Foot Traveler

continued

thirteen I asked my father one day, "Daddy, do you think there's a God?"

My father, Walter Scott Schindler, was the private detective whose files provided the original Perry Mason stories. A skilled investigator, Daddy, I was sure, would not believe something that wasn't true.

For a moment he didn't answer, reluctant, perhaps, to voice his worldly-wise agnosticism to a thirteen-year-old. At last he took a pencil from his desktop -- we were at his office in New York City -- and turned it slowly in his hands. "This pencil," he said, "didn't just happen. Someone had to make it."

He jabbed the pencil toward the window overlooking 44th Street. "The same way with the world. It wouldn't be here if there hadn't been a -- let's call it a Designer, an Architect -- to make it."

I looked down at the street with its stream of Checker cabs headed for Grand Central Station half a block away. From that godlike height, fourteen floors up, I surveyed the hurrying pedestrians, the fretfully honking traffic. What could be the purpose in such a creation? A pencil had an obvious function. But what were we for?

That year, 1941, Europe was convulsed in the most destructive war in history. Night after night I had a recurring nightmare. People would be loading objects onto an airplane -- in one particularly vivid dream it was hundreds of black patent leather shoes. Then the plane would take off and the people would begin throwing the things out the window. As they hit the ground, the innocent-seeming objects exploded. I'd hear screams and wake with a scream rising in my throat too.

There was always a moment, just afterward, when a rush of relief would come. It's only a dream. And then the full awakening: It's true! Bombs are falling on real people right now!

I turned away from the office window. If Daddy was right, I thought, and at the beginning there'd been a Designer, he, or it, was certainly no longer around. If "God" ever existed, it made no difference now.

It was the only time I ever inquired into my father's beliefs. As for bringing up the subject with Mother. . . religion was "too personal," the phrase with which she deflected all attempts to invade her inner world. For me, the journey to heaven began without a map.        <<< end