There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

It was simple, really: identify who was in charge, find out what they want, give it to them immediately.

Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a slippery slope and find, instead, a cliff. Maybe that’s what happened to them that night or maybe, bless their hearts, they had spent a great deal of energy keeping it together—since my tenth birthday, since the seizure, since the beauty convention or the move to Columbus or the first time they met. Who knows? It’s amazing, either way, how quickly you can become a thing you’d never thought of being and may not even want to be.

Hope and delusion, often hard to distinguish, also make folks do strange things sometimes.

This was the first time I learned how far you can make it in America if you have enough disregard for your personal welfare. Maybe that’s why football is the national pastime.

This is one thing liberals continually miscalculate: the human desire to leave things just the way they are.

But one of these days, Granny and her kind might crack. They might pick up the last straw that must be right in front of their faces. And when they do, when all the Grannies have had enough, what is the world gonna do? Who’s gonna carry the cross and the children and wipe the tears of the old women? Will you be ready? Will I?

And for that entire, surprisingly pleasant journey, we pretended that we were not a group of people who had destroyed one another, but a family. Maybe there’s no difference between the two.

See, if you catch it from the right angle, a boy picking himself up by his bootstraps looks just like a suicide.

Love, she defines, via M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm, is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.