Back in the early days of my adolescence, which hasn’t yet quite dissipated, I listened to a weekly Christian rock radio show called the Saturday Night Express. The DJ rocked the house, man, and I even won two cassettes from him in a drawing, one a compilation of a bunch of non prominent thrash-metal Christian punk bands, and the other a demo from the Rage of Angels which sported an interview with the band and one of my favorite glam songs, “Do You Still Believe in Love?” And I got saved, too, several times.


I also took to attending the Christian rock concerts in the local college’s auditorium. The Newsboys came a few times, before they were really famous. The first time they were amazing: the guitarist ran all over the stage with his tongue hanging out, playing mesmerization itself. By the third time I saw them, though, I was less charmed even in spite of the drummer’s hydraulics setup that turned him upside down, partly since in one song the guitar player–a different guy than before and much more mellow–even ripped into his solo in the wrong key, and I saw the lead singer give him a dirty look.


It was not as dirty, though, as the looks M gives me sometimes when I introduce our band’s songs by telling all the details all wrong, like the time I said the song we were about to sing, which she’d written just after falling in love with me, was about another guy.


I don’t know if it was at that Newsboys performance or maybe the second that I bought one of their tapes and after the show waded through all the other adolescent misfits gathered in the lobby to get all of the band members’ signatures on the tape jacket. One of guys, when I handed him the cover to sign, looked at me a bit quizzically, then scrawled his name. Later I noticed that two of the signatures I’d gotten were identical.


I have since given that album to a boy at my church. I’m pretty sure his family still has a tape player.


When it comes to flattery, though–and it all does have to come to that, since this post is titled as much–one solitary incident at one of those small-town Christian concerts has always stood out to me. In the pitch dark between songs, as I recall, the lead singer had to ask the lights man to give him a little light so he could see what song was next.


“I’m saying that to show you that we’re human, too,” he told the audience, as if… As if I’d thought him otherwise?


I was reminded of this just a couple weekends ago when I took N to a planetarium show. In her presentation, the college student guide–who did an excellent job, really–couldn’t remember the name of a star or constellation or something I can’t remember and had to ask her fellow student for it.


“See, I don’t know everything,” she told the gathered throng, as if…. As if we’d thought her omniscient? As if the predominantly early elementary school aged crowd was hanging on her every word and idolizing her and were now crushed?


Maybe they were; N was in a state of constant marveling at the experience. “Are we actually moving?” she asked me at one point during the afternoon’s short dome film about molecules; later she crawled into my lap.


Of course, neither of these As if… stories is to say I don’t flatter myself, too, mostly by writing about myself on my blog, but whenever else possible, too.


For example, at the planetarium we were seated in front of two people with a child. During a film simulation of the Mars rover landing, one of the adults asked the other, “Is that an animal?”


Is that an animal? I didn’t turn around to flatter myself by thinking out loud, “Umm, it’s a digitally rendered space capsule with fire coming out of its rocket boosters and so it is a piece of technology and not an animal.”


Now, there is a fine line between flattering oneself by fully enjoying one’s excellence and just being critical of others. The previous paragraph makes a fuzzy blur of that line. That part which of it is critical I blame on my college education, which has enabled me to use words like “that part,” “which” and “of it” and during which one of my professors talked a lot about teaching critical thinking. That fall I wrote in a student-newspaper editorial, “I’m afraid I’m becoming a critical person.”


And I have become as much, certainly.

Just think of all I leave unspoken! Such as:


At the doctor’s office last week N was asked three times by the same person in the space of ten extremely patronizing minutes what she did this morning.


In response I didn’t smile sweetly and say, “You asked her this already. Do you have amnesia?”


Then, after N had received four shots she’d heartily resisted, the same person kept saying, “You did great! Now you’re all ready for kindey-garten!”


I again didn’t say out loud, “Actually, she cooperated about as well a chainsaw pinched by the tree it’s cutting down–she made a racket and got stuck anyway. And we’re going to have our schooling at home.” 



And after a colleague denounced Obama’s inauguration as “taking away from” MLK Day, I didn’t say, “What? What? Did you really just say that?”


“Actually,” I also didn’t say, “I think MLK in some ways would have been … flattered. No, honored. (Perhaps.)”