Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Everyday People

Everyday People To describe my mother as permissive would be, as we used to say, the understatement ofthe year. She allowed us all the freedom to explore the world around us to whatever degree we wanted, and I'm not sure, even now, whether this is something I should be proud of or angry about. And yet she worried about our well-being like any parent, more than most, in fact, always afraid that some stranger was going to snatch us off the street or from a public bathroom. Perhaps we were too strong-willed a bunch for her to manage, especially after my father died. Whatever we wanted to do we simply did because she could not see a way to keep us from doing it, and we were all skilled artisans of emotional blackmail, or at least I was. And my mother was curious, too, perhaps her deepest flaw, and believed that she could at least learn as much from her children as they could learn from her. None ofus had limits. Jonathan, in his midteens was "asked not to return" to his boarding school for running away to New York to attend a marathon reading ofJoyce's Finnegan's Wake. He then went to Mexico to study Spanish, then McGill University in Montreal to study French. Nola went off to the Middle East or made plans for a religious pilgrimage to India. My energies were always much more split between the physical and spiritual plains than Nola's. While Nola focused her life almost solely on the spiritual battleground ofher soul, I wanted to change things in the physical world as well, and I'm not talking about Vietnam-that was a given in our world, that everyone wanted the war in Vietnam to stop. Perhaps I was influenced by the activism ofthe era, but from the time I was nine, I started getting involved in Causes. Everything became a story with myselfas the hero. Obviously, there's a sociopathic element here, the same as the child murderer who feels no remorse when he shoots the neighbor because everyone else isn't real; they're just characters . That's one way oflooking at it. I suppose people are still characters to me, and while that might sound like a terrible admission, I see the 2I4 Nola 215 word "character" as an elevated term: someone whom we want to know more about, someone we hope to understand. We can't understand the people milling about us anonymously, but a character is someone we focus our attention upon, someone who elicits our sympathy and compassion . The only way I could distinguish good from bad was to act out morality plays in which I starred, scenarios in which I tried to do good, but was sometimes thwarted, like a comic-book hero. When I was ten and lived in Athens, Ohio, I started a petition drive to bring better restaurants to town: "Tired of Hamburgers and Pizza," Kid Petitions for Foreign Spicing ATHENS, a-In this age of involvement, IO-years-young Robin Hemley has a growing concern about the lack ofvariety in restaurants here, in the home ofOhio University. Robin's primary beef is that he's "tired of hamburgers and pizza." Therefore, taking matters into his own small hands, the precocious moppet began circulating a petition, which reads as follows: "Ifyou want some improvement in Athens like a delicatessen or an Italian restaurant or Chinese restaurant or an ice cream parlor, write your name here." What Robin has been saying was anything but Greek to more than 1,000 Athenians who did sign the petition. Deli-rious As written into the petition, the delicatessen ("with any kind of foreign food we can get") is foremost on the wanted list. Robin's reasoning is that foreigners-many ofwhom are either enrolled or teach at the university "will feel more at home." Strongly seconding Robin's campaign is quite naturally, his mother, Mrs. Cecil Hemley, a writer-editor. Admitting that Robin's petition has stirred things up a bit, Mrs. Hemley also attributes her son's campaign-with all due modesty-to her cooking. "I like to cook," she said. "And I like to cook many foreign dishes, which probably has spoiled him." Also in Robin's corner is Kevin Heisler, student-managing editor ofthe Ohio University Post. "For good restaurants you have to go to Columbus, which is 70, 80 miles from here." [3.144.77.71] Project MUSE...