TV Shows

A couple of weeks ago, Joan broke up with God. At least she tried to. As we all know, God is everywhere, if we just look for Him.

I don’t know. ­Joan of Arcadia- hasn’t changed my life in the same way as, say getting married or adopting Annabelle has, but it ­has- quickly become one of my favorite shows. Don’t get me wrong. When I was in high school, I never was approached by a stranger with black spiky hair and told to join the chess club or to try out for cheerleading so I can’t relate to the ambush tactics presented on the show, but I can relate to the wonder, the way that things seem to fit together if we just slow down and notice them.

I also like the idea of God as a loving God. I’ve never exactly pictured Him as Zeus or Thor or anyone fierce with lightning bolts, but pin me down and you’ll find that my picture of God tends to be a little too Old Testament for most people’s comfort. So seeing “Cute Boy God” (hey, don’t blame me, that’s what they call him on the Internet Movie Data Base) smooth back Joan’s hair as she’s sleeping in a hospital bed or hearing him tell her he missed her during one of their many arguments makes me soften my perceptions a bit. Because of that, Friday is one of the best nights of my week.

He calls the interviews with people almost forty years into the future “silly”. I find them fascinating. Just as God often shows Joan patterns and connections, the ex wives, Vice Presidents, journalists and assorted politicians fill in the blanks of the lives of Jack and Bobby McCallister. A conversation with a rabbi, for example, becomes the springboard Bobby needs to defy his mother’s “secular humanism” and explore conventional religion. This eventually leads to Bobby becoming only the second President to come out of the ministry. (Or so the show says. I haven’t Googled this to find out if there has already been one or not.)

-Jack and Bobby- makes me think of the forces that shape us, the collection of tiny little moments that make us who we are. Now, I never could be President. I’d be lousy at it but there are times when I think my brother, Clay, would be a good leader. This week, were he on the show and I one of the interviewees I’d tell about lunchtime.

We lived in Brasil when I was fourteen and our campus was fairly open. Students scattered everywhere for breaks, spreading out under the trees, over the benches, up against the walls. Clay and I were close that year and he would come up to the high school hill and eat lunch with me and my friends. He was ten and outgoing, I was in ninth grade and the tiniest bit annoyed but my friends thought him cute so he stayed.

Sixteen years later he’s still charming, still able to converse with just about anybody about just about anything. I wonder how much a bunch of teenaged girls had to do with that?