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Interchapter THE L I gHT Of THE WO R LD I have always wanted to write about that day Dad said that I shouldn’t be split, that I should be the same person no matter where I am, that the Bible says we are to be the “light of the world.” I sorely wish I could remember his words exactly because I took them as a rebuke, a sermon but I don’t know if Dad intended them that way. The conversation happened some time during my teens when Dad and I were working on some project around the house or yard. Although I didn’t know it then, these are the times when Dad and I often talk—when we’re working on something together, when we’re committed to spending time on a task that occupies most of our physical and conscious effort but in which there are also cracks, moments to stand and wipe the sweat out of your eyebrows before it spills out and runs down your cheek, or to lean back in our office chairs and stretch our bad backs as we wait for the computer to reboot to see if our latest theory about why Windows ’94 needs yet another change to its config sys file will make the Microsoft gods happy. In these moments, Dad and I have some of our best talks because we are not officially talking, we are working, doing something else, and each of us mulls things in the leftover bits of concentration we don’t need for the task at hand. On this occasion, though, it ended up that we were talking; we stopped whatever our task was for a few minutes, and, in my eyes my dad morphed into my minister and pronounced to me that I needed to be the light of the world. Too shy and insecure to push the conversation forward, I pulled back, feeling rebuffed. I had been trying to explain to Dad, although I did not completely understand it myself, that my home/church and school lives seemed completely separate, almost as though I was a different person in the two settings. I had no friends who crossed contexts, and the worlds seemed separate. I am sorely tempted to fictionalize this moment. To write representative dialogue as if it were exact dialogue, to sketch the likely moment, me stumbling out the words, “You know, Dad, um.” Dad smoothes the heavy gray mortar with the sharp metal edge of the trowel, looking up to meet my eyes briefly as he reaches for a brick. “Yeah,” he says, hefting the brick in his hand, lightly tossing it with practiced skill to flip it rough side out in his rough hand as he turns to lower it 160 C OM P ELLED TO WRI T E onto the mortar, carefully aligning it with the string strung from one end of the row to the other and turning his trowel hand up to tap the brick down with the wooden end of the handle. Gray mortar oozes out as he presses the brick down, and then he flips his trowel hand again to scrape the long metal edge across the face of the emerging wall, gathering the excess in one graceful swoop and tossing it back onto the mortar board with a splat, but smearing small mortar leavings on the finished face of the bricks, which I will brush off later after the mortar is dry and flakey but not quite set, scraping my knuckles against the rough bricks. It was a moment like this, but not this moment that I have constructed out of my many projects with my dad. I want to pretend I can remember such a moment in detail, because I want to give my readers the pleasure of detail and because I want to embody something of my relationship with my father to provide some context for my reconstruction of this conversation. So I have split the difference, trying to capture something of the essence of our relationship but admitting my artifice. As I reread the description, I recognize I have probably represented my father as a more skilled bricklayer than he actually was. I had tended much more skilled masons when I worked with Dad to build the church building he preached in for two decades, so I know he was slow and a bit awkward compared to them. But what has always impressed me about my father is...

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