Thursday, November 12, 2015

#195 Jesus is Waiting- Amy Hempel


#195 Jesus is Waiting- Amy Hempel

A life of driving is a lonely thing. The narrator calls the act of driving a mediation or a drone. The same could be said about this story. The running thoughts get funny, and a little loopy but not too deep, and rarely meaningful, at least not to the reader. Just random brain dropping like:

“It is the day before Thanksgiving. According to the radio, people travel to their destination by car. One hundred percent if you count just me.”

“A good feeling when I see traffic cones. They weigh next to nothing and cannot hurt a car. That’s not why I mow them down.”

We don’t learn much about the driver, or the purpose of the driving. We are just riding along, watching through the passenger side window. The Title references an Al Green song.

Notable Passage: “The drive is determinedly a drive. Mostly it is just about the sounds of the car, or driving, of the fade-in and fade-out of the radio, the removal from everything but the moving body in a vehicle, of the is-ness of passing from here to there, of not being where you were, of Jesus waiting. Call it a meditation. Call it a drone. How else to approach Jesus that without history, without reason, without restraint?”





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