Educated: A Memoir

“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said. Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.

windpipe

scripture

all

believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.

recital

standing