Fear and Trembling Leads to Nausea

"Fear and trembling leads to nausea?" she said, hair spilling to one side as she steered the stroller clear of an oncoming skateboard.  "Are you certain?"

"Well, if not, you end up with Wittgenstein," I replied, slanting forward to look at the twins and wiggle my fingers under their chins.

"Not necessarily," she argued, stopping at an intersection, "What about Albert Schweitzer?"

I helped her lower the carriage over the curb, "By way of fear and trembling, I suppose?"

"Why not? That would seem to make more sense than Wittgenstein, or Sartre for that matter."  She nodded to a red Toyota that was inching back out of the crosswalk.

"Well," I walked to the front of the stroller, lifted it over the curb, "perhaps," the twins squinted up at me with their sun soured faces, "but I thought we were talking about existentialism."

"It's a Christian concept," controlling the pram with one deft hand she frowned at me, dabbed white matter from the angle of my eye, and examined her fingertip.

I pushed her hand down, "Come on, honey, are you telling me Nietzsche and Camus were Christians?  Dostoevsky was a Christian?"

An old woman walking with a cane leaned toward the babies as we passed, her smile preceding her face.  "No, but they were reacting to Christianity."

"Against, certainly," I said, smiling, waving at the woman, "we agree, then."

"No, you don't understand me...they were what they were due to a...loathing, I guess, of Christianity," she stopped, rolled hair behind her ears.

"Yes, that's part of it," I said, watching sun eddy up her earring. "I'm agreeing with you."

"No," she reached over the hood, righted one child, "you are not agreeing with me."

"Yes, well maybe not," I conceded, "but here's the library."  I held the door open, and the twins began to cry.


(Arkansas Magazine, Arkansas Democrat, September 6, 1987)