A lukewarm Episcopalian (God only knows what they believe) until her conversion, Rainey now talks about “Biblical inerrancy If she weren’t serious, I’d be sorely tempted to laugh at her.

Just a few years back we had our own Scopes mon key trial in Arkansas, a highly publicized battle in federal court over whether public school teachers should be required to teach “creation science,” thanks to a bill pushed through the Arkansas Legislature by the fundamentalists. Gleefully, the media, smelling a circus, sent reporters from all over to yuck it up at our expense as the ACLU brought in Stephen Jay Gould, the heavy duty Harvard rock sniffer, to testify about the probable age of the earth. Mercifully, the federal judge, a Methodist ruled there was a lot more theory than science put on by the attorney general, who was obligated to defend the statute with his own out-of-state scientists. Our AG, to his everlasting credit, had the good sense and political courage not to appeal.

When I remind Rainey of the trial, she gets an irritated look on her pretty, pixieish face and says, as usual these days, that I’m missing the point. She argues my worldview (so-called “logic” supported by scientists who are forever changing their theories) is culturally determined and can no more be “proved” than what’s in the Bible.

Perhaps to serve as a buffer between us during this pricklish period, Rainey has invited my daughter, Sarah, to dinner with us and has already picked her up and brought her to her house. The less time Rainey and I spend alone these days the better we seem to get along.

There was a time when it seemed we were on the verge of getting married, but at crucial moments one of us, as Paul Simon says, slips out the back. Jack.

Sarah, a high school senior and a daily reminder of her mother, who was a devout Catholic, comes to the door and whispers, her lovely face woeful, “We’re having soup, salad, and corn bread Virginal-looking (I can only hope on that score) in white sweats, she lets me give her a brief hug. Though we do not always under stand each other these days, we remain affectionate, usually forgiving each other our respective generational baggage.