In the mornings, bleary-eyed, I'd crawl out of bed and deliver the mail. The junk and the bills. More junk and more bills. Even the greeting cards in their festive envelopes made me depressed. I forced smiles for the apron-wearing ladies and their gifts of baked goods, and they looked at me with pity, because it was obvious that I wasn't living a real life.

One clear windy day with red-orange autumn leaves swirling into the sky, Mrs. Henderson gave me a sprinkle cookie, and asked, "Danny, why don't you start another gospel band? Why not play with your brother?"

I answered, "I don't sing anymore. Thanks for the cookie. Here's your mail."

At the age of twenty-five, I felt lost and worthless, walking in circles, day after day, enduring the sweet old ladies, the traipsing college girls, and the whims of every sort of weather. I moped home after work, opened books about
holiness, and then sweated through my exercises, making my body suffer. And I always prayed, deep into every night. Flat on my back in bed, with a luminous Adam and Eve looking down from the ceiling, I repeatedly asked for the same old thing: a normal happy life.

It didn't happen, and it didn't happen, until that morning in October 2001, when she appeared in my bedroom.

She was an average woman, perfectly lovely, dressed in white. She leaned down and kissed me lightly on the lips. Trembling, I wondered: is this normal and happy, or just a dream? The woman said something wonderful with her eyes. I reached up to touch her face. I whispered, "Are you—"

She disappeared from the room.

And I had to follow her.

I pulled on a pair of jeans, forgetting about shoes and a shirt, and rushed out into the sunrise. Where could the woman be hiding? She wasn't in my front yard. She wasn't in my backyard. Smiling, enjoying the chase, I climbed into my pickup and searched around the trailer park. Nothing. No sign of her. Yet I could still taste the kiss, and it felt stronger when I sped out to the shimmering cornfields, and I believed that my life was like a favorite book now turning to the happiest chapters. And I imagined a heavenly wedding, and everything in the world was like the first day of creation, as if every death specter that had plunged into me since baptism had been kissed clean away.

And then a hog truck appeared. The rig was covered with mud and filth, about to crash into me. A prayer for help arose in my heart but it couldn't get to my lips in time. Nevertheless, the hog truck swerved around me and into the ditch while I hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. I jumped out of my pickup and saw, through a cloud of golden dust, a herd of swine escaping from the back of the trucker's rig.

I called out to the driver, "C'mon, we can catch them."

"No," he said, not leaving his seat. "Let those pigs fly. The loss will be a good tax break."

"Don't be crazy," I said, pointing at the cornfield. "The herd could cause a lot of damage."

The truck driver lit a cigarette and added smoke to the cloud of dust. "Let those pigs fly," he said, "and mind your own business."