56 Resigned

In 1978 the new president of Friend charged me with moral turpitude the specifics of which to this day I do not know. It could have been any one of three dozen different things all of which taken together did not in my opinion amount to a hill of beans.

But for ten years at the college I had been for the faculty their clubhouse lawyer.

I wasn't stupid.

I understood the reality of my situation.

Turpitude.

Defend my morality?

No way.

Exhausted, weary of my five years of conflict with an administration and board which considered me an embarrassment to the college and wanted me gone, and uncertain what I was supposed to do now with my life-changing religious experience of 1975, I accepted a year's pay from my employer and resigned. Before I left I asked to see my personnel file. To the private conference room to which I had been escorted an uncomfortable and nervous secretary brought out a binder fire-engine red.  It was eight inches thick and stuffed helter skelter with academic trash of every conceivable kind. Even a crude survey of student sexual attitudes and practices—designed and distributed by an anonymous student in an introductory course in sociology—had been attributed to me.

I laughed.

Then I discovered real treasure.

Gold.

Buried in the ten pounds of garbage was an anonymous note to the former college president who had tried to fire me and failed, handwritten in a wobbly scrawl on a sheet of lined paper.

Priceless:

To the president—

Do you know Jesus Christ is on campus?

The head of the English department is barefoot, dressed like Christ, and saying his prayers as he greets people.

I suppose you will let this go like you do everything else.

Signed—a friend

I thumbed idly through the rest of it with only desultory interest.

It was nothing.

But, really, how could it have been anything real?

How—

I had done nothing seriously wrong.

I had confessed.

Written.

Talked.

Told for the first time the simple naked truth of my life so far.

The drugs—

The sex—

I had gone to work barefoot.

Whoa!

Now I was unemployed.

Four kids.

Two of them toddlers.

Two teens.

Jesus—

I did not know what to do.

I was fucked.

Zen—

"We hear you are enlightened," monks told Kyogen.

"I am," he replied.

"Is this true?" the monks asked.

"It is," he said.

"How do you feel?" the monks inquired.

"Just as unhappy as ever," the enlightened Kyogen replied.

I collapsed on my bed, just a box spring and mattress on the floor.

I buried my head in my pillow.

Despair.

My daughter knew something was wrong. She toddled over, climbed onto the bed, and put her soft, tiny arm around my shoulder, a hug and caress. The impossibly soft skin of her cheek lightly kissed my own.

"Daddy," she asked, "what's wrong?"

I thought.

"I'm sad," I said.

I heard the break and the ache in her heart when she asked.

"Why?"

I thought.

"I'm just sad."

She snuggled.

With her tiny hands she patted and petted my shoulders and neck to comfort me and caressed my cheek and hair as I did when she and her twin brother were hurt or unhappy or sad and she hugged me and squeezed.

"Don't be sad," she begged. "It'll be okay."

She was not yet three years old.

I smiled.

"Yes," I said. "Thank you."

We cuddled.

My sadness passed.