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Cruising On Thin Ice
Did I love the night life?
Yesterday I found myself discussing with my American Literature class the theme of the American misfit. We had been studying Flannery O’Connor’s haunting tale of a family vacation gone wrong — “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” — and were preparing ourselves to begin Casey Parks’ Diary of a Misfit, a nonfiction account of gender fluidity in modern/contemporary small-town Mississippi.
There is no glamor or fame for being gender fluid in small-town Mississippi, in case you wondered.
One of our main discussion points in the O’Connor story involved the character of “The Misfit,” the outlaw who drives a hearse and claims he would have known what to do with his life had he just been around to see Jesus in person. I suggested, however, that he is not even the main misfit character in the story. No, maybe it’s the family itself who, off for a three-day Florida vacation, finds themselves caught between the American dream and the universal nightmare of realizing that dreams aren’t real, but reality definitely is.
So, when we realize that whatever “the norm” is, we don’t quite fit it, then how do we cope with and define ourselves?
In other words, I was once a boy living in small-town Alabama — a town with either the joy or the ignominy of existing only fifteen miles from…
