Cybercolumn by Brett Younger: About Alice

Posted: 5/21/07

CYBER COLUMN: About Alice

By Brett Younger

I used to alternate between reading “Christian” books and “non-Christian” books, but I don’t do that anymore. The problem with the practice is that “Christian” books often suffer by comparison. Too many are passionless and dull—the opposite of what a book that has anything to do with Christ should be. About Alice will never be on the shelf of any Christian bookstore, but it’s passionate, funny and sacred. It’s also the saddest, loveliest story I’ve read in a long time.

About Alice is Calvin Trillin’s heartbreaking portrait of his wife Alice—who died in 2001 after a long struggle with lung cancer. I didn’t cry when I read About Alice. At least not the second time through. Not much anyway.

Calvin and Alice met at a party where his first impression was that she looked “more alive than anyone I’d ever seen.” He tried desperately to impress her, feeling “like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for The Tonight Show was in the audience.”

“You have never again been so funny as you were that night,” Alice would say 20 or 30 years later.

“You mean I peaked in December of 1963.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Some preachers are constantly trying to impress their spouses, so I understand when Calvin Trillin says everything he wrote was an attempt to impress Alice. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Calvin is clearly smitten as he describes Alice. She had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day.” Alice believed that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county will come and take the child.” She lived with a childlike sense of wonder that led her to respond to encountering a deer on a forest path by saying, “Wowsers!”

After her death, one friend wrote that Alice managed to “navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”

Even in the midst of her struggle with cancer, Alice cared for others. She taught not only in a prestigious university, but also in a prison. Those under Alice’s protection included “anyone she loved, or liked, or knew, or didn’t quite know but knew someone who did, or didn’t know from a hole in the wall but had just gotten a telephone call from because they’d found the number in the telephone book.”

You’ve met church people who seem to have figured out everything about Christianity except that it’s about love. We ought to applaud love wherever we see it, whenever we hear of it and whenever we read of it.

Calvin Trillin did such a good job of making it clear how much he loved Alice that one young woman wrote that she sometimes looked at her boyfriend and thought, “But will he love me like Calvin loves Alice?”

Christians should love like that.

Brett Younger is pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth and the author of Who Moved My Pulpit? A Hilarious Look at Ministerial Life, available from Smyth & Helwys (800) 747-3016. You can e-mail him at byounger@broadwaybc.org.