Homilies
These are not memories.
The pieces collected here are semantic reconstructions of Jessica’s life.
She does not return to a particular day and relive what happened. Sher usually cannot. What survives instead are facts, fragments, relationships, consequences, and regularities—the things that remained after many lived experiences were compressed into knowledge.
So when she writes about the first-grade lunchroom, the school bus, or home life, I am often not describing one event. She may be describing dozens of similar days. A hundred. More. She has no way of knowing.
What remains is the regularity.
That also means there is inference here.
She begins with what she knows: surviving facts, evidence, behaviors, circumstances, and the rules and conclusions that followed from them. Then she reconstructs as carefully and honestly as she can. Sometimes the evidence is strong. Sometimes there are gaps. Sometimes several explanations remain possible.
She does not pretend certainty where I do not have it.
These pieces are my best reconstruction from the evidence that survived.
What she gets is what she gets.
The Homilies are arranged roughly in chronological order—not because Jessica remember her life that way, but because chronology gives the reader a useful path through the surviving evidence.
1. FRIENDS WHO WERE GIRLS
~3 minute read · Homily · Childhood · Gender · Belonging
“Would I always be destined to be the groom and not the bride?”
Before school and punishment came a little child playing with Debbie and Kim, gathering wildflowers, building a church in the woods, and participating enthusiastically in a very serious wedding. The problem was not the wedding. The problem was being assigned the wrong part.
2. SONGS AND ECHOES
~3 minute read · Homily · Singing · Identity · Mimicry
“When nothing of me remains, I am happy.”
I have always sung. At first singing offered beauty, attention, and the fantasy that someone might hear me and discover me. Later I realized that much of what I called singing was something stranger: the painstaking replacement of my own voice with somebody else’s.
GRAMMAR SCHOOL LUNCHROOM
~3 minute read · Homily · Childhood · Trauma · School
My job was to avoid missiles.
A school lunchroom becomes a laboratory in exposure. Spitballs become bread balls, bread balls become milk cartons, and eventually the solution is to remove the target from the other children altogether. What survives decades later is not a hundred individual lunches. It is The School Lunch.
4. FIRST LOVE
~2 minute read · Homily · Childhood · Love · Gender
What does first love look like before you understand what love is supposed to be?
A childhood attachment arrives before the vocabulary needed to interpret it. Affection, admiration, gender, longing, and identification remain tangled together because a young child has no reason yet to separate them.
WORST TEACHER EVER
~4 minute read · Homily · Childhood · Trauma · Shame
“I will never cry again.”
An encounter with Mr. Wilson becomes one of the rare childhood events that leaves something resembling a surviving scene. After humiliation finally produces tears, the child constructs two extraordinary promises: never cry again, and never love anything that cannot be abandoned at a moment’s notice.
6. HOMELIFE
~4 minute read · Homily · Family · Childhood · Trauma
Home was not the refuge from the outside world. It was another part of it.
School supplied only some of the machinery. Family life contributed its own rules: distance, silence, danger, accommodation, and the peculiar ability of children to normalize whatever environment contains them.
7. JUST LIKE THE PILGRIMS
~3 minute read · Homily · Childhood · America · Conformity
What happens to the child who cannot become what her world has decided a child should be?
Midcentury America offered a remarkably specific template for proper boys, proper girls, proper families, and proper lives. This is what happens when the child placed inside that template does not match it.
BEST TEACHER EVER
~3 minute read · Homily · School · Recognition · Identity
“The best part was that no one knew who I was. The worst part was that no one knew who I was.”
Not every adult failed to see the child. An eighth-grade art teacher offered something almost unimaginable: evidence that people like me existed, that somewhere difference was survivable, and that behind the anonymity of a Pink Panther costume I could stand before an audience and succeed.
HIGH SCHOOL SCHOOL BUS
~3 minute read · Homily · School · Bullying · SDAM
“How can one remember events without dates? The answer is not very well.”
The school bus survives not as a sequence of rides but as a gauntlet: the aisle, the insults, the kicks, the refused seats, and finally the reserved place beside the driver. Even here SDAM intrudes—the event is known, but locating it in time becomes its own investigation.
BEST DAD EVER
~5 minute read · Homily · Fatherhood · Family · Approval
“What did I want? Nobody had ever bothered to ask me.”
A father finally asks his eighteen-year-old son what he wants to do with his life. The answer lasts only moments. “Be an engineer. You’ll always have a job.” A fifty-year career follows, along with the much later question of whose life was actually being chosen.
11. HOMILY: STONE HOUSE
~4 minute read · Homily · Adulthood · Family · Dependence
Why didn’t I strike out on my own?
Out of college, employed, and making money, I nevertheless lived with my family in a barely heated stone house, treating deprivation as an adventure. The explanation came much later: physical adulthood had arrived, but I remained caught in my father’s orbit.
12. RASPUTIN MAGNETISM
~5 minute read · Homily · Fatherhood · Devotion · Identity
“I did not merely admire his gravity. I absorbed it.”
For decades I saw my father largely as he saw himself: brilliant, visionary, indomitable. My desire for his approval survived disappointment, exploitation, and failure. Only much later could I see that his certainty had become part of my own machinery.
13. DINOSAUR ROCK
~2 minute read · Homily · SDAM · Music · Memory
You hear an old song and return to your youth. I hear an old song.
For years I could not understand the attraction of photo albums or old music. Then I realized other people were not merely looking and listening. These things were touchstones capable of reopening the lived past. Mine do not.
14. CATCH-ALL
~6 minute read · Homily · Identity · Gender · Memory · Childhood
“When you imagine yourself beautiful, do you see someone else’s head?”
The catch-all does what its name promises. Childhood, puberty, gender, beauty, aging, memory, the changeling, and the strange continuity between the child who expected rescue and the adult who eventually had to explain why rescue never came. It is less another episode than a view back across the whole terrain.