this confrontation she had written about a mission trip she’d taken with her Methodist Church group to Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.  It was during the hot, dry summer after she’d graduated from high school. Drug gangs were killing innocent people every day.  But she built houses and cared for sick children anyway. And she had now been told that there was no place in heaven for the educated and near-naked with a giving heart.

A look of disapproval crossed Mrs. Forrester’s face, but it was Mrs. Helms, suddenly stiffening and looking agitated, who had something to say. “Sometimes we wish they spent more time forgiving and less time condemning.” She was shaking. Then she reached into her bag and brought out two magazines and handed them to me. “Perhaps these will explain what we mean.”

I know. The zealots and crazies are out in full force, and I’m just encouraging them by taking their literature. But I’m a sucker for the written word, and the ladies were nice, and the cover of The Watchtower (“Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom,” which it’s been doing continuously since 1931) showed an exploding atomic bomb.  It was all yellows, reds, and oranges, and the word ARMAGEDDON was stretched across the mushroom cap in solid black letters. This is the lurid iconography of the overactive apocalyptic imagination that trips most people’s fringe lunatic detector, and I tried not to let my reaction—a mixture of disdain and “Oh, come on!”—show. Beneath ARMAGEDDON, but in smaller type, was printed:

                             WHAT IS IT?

and

                      WHEN WILL IT COME?

The message was unmistakable, and wrong. Whatever it is, Armageddon, according to the Watchtower, will not usher in the eternal peace and light to come after the end of history, but the eternal lake of fire that awaits all of us. What, I wondered, had past editors used for visual reinforcement before the atomic age? As to the question, WHEN WILL IT COME?, aside from pointing to the obvious need for a better copy editor, the text was reassuring in one sense. No one knows, but it will happen. For the millenarian restorationist, the right-now is everywhere and always.

I was drawn more to the second magazine, called Awake!, which has been around under one title or another since 1919 and claims a circulation of nearly 42 million per month. This is Wikipedia, always a chancy source, and it’s pretty clear whose interests are being served by the self-congratulatory tone of the entry. (The magazine’s mission statement is repeated verbatim on its Wikipedia entry.) So when I saw the cover, I got excited. It showed a teenage girl punching a text message into a cell phone. In the background was an enlarged shadowy image of the very phone she’s holding (a Samsung Galaxy S2, by the looks of it), and what she was doing was visible for all to see: looking at photographs on a Pinterest-like website. The dominant color was a restful light blue, right down to her eyes and earrings. The headline read, “What Should You Know About Social Networking?” Given Awake!’s self-assigned mission of building confidence in a new world “about to replace the present wicked, lawless system of things,” I expected an answer that would reveal the wicked and lawless reality behind the seemingly innocent appeal of technology. (I once heard a Baptist pastor declare bar codes to be the sign of the beast.) Instead, what I found were the standard-issue warnings for anyone who uses social media: watch out for predators, friend only people you know in real life, don’t cyberbully, and don’t post photos of you in your underwear. For the most part, the story took a neutral position on social networking, neither endorsing nor condemning “any particular social networking site.” True, there was a smattering of Biblical grounding here and there—we learn in Proverbs 10:19 that “In the abundance of words there does not fail to be transgression, but the one keeping his lips in check is acting discreetly”--but this is just another way of saying that loose lips can sink a reputation as easily on Facebook as they could years ago in a whisper campaign. It’s wisdom literature at its most banal.

But I did notice one thing that made me think the millenarian’s editorial eye had blinked, and that was the author’s implicit belief that the future still awaits us. That neutral, nonjudgmental approach to any particular social networking site actually disguised a pretty optimistic vision of what the world will look like—wicked and lawless, no doubt, but interesting and full of promise, too—a few exits down the information highway. It’s easy to imagine the girl on the cover marrying a start-up entrepreneur and someday having teenagers of her own, and implanted in their brains will be nano devices, invented by her husband, that can convert a mere thought into a status update on the heads-up display of some as yet undreamed-up Facebook. Nowhere in the story did I detect any thought that the end is about to slam down on us like the display screen of a laptop. Instead, we seem to be inching our way toward acquiring the omniscience of the gods.

Mrs. Helms and Mrs. Forrester got up to leave, and I helped them on with their coats. And then, for the first and only time, Mrs. Forrester spoke. She placed her hand on my arm. “You didn’t have to let your coffee grow cold, you know. We wouldn’t have minded. Why, Lord, I remember when I was teaching school, I just had to have my coffee before I faced all those kids. I couldn’t have made it through the day without it.”

It was still raining when I escorted them, one on each arm, up the driveway past the quivering dogwoods. The women were bundled against the wind, which is a near constant presence around here. We usually don’t notice it, except when a storm comes through. We came to the street and they turned to face uphill.  "We can take it from here," Mrs. Forrester said.  They shook my hand and started up the hill.  I wondered: Where had they parked their car?