"Why me, Lord?" Tulsa King

    

TULSA KING

Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved."
— Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

In 1965 I was a high-school senior in Tulsa. Will Rogers High School, a 3-year public school with 3,000 students. The Will Rogers Ropers. Well, as everyone knows, sometimes you're the roper, and sometimes you're the roped. One beautiful late-May day as were filing into the auditorium for our last general assembly I was told that the principal would be calling me up to the stage to congratulate me on being a National Merit Scholar. Well can I just say that I could no more walk up onto that stage than I could fly to the moon: as the son of an outrageously alcoholic father, I had always tried to be invisible. So when the principal called out my name I didn't — I couldn't — move a muscle during the entire soul-crucifixion. Finally, blessed relief: "Lawrence seems not to be here today." Sometimes you seize the moment, and Sometimes the moment seizes you. This too shall pass — yes, but you'll never be the same.

 

When I told my parents what had happened, my father told me that the answer to the question "Why me, Lord?" is "Because you piss me off."

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"In the beholding of God we do not fall;

in the beholding of ourselves we may not stand."

                          — Julian of Norwich