Jetty

OSB doesn't believe in God.

I love her dearly. I talk to her weekly (at least). But I rarely, if ever, mention the spiritual side of my life to her. It's an agree to disagree thing.

But if I felt more comfortable about it, I'd tell her this: I see God in jettys. There's just something about a jumble of rocks leading out to sea that speaks to people. I can remember being small, and looking forward to those summer Sundays when, after spending the day at Grammy's, our extended family would go to Rye state park, and after we ate, we'd all walk out on the jetty.

That my legs were too short to make some of the leaps from rock to rock thrilled me. I liked to get to the end first so I could stand there alone and see nothing but the ocean around me. I liked that when I got to the end I could turn around and clamber my way back.

I think Mira Nair sees God in jettys, too; there's one in The Namesake. It's part of what made me burble up so much at the end of the film.

And who knows -- maybe one day scientists will isolate the way specifically the shape of a jetty, the smell of the ocean breezes, and the feeling of being so small as to not matter and so infinite as to be unknowable at the same time all coalesce chemically in some fold of our brains.

Or maybe it's like Harold Bloom says, that religion arises out of the fact that we all die and are so soon forgotten.

But why then would I feel as a grade schooler something that seemed to speak to a part of me much, much older than seven while standing on a pile of rocks looking out at the Atlantic?