Wishing It So

It was during the joyless middle years of the first Trump era that I started attending Mass. We were living in the Rogers Street house, in a neighborhood cordoned off from the rest of our college town by the intersection of the lake and the river, which created something of a microclimate. In the winter thick fog banks rolled in each morning from the lake, and in the summers the humidity was almost tropical: monstrous plantain lilies extended over the sidewalks, mosquitoes loitered, blood drunk, in the shade, and Persian ivy grew so prolifically across the windows that our apartment was perpetually washed in green light. I was working on a long magazine article about the new religious right and spent a lot of time sitting at our kitchen table, encased in a pair of heavy circumaural headphones, listening to an endless feed of speeches and sermons. The upstairs neighbors had two mastiffs who were left home all day and who barked incessantly and scratched at the floor of their kennel.It was impossible to do interviews in the apartment, which is why I started spending my afternoons at the public library, where I could reserve a private conference room. Among the people I spoke to were ...