My Soul to Keep

When did I give up on certainty? At what hour on what day did I realize that you never get to know the answers? Especially not the juicy ones? It was a misguided affectation, I realize, my little preoccupation with verity. One that served no more purpose than a set of wisdom teeth or manual typewriterfitting, perhaps, in some other millennium, but out of place if not archaic in a postmodern world of news cycles, reality shows, and million-dollar half-minute Super Bowl ads. I never saw it as dangerous, though. Of course, that was back when I was young and dumb and blissfully wafting through my days as though nothing sinister was sharing the air with me. But the air is indeed crowded. And the other inhabitants rarely announce their presence, much less their intentions. Which sends the rest of us spinning around in unexpected directions, bumping into invisible barricades and teetering off into unseen ravines. Eventually, of course, if you have any spunk at all, you right yourself and you find your bearings. But just when you think you've spotted the lodestar, you discover that what you thought was true north is neither. That truth in the universe is the most elusive of the elements. And if you're dumb enough to go looking for it, you're liable to get smacked in the face by one of the legions of liars you're trying to outwit. My own personal liarthe one assigned to me by some force out there in the etheris named Peter Terry. He's a nasty, ratfink bottom-dwellera mind-stalking, soul-dissing prevaricator of the first degree. He lies, cheats, and steals, amusing himself by shoplifting, pickpocketing, breaking and entering, or outright armed robbery. I thought I'd seen the worst of him. But with beings like Peter Terry, I've learned, low expectations cannot possibly be low enough. And where Peter Terry is concerned, I have lowered my expectations all the way down to the black pit of hell. It began this time on a sunny Saturday in May. Graduation day. My favorite day of the academic year. I teach psychology at Southern Methodist University. Like most professors, I experience a powerful surge of enthusiasm every August when classes begin. In those first moments standing at the blackboard, chalk smudges on my fingers, my students' faces aglow with curiosity, I swell with the intellectual and spiritual stimulation of my craft. I love a fresh roomful of malleable minds, the smell of new school supplies, the squeak of the freshly waxed floors of Dallas Hall, the sound of the crowd at football games (a small crowd since 1987, unfortunately). Of course, that sentimental nonsense lasts about forty-eight hours. And then, like the rest of my colleagues, I spend the following nine months wishing the little darlings would quit bothering me and go home. The students are equally sick of us by May, however, which is one of the reasons graduation is a uniformly glorious occasion on campuses around the world. It's one of the few Hallmark holidays about which everyone involved is truly unconflicted. On this warm summer Saturday (in Texas, the solstice comes early), I found myself hooded and tasseled, wrangling a room full of rowdy degree candidates. Technically, they would not be graduates for another hour or sowhich ensured my last, tenuous thread of authority over them. Our caps and gowns gave us all an impressive, if misleading, air of credibility, at least until you glanced down at the wild variety of (mostly tasteless) footwear on display. I was shouting instructions, trying to herd them all into a reasonably straight, alphabetically ordered line, when my cell phone rang. Amid hoots from my chargesI'd confiscated cell phones from several conspirators who were plotting to interrupt the festivities with coordinaWells, Melanie is the author of 'My Soul to Keep', published 2008 under ISBN 9781590524282 and ISBN 1590524284.