Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment

What Seamus Heaney gave me

- Caitlin Flanagan

When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, who our father thought was a pompous and ridiculous person. Suddenly, Ellen slammed through the kitchen door and pounded upstairs to our father's study.

"Daddy, Daddy!" she cried out in anguish. "Margaret Mumm says there's no Santa Claus!" Our father stopped typing, considered briefly what she'd told him, and then said, "You tell Margaret Mumm there's no God." In the Berkeley Hills, long, public staircases run between streets like steep sidewalks, and the minister and his family lived in a house built next to one of them. So, not long after Ellen ran off, as my father looked through the window above his desk, he saw the man approach like an advancing filmstrip: first the shiny black shoes, then the black pant legs, and soon enough the whole of him, making his way to the bottom step and crossing the street.

In America in the '60s, members of the clergy were generally considered moral authorities and accorded a certain measure of respect. But this particular clergyman was placing a very bad bet if he thought he could pay a visit to Tom Flanagan and tell him the right way to talk to his children about God.

After the inevitable knock at the door, my father descended the stairs, and then there it was: American Mainline Protestantism face-to-face with post-Hiroshima rational thought. The minister must have assumed that Tom would at the very least invite him in, but he didn't, so the man was forced to stand on the front porch and reduce his plaint to its elements.

"Your daughter told my daughter that there is no God," he said, more in sorrow than in anger. I think it was meant to be a pastoral visit.

"And your daughter told my daughter that there is no Santa Claus," my father replied.