ED

I moved to Waco in July of 2000 to take a job at Baylor University. It was the beginning of a very difficult year in my life. Having lived in the same house for the first 18 years of my life I then went on a moving spree that had me changing residences a total of 6 times in 7 years. That created a sort of equilibrium problem with me. Am I here, am I there? Where do I want to be, and why should I care? The few friends I had in town were situationally removed from me and began to create lives of their own in which I was a part, but on the periphery. Financially I began to realize what a bind I was in when it dawned on me that I wouldn't be able to defer my student loans forever. My grandmother had recently been uprooted from the only hometown she had ever known to be closer to my parents due to failing health. Working and living with freshmen boys with whom I shared little in common, as well as with supervisors who were more concerned with meetings and programs and paperwork than they were with people, created within me a desire to sigh and think to myself "What the hell is this strange world I have entered into."

I felt as if I had inadvertently gained citizenship into what Anne Lamott refers to as the land of the fucked.

Then two things happened. In August of that year I had lunch with the pastor of University Baptist Church, we hit it off immediately, and I slowly began to be involved in the flow of what was going on there. People included me. I felt like I was experiencing something truly new and "on the edge," but at the same time feeling a sense of timelessness in the philosophy of ministry there. Friends began to be made, and a seed of community was planted in my life that continues to grow.

Then, in the fall, I began to hear talk of this new show that had just premiered on NBC titled simply, Ed. To say that Ed changed my life would be an overstatement. To say it was just a television show would be an understatement. To say the show, more than any other show I had seen, reflected my hopes and desires of what the world should be like would be a correct statement.

The plot of the show, although quite odd, is easy enough to be explained in just a few sentences. Ed Stevens, an upcoming lawyer in New York, finds his life falling apart within the course of a day. He is fired from his firm because of a mistake in a contract cost a company millions of dollars, with the mistake being a missed comma. He comes home to let his wife know the bad news, only to find her in bed with a mailman. Not THE mailman, just A mailman. He leaves his life in New York to return to his hometown, Stuckeyville (presumably in Ohio.) Ed pursues Carol Vessey, the homecoming queen that he was secretly in love with in high school. To impress her he buys the town bowling alley and sets up his law practice there. For three years he pursues her, she rejects him only to continue dating (and eventually becoming engaged to) guys who are assholes, but with whom she feels safe with. Ed pursues, Carol runs, etc. The Carol, sensing Ed is getting away from her, falls in love with him. A few roadblocks later and Ed and Carol are an engaged couple.

It's as simple as that, but it's so much more.



Part home, part heaven, part fantasyland, Stuckeyville is the quintessential small town where drama is small, but meaningful, and humor-- in a very Seinfeldian way-- is to be found wherever you look. It's a place where the values of kindness and hard work supersede those of irony, cynicism, and the need to be "cool." It tells of a people who instinctively understand that community isn't something to be built or theorized or spiritualized or sentimentalized, but to be experienced and treasured. It's a town, like all the towns we grew up in, that contains Shirley Pifkos and Phil Stubbs's and Eli Goggins-- people who are quirky and mysterious, but also consistent. They're people with whom we have limited contact that brings little hints of joy and laughter , indeed, little hints of heaven, into our world.

We see in ourselves a Warren Cheswick. Often insecure, often confused with our world and our bodies and our emotions, always driven by strong hormones.

I see in Mike and Nancy Burton and Molly Hudson the type of friend that I hope to be. Always hoping, and actively working for, the best for their friends. Always open to crying with, giving advice to, and sharing in the extravagance of the mundane with those closest to them.



In Carol, more than anything else, I see all the fears I've ever had that the great person people see in me is just a sham, and that sooner or later, the gig's going to be up and people are going to see that I don't necessarily fit the standards they perceive.

And in Ed, good old Ed. Ed confirms to me what I've always suspected-- niceness is a virtue, not a vice. Nice guys hardly ever win, but they are always right, always just, and sometimes, if you put on a suit of armor and hire skywriters and throw waffles at windows, and are as patient as a turtle, get the girl.

Ed is fictional, I know. It's a play land. But in some ways it, like all good art, acts as an icon, a window to another world. A world where, as Margaret Becker puts it, " mercy reigns supreme and thoughtful, demonstrative, detailed love is expressed in microscopic ways."

In all likelihood next Friday, February 6, the final episode of Ed will air. If you happen to be in Waco, and consider yourself a part of my world, either on the periphery or smack dab in the center-- or in that nebulus of space that is somewhere in between-- why don't you haul your ass over to my place in time to watch it end. But one condition is required-- you can't laugh at me for crying.

And after that? LET'S GO BOWLING! Seriously.