Chumpions

When you’re a teenager—say, 14 or 15—everyone over 50 seems ancient. By your mid twenties, you probably know a few 70 somethings with whom the hipsters in your circle wouldn’t mind having a tête-à-tête over a PBR.

And, then again, there are those people who are just old, even if you are that 70 something. I have no idea how old Dor is, but she would certainly fit in this category, because, as moralists say, actions speak louder than words.

Before I’d ever even seen Dor, I’d heard from co-workers that she’s had 14 accidents in company trucks—according to lore, one for every year Dor had been at the company. Supposedly she’d come back from Chicago one fine summer day with a tree branch transfixing the bed of her straight truck. Evidently, somehow or other, it was somebody else’s fault. And she was very confused about just how they’d managed to do it.

Sure, Dor was personable enough. She could talk to any sentient and probably most non-sentient beings, which is probably why the District Supervisor found it so hard to fire her. Still, the insurance premium hikes must have strained his sensitive conscience.

The first run-in I had with Dor was when she asked me to drive her to Arby’s during lunch break since her car was in the shop. She “yammered” (as she called it) the whole way there and back about her son Shawn, a good boy, who was in his eighth year of undergrad majoring in Physical Fitness.

I found out Dor had taught math at Western Michigan for many years (which begged the question how her mileage logs were always wrong) and that her husband was a musician who, because of health problems, was now limited to playing organ in church. After cataloguing her husband’s, her son’s, her own and her next door neighbor’s health problems (which took the rest of lunch), Dor turned to religious matters.

She asked me if I believed in God, and I said “Yes, I do.”

Would she, I wondered, assign me to the deepest circle of hell (though, if Dante was right about hell’s “circles,” I was sure mine would also involve Dor’s doppelganger sitting down to “chat” for all eternity) or would she attempt to engage me in a discussion about the latest episode of Touched By an Angel?

“Well, I’m an Evangelical Christian,” Dor said, “and I have been all my life.” I braced for impact.

“And I haven’t exactly heard this in church, but you know, I was just thinking this morning as I had my breakfast that as we all get to know God as history advances and as so many people around the world become Christians, that maybe God’s also getting to know us better as a species!”

She dipped a fry in her horse radish.

“And maybe—this is what I was thinking this morning—maybe God is even getting to know Himself better over time! Have you ever thought about that young man?”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, wondering how to tell her that she was expounding (as far as I could make out) the metaphysics of the German philosopher Hegel. “I haven’t given that much thought.”

“Well, I think I might just write a book about it,” she said. “You’d read a book like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I lied. “But maybe you should do a bit of research first. You’d improve the book quite a bit, I think.”

“Of course, of course,” she said. “But we should get back to work.”

“Yes, we should,” I said too exuberantly.

“There’s a church board meeting tomorrow night,” she said as we walked back into the warehouse, “I’ll have to bring up the idea with them.”