Prerequisites
by Angela Townsend

I  am not afraid of prerequisites. This must cause them grievous pain. I was once their favorite raisin, rolled between their fingers until all my chocolate came off. I lay awake counting intersections in the dorm drop-ceiling, interrogating my math. Graduation was a treacherous take-out menu. Did I really have sufficient social sciences from Column A and adequate humanities from Column E? Did God really say I must eat from every branch of academia?

I was not at peace until I wrapped my fingers around the diploma and found it sturdy enough to bear my weight. No one was going to call me into the provost’s office: “You have nine hundred credits, but you neglected to take Gogol and the Metaphysics of Wombats, so you must return to Start.”

Susan Sontag gave a commencement speech, and my advisor kissed me on both cheeks. I won. This was not Chutes and Ladders, with unpreventable descents. Flatter the prerequisites, and I could prevail. This thing had rungs that fit my fingers.

I threw my hat, and my grandfather and I breathed synchronized sighs. He had etched the index card on my desk with the “Five P’s:” Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. He was not exactly afraid that I would perform poorly. He had fears as dense as strawberry seeds rippling his big veins. He had reminders everywhere. He read a Psalm every night, but the brain-fear barrier is as dense as cream.

My grandfather endured a commencement address about dismantling the patriarchy to watch me throw my hat. He had been hemorrhaging for weeks, turning him yellow as unkept ivy, but his newsboy cap cast a jaunty spell. He would wait until his 86th birthday to request a drive to the emergency room. Today we would sigh, praise the God of prerequisites, and eat eggplant rollatini with my mother.

The nexus gripped generations and made me say a prayer. She had taken my dictation at age three, painting a garden rock with prophecy: Grandpa is my best friend forever. She had taken the temperature of her only child and felt her father’s blood like whitewater. She took us both seriously. She refused to let us take ourselves to the canyon rim.

My mother went to college when I was five, taking Ballet and Field Natural History without fear of skipping steps. She sloshed through creeks and brought home stick bugs that sprinted over water like Jesus Christ. She bought me a T-shirt that said Anonymous Was A Woman and let me wear it to church and Grandpa’s. She bought me a poster that said There Is Nothing God And I Can’t Handle Today! and made me read it out loud when I became convinced the cafeteria ladies were poisoning my tater tots, or that I would never get to Vassar.

She had been here before. She grew up here, only to find the same odd bird at the top of the tree. She had a running gag, “I became a school psychologist because my father was German, and my mother was Sicilian.” She had no fear of prerequisites.

She had an answer the night I lost Candy Land, diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at nine. She curled her arabesque arms around me in the hospital bed. Nine-year-old theology is citric enough to make the brave squint. Why would God do this? I tried to be a good girl. I love Jesus. She said this was “in my book.” She would do her term papers in advance, so she would be ready if I needed to go back to the hospital. I didn’t. She graduated summa cum laude.

She didn’t tell me what my grandfather said in the hallway, his brown-bear eyes as heavy as an epilogue. "Her life will be difficult."

He burst into the room smiling, his bald full moon head bright. He told stories from his days as an air-traffic controller in World War II. He made me practice injections on his forearms. He said “pshaw, ain’t nothin’,” and sang me a happy song called “Bread and Gravy.” It would be years before I knew the song was laughing about starving.

The night they diagnosed my grandfather, he pulled his nasogastric tube out while the nurses drowsed. “I do not need this.” He was defiant in the morning. They taped it down. He ordered grits for breakfast because he’d never had them before. They put him on sedatives that made him extemporize about Winston Churchill. He woke with a start, pointed at the crucifix over his door, and shouted, “That’s the Chairman of the board!”

My grandfather lived, and he went home to the 600 square foot condo with bananas on the counter and VCRs arranged by Ebert rating. He wrote the same shopping list on an index card every week: “Bananas, fish n’ chips, Total, Edy’s French Vanilla.” I went to divinity school, and he wrote me cards with quotes from generals and episodes of M*A*S*H*.

I found myself too sentimental for vocational ministry. I took a job in public relations for a cat sanctuary and called my grandfather every Sunday. I stayed out of ketoacidosis and the marquee forms of trouble. I tried to flip ahead in the book and found doodles. I spoke the same words of the same prayers every morning so everything would remain in place. The Holy Spirit airlifted me places I did and did not want to go. Air traffic control never slept.

We were unprepared for my stepfather, a shamrock on a motorcycle. My mother met him online and said he looked like Sting. I could not reach her for hours at a time. My grandfather was astonished that this was not his terminal fright. He walked my mother down the aisle in a Disney princess dress and ate more eggplant rollatini. I danced with him to Dean Martin songs my grandmother once sang in the banana kitchen.

I kissed his head in the last room, and he raised his eyebrows to the ceiling.

I don’t know where the squares lead. I roll raisins into oatmeal cookies someone else will eat and smuggle stories about my grandfather into press releases about cats. My mother retired from psychology to storm the gates of poetry. She has been published in over seventy journals. Each one takes her by surprise. I am not afraid of prerequisites.