Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on
-- Rolf to Liesl in The Sound of Music

I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Merton wondered whether he and Fundamentalist Christians served the same God.  I wonder similarly if YourBO is MyBO.  Unless you’re frank, I may not learn how MyBO offends you.

“No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”  What's your take on that?

If you break open Obama’s memoir and take a gob of pages in each hand, bearing down somewhat with your thumbs on the open pages as you might to read them, the book applauds. My daughter thought so, too.  Now, mine’s a used paperback; my mother read it at home this past summer in Tidewater where pages can get a little soggy.  Anyway, it’s the loudest book I’ve ever held.  And I think Isaiah’s prophecy that “all the trees of the field will clap their hands” has come to pass in my day, in MyBO.

This week, even the hazard of a cabinet appointment marginalized MyBO.

I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.  “I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.”

Christians argue most over Genesis and Revelation.  We are half-blind in different eyes, each the other's spitting image.  We see trees as men, walking.  But MyBO sees the past and future rooted in each clattering leaf.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests.  I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power – that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree.  It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky.  “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce.  They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another – the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

That’s from pages 436 and 437 of Dreams from My Father.  Obama was in Kenya then, crying over his father’s grave.  There was no plaque on it, nothing in writing.  When he returned years later with a wife and a Harvard law degree, he found a plaque there.

The GOP wrote Bill Ayers all over Obama’s book.  Turns out it was just their copy.  So they offered Pilate $10,000 to revise it, but they panicked when they read the blank proofs.  TheirBO came out last week as OurGOP and sold millions of copies.  What I have written I have written.

Thomas Merton and the baobab tree.  Neither MyBO nor I can cite sources.

We are dogs, rooting in crotches.  The past is present in a scent, the future’s brazen innocence.  MyBO is me; YourBO is you.

And Liesl’s dreamy echo: “To write on.”  There’s something indiscriminate about an empty page.

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Posted November 15, 2008.