A Beer is Fine But Forgiveness is Divine
by Orson BeanDennis Miller and I were gabbing on his talk show about the Gates-Crowley affair and a thought occurred to me: Professor Gates needs to forgive Officer Crowley and he also needs to forgive the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
Here’s what popped into my head on the Miller Show. At the age of five, my mother told me that if my father ever left her she would kill herself, and that if I wanted to prevent that from happening, it was my job to keep him around. This is a heavy responsibility to lay on a kid of five but I accepted it without question. I adored my mother. She was beautiful, smart, sexy and funny. She was also a self-destructive drunk who had room in her heart only for my father. He was a charming sadist with room in his heart for no-one: a hot-shot liberal who helped found the New England branch of the A.C.L.U. but in private often used the word jewbastard.
Their marriage was, to say the least, tumultuous. I had been sent by Central Casting to play the small but important role of the child. After each of their frequent and alcoholic altercations, my father would storm out of the house (actually, the rented, upper half of a house in a working class neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts…Gates-Crowley country) and head off to spend a few days with one of his girlfriends. I’d be sent after him, once actually barefoot in the snow, a sobbing ten year old, to catch up and explain how much I loved and needed him and beg him to come back. “Go home,” he’d tell me. “I’ll be back in a while.” (more…)
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