Free Quiet-Crazy by Joyce Durham Barrett Page A

Adams on our next visit. “Maybe I’m really Angela come back from the dead.”
    Then, of course, I have to get into telling all about Angela, and for some reason it’s easier telling about Angela than it is telling about myself. Maybe I don’t know me, but I sure do know Angela frontwards and backwards, and for some reason I feel there’s some saving grace in that.
    â€œOkay then, pretend you
are
Angela,” he says. “Then who are you?”
    â€œI am Angela, a little girl about four years old, an angel now, but I got run over thirty-two years ago when I ran out behind the car when Mama was backing it out of the garage. I am the prettiest and the best little girl in the world. I made my parents very happy when I was alive, but now I make them very sad, and it makes me feel sad, too. I try very hard to make them happy, but it doesn’t work because they’re still sad most of the time, and it makes me sad, too.”
    â€œWhy does it make you sad?” Dr. Adams says, writing in the silver-backed notebook, which he won’t let me see, although I’ve asked him nearly every time I’ve visited him, I’ve asked him to let me see it. Why I want to see in that notebook so bad I don’t know. But it’s like he’s writing things down about me that I don’t know about myself, and if I knew it, maybe I could figure out who I am. If I could just peek into that notebook, then maybe I would find Elizabeth Miller in there somewhere all written up in a nice, neat summary so I could read it and say, “Oh, so this is who I am.”
    â€œWhy does it make you sad?” I say. You see, I’ve found that trying to answer the questions is easier if I repeat what Dr. Adams repeats. So I repeat him repeating me. It’s real catchy, this repeating stuff. “Because,” I say, “because Mama just keeps on thinking it’s all her fault about me getting behind the car when she was backing out of the garage,but it’s not, it’s the Lord’s will. At least that’s what everybody says.”
    â€œIt’s the Lord’s will,” he says, looking at me as if he’s looking deep into me, puzzling over me. And I’m feeling ridiculous again.
    â€œOh, you know,” I say, “like everything that happens is supposed to be the Lord’s doing, that kind of Lord’s will.”
    He’s writing in the silver chart again, and then he says, “Is your coming here, Elizabeth, is that the Lord’s will?”
    Another stumper. But after I think about it for a minute, I decide sure, if the Lord’s the cause of everything, then sure, that’s why I’m here. And for the first time ever I feel myself getting really put out with this Lord who’s supposed to notice every sparrow’s fall. As I leave Dr. Adams, the more I think, the more I decide that’s all this Lord did, He just watched this sparrow’s fall, just watched it, and didn’t do one solitary thing about it. He just looks, like Mama always looks. Looks and you don’t know what she’s thinking. But then remembering back on that little verse in the Bible, it didn’t really say, did it, that He would do something about the sparrows falling. No, I think it just says that He watches them fall. But that makes me even madder. What’s the purpose in having a Lord, if He’s just going to stand by and watch the sparrows fall and not even make a move to do anything about it?
    When I get back to my room and hear Miss Cannon singing, “’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at His word,” I feel myself start in to trembling with anger, and I wonder if this is what it means to go crazy, standing here listening to some old woman singing about trusting in a Lord who just stands back and watches everything and everybody and doesn’t ever do nothing about nobody none of the time. Mama, nor me, nor