The Big Picture and the Closeup

Rupert Holmes and Susannah McCorkle understood the sadness in the limits life places on our love lives. We can try, for a little while – I did – to break the short tether of human finitude that so restricts our access to romance, but we can never pull hard enough to snap it. We can, at best, meet an infinitesimal fraction of the people with whom we could have mated. Good things may come from crying uncle in this struggle, but let us not disguise the defeat as a victory.

In the world of Genesis, knowing the difference between good and evil seems to be a bad thing. Adam and Eve develop what in English we call modesty, the sense that some things should stay private, which they experience as embarrassment. And somehow that makes them God-like. And even more confusingly, God treats this as a bad thing, objecting as if He were afraid of the competition. What a thematic mess, at least for a modern-day Christian!

If that day taught me a lesson, it concerned the occasional moments of grace that drop into our lives, days where downtime unexpectedly becomes time out from one’s cares. For one gorgeous, sunny day I was forced to stare out the window of a cozy two-car train at some of the prettiest creation Pennsylvania has to offer.

The first car may frequently be more important in a young man’s life than the first sex. Sometime in the first two weeks of May 1969, my dad bought me mine, a well-used blue Chevrolet Nova. The car finally necessitated that I get a job, in order to pay for insurance. The following Monday I was at the gate of the Grove Street plant of the Ford Motor Company.

Rolling arpeggios, a haunting theme, spectacular effects, Detroit at its swankiest, and my dad …