My understanding of my family’s religion was that we didn’t have to go to church if we didn’t want to and that our belief in God was tenuous at best. I grasped the seventh principle, “the interconnected web of all existence,” and I understood the humanist tradition in a vague sense, but the truth is I didn’t think about Unitarianism all that much. I hadn’t been to church in months. That Sunday, my brother and I went with our mother. We sat five rows back, near a woman named Tamsin Brodhead. Tamsin was tall like a basketball player, and very serious. It was an unspoken rule in the congregation that we should never mention her brother to her. David Brod was the lead singer in a once popular, now aging rock band, and no matter how much we had been prepared it was still a shock to see him there.
Over the course of several weeks, Tamsin had been calling around the congregation. David’s rehab had been in Utah, our mother relayed, and it was different from the others he’d previously tried, which were more like day spas. On the phone, Tamsin went into a long story about a particular counselor, a recovering-alcoholic cowboy who had never heard of her brother because he only listened to country and western, but the good stuff, like Townes Van Zandt and Waylon Jennings, and how this counselor had taught David to ride a horse. Her brother’s rehab hadn’t been overtly religious, Tamsin said, but there was a mystical, spiritual component. He was coming to church with her, she said, so don’t freak out. Feel free to smile, say hi, welcome him, but steer clear of prolonged eye contact. And absolutely no touching. There was to be no touching at all.
Who could remember what the sermon was about? Afterward, the congregation gathered in the rec room for coffee. I was depressed or anxious or maybe I wanted to kill myself—I was fourteen—and I should have been on medication, but my father, who’d recently moved out of our house, didn’t believe in that sort of thing.
Almost the entire church was there. Some of them had been part of Plowshares antinuclear actions, or offshoots of the Weather Underground, or were in the fight to ratify the ERA. They were all invested in themselves as individuals on the political left. Cal, my brother, was six. He and I