May 11: Saint Francis di Girolamo

Right now, I'm reading The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb. It's a book that I didn't choose to read voluntarily. A member of my book club suggested it for this month's meeting. I try to retain tight control over the selections for the club. I once made the mistake of going to the bathroom in the middle of a meeting; when I came back, the other members had selected the books for the next six months. I no longer go to the bathroom during book club.

Despite the fact that I didn't choose the Wally Lamb for this month, I'm really enjoying it. The person from the club who suggested the book has very similar tastes in literature to my own, so there's plenty of dysfunction, mental illness, violence, and death to satisfy me. The thing that really astounds me about the book is that it's so popular. People who I don't even know that well see me reading it and feel compelled to come up and fawn over and praise Wally Lamb. For a book with such dark subject matter, it has a following that rivals teenage girls melting over Robert Pattison. (It doesn't hurt that Lamb's two previous novels were Oprah book club choices. He kind of has the middle-class-housewife, career-woman, self-help-addict, gay-man audience in his back pocket.)

The thing is, a coworker read the Christmas novel Lamb published last November or December, and one morning, at the breakfast table, said, "You could have written that book." She meant it as a compliment, I know. And, having now read about a third of The Hour I First Believed, I see definite similarities in style and tone. If I shared his experiences and obsessions (twins, mental illness, women in prison), I could have been Wally Lamb.

But I'm not. He is a bestselling author, TV personality, and respected writing teacher. I am an adjunct English instructor, full-time medical records clerk, and occasional poet. The only thing I do with any consistency is play the organ for weekend church services and write blogs which disparage the successes of friends, relatives, and talented writers.

The problem is that people who receive praise and/or prizes usually deserve them, and that tends to make me look small and just a little bitchy.

It's even worse if the person I get bitchy about is a freakin' saint. I mean, you can't really make biting comments about Mother Teresa or a Saint Francis of Assisi without appearing a little bit like an asshole. Today's saint, Francis di Girolamo, was famous in his native Italy as a preacher. My book of saints even says that the crowds who followed him "hung on his every word..." Through his gift with language, he converted hundreds of prisoners and prostitutes, slaves and murderers. When I read Francis's biography, I pictured a seventeenth-century version of Wally Lamb, with people walking around the streets of Naples saying to each other, "Did you hear what Francis said on the Sister Oprah Show yesterday?"

I'm not proud of the fact that I harbor this streak of jealousy in my character that runs about as deep as the Grand Canyon. If it's directed at someone famous and successful (like Wally Lamb), I can be as mean and sarcastic as I want to be without the risk of appearing mean and sarcastic. If my jealousy is directed at a friend or acquaintance, my little tap dance becomes trickier. I have to throw in a strong dose of self-deprecating humor to maintain my facade of charm, wit, and humility. It's tough to keep all those balls in the air at once.

I think that's why I like teaching poetry to second graders at my daughter's school. For the couple of hours I'm in their classroom, talking about writing and telling jokes about burping and other bodily noises, I am the Wally Lamb of the elementary crowd. For a short while, I have a group of 25 or so kids who are hanging on my every word, a la Francis di Girolamo, and I feel the weight of the responsibility that comes with being in that position. If I make one wrong move, say one wrong thing, I may send a child spinning off along a career track of stealing, prostituting, serial killing...

...or writing sarcastic blogs about successful friends, relatives, and writers.