Eating is a Small, Good Thing

I was recently stuck in a TSA line, anxious that I would miss my flight home from a conference out west, when I got to talking to the man next to me, who happened to also have attended the same conference (though he seemed less anxious). His name was Brewer Eberly and he spent most days as a family doctor in a rural community in South Carolina. When I asked him how he ended up at a conference about the future of Christian Higher Education, he told me about his work with Duke Divinity’s Theology, Medicine, and Culture initiative. And then to my great surprise and delight, he said that the reason he worked as a doctor in a rural community could basically be chalked up to Raymond Carver’s short story "A Small, Good Thing."

I love Raymond Carver, and, honestly, it’s a love I barely understand, and I rarely find anyone in Christian circles who shares it with me. Carver came out of the dirty realism minimalist movement in fiction in the late 70s and early 80s and his characters are hard scrabble, lovable losers often tangled up in domestic destruction in one way or another, fueled—as Carver was—by copious amounts of gin. To say that his people are not my people is about as factual as I like to be as a fiction writer myself—I come from low-church teetotalers, my people are preachers and educators and family therapists. But something in his stories almost always moves me and none more than "A Small, Good Thing." It’s a story about a boy who is hit by a car and goes into a coma and eventually dies and at the center of the story is a strange—and sometimes menacing—baker who has completed a cake for the boy’s birthday and is calling the house trying to get someone to come pick it up and pay him for his work. The story culminates in a furious mother’s march to unleash her anger on the unsuspecting baker, the tension diffused by a beautiful scene in which the baker offers what he has—fresh coffee and rolls—to the mother and the father. “You have to eat and keep going,” the baker says. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”

I have often thought about the story as a proxy for communion, coffee replacing wine, the unleavened bread swept aside for the “heavy bread” of cinnamon rolls. Brewer offered his take, that the job of a doctor is really just to sit with people in their pain, which of course is also a version of communion, a version of one of Paul and Peter’s overlapping phrases: “to share in his suffering” (Romans 8, 1 Peter 4). And for the first time, between Brewer’s sharing and our shared love of Carver’s story and the shared suffering of waiting in a TSA line, I was able to replace the personal possessive his with another, more plural antecedent—the church as the body of Christ. If we are the body of Christ, sharing in the suffering means sitting with people in their pain. And sharing is always better over coffee and sweet rolls.

In graduate school, as an act of procrastination, when I was supposed to be writing my own short stories, I took to turning Carver stories into songs. I recently returned to the project, but I’ve been holding out on "A Small, Good Thing," I think because it is my favorite and I’ve been a little worried that something important would get lost in the process. It’s possible this was a worry of Carver’s too, as there are three distinctly different versions of the story available. It’s a hard thing to get right—sharing in suffering.

Here’s my try:

It's a small, good thing to pour the coffee

It’s a small, good thing to share the crust

It’s a small, good thing to sit together

And remember we are dust

I didn’t hear you when you called me

And when I did I couldn’t speak

Oh how the anger overwhelmed me

How the shock had left me weak

One minute he was with us

The next moment he was gone

There is no break from all this suffering

Our hearts keep beating on

But it's a small, good thing to pour the coffee

It’s a small, good thing to share the crust

It’s a small, good thing to sit together

And remember we are dust

And if our time is just an instant

And what we know is just a speck

I’d like to spend it with the people

Who know the taste of death

Because grief doesn’t leave you empty

Oh no if fills you to the brim

The body is a channel

For a pain that never ends

But it's a small, good thing to pour the coffee

It’s a small, good thing to share the crust

It’s a small, good thing to sit together

And remember we are dust

There is a tree outside my window

That burns like fire in the fall

A brilliant blaze to match the sunset

A spark to torch it all

But we are rooted in the soil

We are planted in the dirt

And from the fields our sorrow flowers

And illuminates the earth

And it's a small, good thing to pour the coffee

It’s a small, good thing to share the crust

It’s a small, good thing to sit together

And remember we are dust

References

Carver, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From. Random House. New York. June,1989.