This morning for coffee I ground four scoops of Farmer to Farmer Guatemalan Medium and when I pulled the grinder cap and sniffed, it was all I could do not to flop right over and shake my leg like a dog.

Michael Perry, Truck: A Love Story

Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At times funny, at other times sad, in the end reflective and powerful. This is a great book by a great writer. Perry is a real craftsman, and I love his books.

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In his collection of essays entitled Off Main Street, Michael Perry recounts how he lost his faith because of a legalistic preacher:

In our little corner of Wyoming, Brother Tim was seen as the heavyweight champ of preaching. Church members would grin and shake their heads in benevolent wonder when recounting his exploits; the deeper implication was that he was not to be messed with. Preaching or not, Brother Tim tended to Hold Forth. This day he was in strong, confident voice, sharing the stories of saints and sinners and their weakness in the face of salvation. There was a woman nearby who had been coming to church off and on for some time. She was a beautiful thing, and, as the story went, had worked as a model. We heard anecdotes of her struggle, of her inability to adhere to our dress code, for which women are forbidden to cut their hair or wear pants. After working with her for some time, with mixed success, Tim paid her a surprise visit. She answered the door in a pair of shorts. By his own account, Brother Tim spun on his heel, walked right back out the sidewalk to his  car, and drove away. The woman who first told me this story chuckled with admiration for Tim's resolve. But the chuckle was double-edged; it also conveyed condescending pity for this woman who didn't know enough to slip into a skirt and save her soul.

The idea of an unannounced inspection struck me as goofy as it was creepy. But that paled in comparison to the idea of this man filled with such vindictive hubris that he was willing to risk this woman's soul to Hell, to abandon her in her own home, willing to stand before the throne of God on the Big Day and say, Lord, she was clad in shorts, so I turned away. I got her behind me, back there with Satan.

I can still see him, down at the end of the long cookhouse table, right across from me, his big frame backlit in the window, telling this story with booming certitude, and I remember thinking, if the kingdom of heaven can swing on a pair of hot pants, if the cut of your shorts can shift the firmament, then we got trouble. And now, when I think back, I feel a little sorry for him, sad that he could tell these stories in front of a kid like me and not have any perception of my perception. Blown up in his own spiritual bulk, he unwittingly blocked the one true light, and a shadow fell on my heart. In time, I came to know others like Tim Copper. In their zeal to count heads, they lost track of souls. And when they saw some of us turn away, they assumed we simply strayed, were tempted away, or left in ignorance, when in truth, many of us left in full awareness, seeking a purer truth. He wasn't the only one. But I remember that Sunday. For the first time, I felt the foundation of my faith crack.

As I read this, I can't help but think of the contrast between the way this preacher treated the girl and the way Jesus treated the woman caught in adultery:

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting by Michael Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I enjoyed Perry's Truck: A Love Story a little more than this book, I thoroughly enjoyed Coop. Perry is a great writer--a real craftsman--and I appreciate his honesty as he recounts his efforts to balance his life as a farmer, a husband, a father, and a writer.

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From Michael Perry's Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg:

For a landlocked boy in northern Wisconsin, nothing substitutes for seafaring like nosing a Massey-Ferguson 132 tractor into an unmown hayfield on a sunny summer morning. The grasses part around the grille, rising as high as the engine shroud and sprinkling leafhoppers on your jeans. Rolling lobes of wind press across the meadow, made visible in shifting shades of silver as the seed heads dip and sway. Just inside the gate you pause for a moment like Columbus set to sail, discovery and depredation your call. And then you engage the power takeoff, roll the throttle back so that tach pegs around 1500 rpm, lower the haybine's clattering maw, ease out the clutch, and launch roaring into the uncharted grasses. 

This is why I love reading Michael Perry:

Come August, you feel it all slipping away. The garden weeds are seeding out. The tomatoes ripen faster than you can figure what to do with them. You force boxes of surplus zucchini on complete strangers. You realize the leeks simply are not going to turn the corner and will remain the diameter of Tinkertoy sticks. A handful of the hottest days of the year are yet to come, but some afternoons the sunlight is dilute and fails to heat the air, which in turn hits your nostrils with a remindful zing. This week I was on the front porch steps lacing up my running shoes for yet another four-mile slog when the giant maple across the street produced an eruption of blackbirds flying outward and apart. On some invisible cue the birds pitched, cohered, and streamed directly overhead with an ominous feathery hiss. It sounded like the air was colder up there. These were redwings, and they chuckled in a way that reminded me of frogs in spring. Twin sounds, bookending summer. (From Truck: A Love Story)