Alecs

The professor touring with us told us about Saint Francis’s father, a wealthy guy who ran a fabric company—meaning that he provided the wealthiest, most stylish people their clothing. Francis just wanted to go around in rags and help the poor, and this was embarrassing to his father, who threatened to disinherit him if he kept it up.

One day, Francis took off all his clothes in the middle of the street, in the middle of the town, and folded them up, all those fine fabrics that had made his family rich, and handed them back to his father. “My only father is my Father in Heaven,” Francis said, and he stood there, naked in front of the whole town. What a badass.

“From then on, he lived “like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field,” in a complicated, dire, but occasionally blissful poverty. He died naked in the cold winter, on the altar of a church he’d built with his own hands, surrounded by men and women who’d followed him into poverty.

For my confirmation back in eighth grade, we were supposed to pick a patron saint, and I picked Saint Francis because he talked to animals, plants, and planets and called them his brothers and sisters. The lady in charge of confirmation at the church looked uncomfortable, and after class, she pulled me aside and said it was “very strongly suggested” that we pick a saint of our own gender. When I heard that, I instantly picked a female saint so that no one would suspect there was anything amiss about my gender.

Saint Claire and all the women saints cut their hair short as a sign of holiness, but I knew I could never cut my hair short. When I’d tried to get it “short” at the hairdresser as a kid, the lady had given me a Dorothy Hamill bowl cut that I hated.  For a while, I thought it might be literally impossible for scissors to cut female hair shorter than a certain length, because people’s reactions made it seem so outlandish when I asked for it, until I stopped asking.

The next night, I got my hair cut short. I closed my eyes and thought of Samson, and how hair was dead skin growing out of you, like memories, and how, in my case, it might give me more strength to shed myself of the past, the dead cells, the broken chargers, the burned bridges. I watched it all fall to the floor around me.

When she was finished, I looked like a boy and a girl. I smiled hello to myself.

“You look good,” the stylist said, playing with the wave of reddish-blonde hair she’d left sticking up in the front. “It looks like a little flame.”

I thought of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down to the first twelve apostles, after Jesus was dead. There were tongues of fire on their foreheads, to show that God was talking through them now, too, not just Jesus. How now, everyone could be a Christ, like every human body was the ears and eyes and lips of God. That was the whole point of it.

She asked if I wanted my neck done like a boy or a girl.

“Boy,” I said.

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable