Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  Inflationary cosmology . . . there are other potential yous . . . bat shit crazy (is that a legitimate scientific term?) . . . truth important if true . . . Possible world semantics . . . quantum events . . . infinity universe . . . infinity pool (might not have heard that, but going for a cool dip is always welcome in Los Angeles) . . . quantum suggests there is an infinity of universes . . . quantum (again with the quantums?) of quantums (does he have a licensing deal with the word quantums?)

  jam jar water

  Birkenstocks

  I don’t recall what the note about jam jars and Birkenstocks had to do with the talk. Was he drinking from a jam jar? Maybe. Others in the crowd were. You see that a lot these days. Mason jars have supplanted reusable water bottles in the Hipster Ethos.* Was he wearing Birkenstocks? Possibly someone in my row was wearing them. I don’t think his talk was intended to encourage this kind of speculation, but I would like to live in the alternate world where Birkenstocks were never invented.

  I’m sure Dr. Dizadji-Bahmani’s degrees were earned with unimpeachable scholarly research, but it all sounded a bit . . . just a bit . . . almost exactly like the channeled wisdom of free-ranging entities I was privy to as a member of that UFO cult in the 1980s. The talk probably landed him a development deal at the Syfy channel.

  We observed a moment of quiet reflection, as you do, and then we were back into gear with the day’s featured live musical act. A folk band from Hawaii leapt onto the stage. Accomplished young musicians, they struck me as so clean-cut and unencumbered by self-reflection, it was almost unseemly for non-believers. Aren’t you supposed to wrestle with existentialism and be miserable in your twenties?

  Their musical offering was perfectly charming, but I have to confess, I was losing the thread. Were we at a God-free hoedown? I was pondering this when a middle-aged woman sporting wire-rimmed glasses and a grandmotherly warmth approached the mic stand. She told us how her zest for life had waned after the death of a family member and that feeding the homeless with Assemblers had returned a sense of purpose to her life. This is a regular feature of the Assembly, a three-to-four-minute testimonial on “doing our best.”

  As she testified, I felt queasy. She reminded me of the women my son and I had met working in the soup kitchen of his Episcopal grade school. You can take the lady out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the lady. I too find being of service a salve for depression, but good lord, the service was getting awfully churchy. All of the songs seemed to strike religious thematic notes: Take my flesh / And fix my eyes . . . Is Mumford and Sons’ song actually a call to religion? And what if you don’t like the musical selections? That’s really going to be a buzzkill. There’s something comforting and even pleasurable about showing up at your house of worship knowing there will be the same old songs, even if you don’t like them. They carve a familiar if mortifying groove in your brain. Just like if someone sings the Nair hair-removal commercial song from the 1980s—“Who wears short shorts, we wear short shorts, if you dare wear short shorts, Nair for short shorts”—it’s impossible for me to resist happily joining in.

  As she spoke, I thought about my conversation with Ian Dodd, one of the founders of the Sunday Assembly Los Angeles. I’d called to ask about how he, a director of photography for TV shows, came to be involved and he’d told me how he met the founders at a local watering hole and got swept up into starting a chapter. He candidly addressed the difficulty of coming up with a format. “Some people feel the Assembly is too churchy, for some it can’t get churchy enough.”

  Music has been an issue, he allowed. Every secular community is trying to get away from endless covers of “Imagine.” The Los Angeles Assembly often invites a local atheist choir, Voices of Reason, whose signature number that year was “The Rhythm of Life.” It’s from the musical Sweet Charity, in which Daddy, a role played by Sammy Davis Jr. in the movie version, an improbably jazzy, flower-power, hippie guru, sings about forming a church where his followers will “hit the floor and crawl to Daddy.” Dramatists and audiences have puzzled over the song’s inclusion in Sweet Charity, and it doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for the Assembly either, although my questioning the selection affirms my status as a card-carrying skeptic.

  Ian was a witness to what’s been called the Second Atheist Schism, the first being the break from God. A faction of SA in New York, where he was living at the time, accused founders Jones and Evans of trying to form a centralized humanist religion. Guided by a more hard-core vision, they formed a splinter group called the Godless Revival. They proudly label themselves atheists and meet in dive bars.

  I’m so glad I’m not in charge of figuring this stuff out, I thought as the Assembly drew to a close and we were treated to the full “tastes like chicken” religious institution experience. An announcement was made of this exciting news: “We’re planning to hire staff, so we need money.” In what must have been a nod to the newness of the group, the collection box that made its way to me was a diaper wipe container.

  We service project volunteers were handed the boxes that were to be sent to the members of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers who were serving on bases around the globe. Our secular stocking stuffers included books by Richard and Sam, mints, gum, and board games.

  We were encouraged to include personal notes in our packages. I felt a bit silly, so I tried to strike a lighthearted tone and after several attempts settled on:

  Dear third chimpanzee, merry everything, happy everybody!

  I thought it was pretty clever until I peeked over the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me. Allen was composing a letter that was several pages long. I couldn’t make out the text, but it was filled with underlined words, caps, and lots of exclamation points.

  Allen, a surgical sonographer, served in the Air Force in Vietnam. Once his commanding officer found out he was an atheist, he’d pulled way more than his share of KP duties and cleaned more latrines than anyone else in his platoon, he told me with venom in his eyes as he spoke.

  “Atheists aren’t officially recognized by the military and are still required to pray at some ceremonial events. Even Wiccans have chapters on bases,” he told me, his voice rising with anger. Had I composed my holiday greeting with enough sensitivity? It seemed doubtful, but my packages were sealed and whisked away. I’d also neglected to note that The Third Chimpanzee is the title of a book by Jared Diamond on how alike human behavior is to that of the chimpanzee, our closest relative. Without context, my letter could be misinterpreted in an antagonistic way. Unsuspecting women and men serving in conflict zones might open these boxes and take offense. Was it possible that Allen was exaggerating the importance of these care packages? He was wearing Birkenstocks.

  I headed home and immediately put out the word through MAAF channels that I was interested in speaking with package recipients. I started receiving e-mails from people like Staff Sergeant Sawyer Braun, who told me about his “transition” from his Catholic upbringing. He was binge-watching George Carlin videos during a tour in Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2005, when he had an awakening. He started a branch of MAAF at Fort Campbell as a way of reaching out; being from a small town, he’d never met anyone who was a non-believer. “Humanism isn’t recognized by the military, and we can’t officially congregate as a group on base, so we hold our annual Darwin Day in my apartment.” They are also looking for alternatives to “Imagine.” He was hoping to convince his group to adopt “Let It Go,” from the Disney animated film Frozen. A Marine sergeant, Cody Heaps, phoned to let me know how much he valued getting his package fifteen months into a deployment last year in Bahrain.

  “Many well-meaning people send religious propaganda and I was so happy to receive something from ‘my people.’ You know what else is great about your gifts?” he added. “They’re not too big. We get these huge hauls and it’s just not practical in a war zone.” Score one for the practicality of skeptics.

/>   I had no idea how much attention was being paid to this small gesture, having never experienced this kind of marginalization for my faith or lack thereof. Their stories reminded me of the isolation I felt in my youth, for completely different reasons, but it was out of this feeling of solidarity with the soldiers that I found myself standing on the National Mall, facing the crowd of ten thousand freethinkers at Reason Rally 2016. I was so overcome with emotion, I blurted out, “I’m so glad to be here with my tribe,” before I introduced retired lieutenant colonel Thom Grey, founder of the humanist group at Offutt Air Force Base, one of the members of MAAF I’d connected with. After he spoke, I didn’t think twice about joining in the rousing rally-wide rendition of “Imagine.”

  I’d been expecting legions of Holy Roller protesters damning apostates to hell, but the mall gathering and subsequent parties had all the hallmarks of a large family reunion whose members had never met, everyone angling to figure out how they were connected and reveling in their commonality.

  “I’m disappointed,” Emery, host of the Ardent Atheist podcast, told me when I mentioned my dashed hopes of a bit more Sturm und Drang. “There’s just one Flying Spaghetti Monster.* At the last rally, we had a Jesus riding a dinosaur.”

  You know a movement has gone mainstream when it goes meta. Scattered throughout the crowd I spotted fresh-faced acolytes of the Flying Spaghetti Monster with colanders on their heads, strands of yellow yarn just peeking out over the rims.

  When I saw that the founder of Recovery from Religion, Gayle Jordan, was going to speak, I thought, Well, that sounds a bit dramatic, and grabbed a front-row seat. Gayle, who turned out to be as high on the dramatic scale as any CPA I’ve ever met, spent most of her life immersed in a Southern Baptist community. She was in her thirties when she informed her family she’d had an awakening and was renouncing her faith. Her parents threatened to have her declared an unfit mother and tried to enlist the help of the local social services agency to have her three children removed from her home. Her group offers counseling hotlines specifically targeted for those in remote locations who live in households or within religious sects where they are afraid to “come out,” in her words, to their families.*

  One of the founding members of Black Nonbelievers, in his early thirties, said he’d had to join a church “’cause it’s hard to meet women otherwise, you know? Church is part of the expected equation of family and community.”

  “You gotta keep your priorities straight,” I told him, and I meant it.

  But as with all clans, an in-family fight was in full swing. I inadvertently entered into this squabble by uploading to my Twitter account a shot of the golden uterus that Lizz Winstead and her Lady Parts feminist posse temporarily tattooed on my bicep at the rally. When my account blew up with angry tweets—“Nice one, Annabelle, what would you think if I got a golden penis tattooed on my forehead!” or “Annabelle Gurwitch has a golden uterus on her arm and you wonder why so many people are boycotting the rally?”—“What’s going on?” I asked fellow presenter Yvette d’Entremont, whose nom de science is SciBabe.

  An incident that took place in 2011, known as Elevatorgate, exposed what some feel is a culture of sexism in a community admittedly dominated by white males. Rebecca Watson, a podcast host and blogger, known as Skepchick, mentioned an unwanted invitation from a random atheist in an elevator during the World Atheism Convention in a blog post. Her offhand remark escalated into a full-blown brouhaha when Richard Dawkins published an open letter contrasting her complaint with genital mutilation and other horrors that women suffer in the name of religion. Apologies have since been issued. The Dawkins Foundation has outposts in numerous countries and is an essential player in the secular world, and no one really wants to demonize them.*

  Attempts at inclusion have been made, including a focus on LGBTQIA rights and the adoption of an anti-harassment policy. Still, there was a minor amount of boycotting of the rally and some online pushback, but it’s easy to vent on a platform like Twitter from the comfort of your own uterus-less household. I had no idea about any of this, but then, what can you expect? The Family Feud game show first aired in 1976 and is still popular today. At least, as Penn Jillette likes to remind us, “We have no martyrs and no saints,” so no one in either camp can claim God is on their side, and any controversy, at least publicly, died down in about the same amount of time as it took for my tattoo to fade.

  If history is any example, it takes years, even centuries, for a movement to really take hold. If we want to have own secular hub, something like Vatican City, or even Salt Lake City, it will take a lot of diaper boxes full of cash, but then, the nones are young and in their most fertile years. Maybe we’ll come up with new rituals and anthems yet to be written, or we’ll keep singing peppy folk tunes and in a few hundred years, the songs of Mumford and Sons will become part of the atheist canon. Some congregants will roll their eyes as people around them sing out, and those who have forgotten the words will find themselves mindlessly humming along because they can’t remember a time when they didn’t know the melody of “I Will Wait.”

  Mayim E. Flamingo, who watches over Tel Aviv Gardens.

  suddenly sequins

  Encountering sequins where you least expect them can elicit a kind of startle response, especially if they are located along the seams of a T-shirt that already has coin fringe sewn onto the padded shoulders.

  I’m wandering the aisles at the Ross Dress for Less in a daze. It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with bargain shopping. I’ve schlepped through enough thrift stores to appreciate the patience and fortitude it takes to rifle through the many misses to find a few hits, but this store is like entering another landscape altogether.

  If you want to visit the real America, shop the Ross Dress for Less in North Miami. Ross, like America, is a jumble of discordant singularities, all of which are competing loudly for attention. A single blouse has so many design elements it brings to mind a vase that has shattered and then been reassembled by raccoons. All logic has been dispensed with. Some items are so packed with studs and nail heads, I half expect the rack to be labeled Fashion for People Who Never Travel, as you’d never make it through TSA without ending up entirely in the nude, because even the bras and panties have metal accents. What appears to be a lumberjack plaid shirt, very Brooklyn 2016, is made of polyester, which, here in the tropics, forms an insulated casing around the torso and traps odor like a bathroom on a Greyhound bus.

  I’m shopping because of the holocaust. Not the Jewish Holocaust, but my mother’s personal holocaust, although for her, they have morphed into the same thing.

  In the less than four months since my parents moved into the Tel Aviv Gardens her breast cancer has declared all-out war on her body. Pieces of our mother are disappearing like she’s Swiss cheese. We have been told this progression will continue until there is nothing left but empty space. The latest outbreak of violence is an assault on her digestive system in the form of a tumor the size of a grapefruit.

  By the time I arrive in Miami, she’s made it through a seven-hour surgery and been sent to the Gardens’ recovery center, just a few yards from the apartment building that my parents now call home. What’s left of her midsection is saddled with not one but two colostomy bags. It seems like a cruel punishment for a woman who’s looking at potentially months, not years, left to live, but death was imminent, so it was unavoidable.

  I have been tasked with finding clothes that can accommodate the appliances and that will help, in some minuscule way, to ease her suffering. Ross is the closest store and I don’t want to leave her side for long periods of time. As she is shrinking—every day she seems to lose a size—it seems imprudent to be purchasing “investment pieces.” She would like stretchy pants, long shirts, and loose-fitting jackets. It appears likely that whatever I pick out will be accented with sequins, but if I’m lucky, I’ll find something in a tribal print.

  Teenagers tend to
dress like their peers. It’s a phenomenon called “twinning.” According to psychologists, dressing alike bolsters adolescent girls’ fragile self-esteem, and I’ve witnessed a similar dynamic at play with the women at the home. There is a pervasive style that they all seem to have adopted—colorful Aztec geometrics and Native American Hopi bat-wing patterns. My mother is mirroring her peers with a newly acquired collection of bold-patterned jackets and leopard-print scarves. The sight takes some getting used to: elderly white Jewish women in tribal prints being attended to by Haitian and Jamaican women in pastel uniforms. She’d like me to pick up something “fun”—a blouse in a tiger or giraffe print would be wonderful—and I want her to fit in.

  It turns out, we had gotten them situated just in time. Two weeks after moving them in, we Airbnb’ed a place in Fort Lauderdale big enough to accommodate my parents for Thanksgiving weekend. It was to be a model for future weekend excursions.

  The rental had slippery tile floors and we witnessed my dad fall—it was like watching an elephant get shot and go down in slow-mo. My mother had a persistent stomachache; we didn’t know about the tumor yet. If you’re looking for a guided tour of bathrooms in the greater Fort Lauderdale area, I can give you one. Despite her discomfort, she insisted on wine with every meal, which she dispensed from a three-liter box that she refused to be separated from. It was on that trip that I learned my dad was carrying a weapon to the casinos. We’d been driving around with a gun in the glove compartment.