In His Own Image

By Lewis Brown

Stan was strongly influenced by his Southern Christian upbringing. Under the pressures of family and career, he attempts to simplify his life by taking a job teaching at a small college in Tifton, Georgia. He needs Tifton to provide that stereotypical small-town lifestyle that he always believed existed, even though he had never observed it. As that illusion and his marriage both evaporate, he begins to realize that there is a discrepancy between his Southern Christian values and how his keen senses perceive reality. A young Stan is polite with strong religious values. As he grows older, he turns from religion and becomes a bitter, cold man.

The book opens with a devastated Stan at the funeral of his former student, Cleave. Cleave has committed suicide, but his motivation is a mystery that is slowly revealed as the story progresses through unlikely international connections to Tifton and Cleaves even more unlikely connection to the September 11, 2001, attack on New York and Washington, DC. Cleaves death further changes Stans perspective of the world and causes him to question all his previous conclusions about human interactions and human interactions with God.

In His Own Image is about the commonality of human nature, despite the wide diversity of human cultures. Through a fictional story built around real historical events, In His Own Image shows how individuals are molded by their birth cultures but, eventually, have the opportunity to break from human influence and see the world in a new way.

In His Own Image is not about religion itself, and no ultimate religious conclusions are presented. Instead, it deals with how religion shapes our perception of reality. The reader is challenged to distinguish the part of their religion that was created by man from that which comes from God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524531393

Lewis Brown

Lewis Brown made a career out of communicating the latest agricultural science to farmers and county extension agents. During his time at Auburn University and the University of Georgia, he won numerous awards for university outreach and communication programs, including the University of Georgia’s Walter B. Hill Award for Public Service and Outreach—the most prestigious such award given by that university. Now, as a University of Georgia professor and assistant dean emeritus, he continues his passion for agriculture as a consultant and as an executive director of a nonprofit foundation. In his first novel, he continues to utilize his communication skills and experience in international travel to tell a story in historical fiction. His story is relevant to everyone, especially in today’s melting pot of international cultures. He writes with a unique style that most find easy to read and impactful. Brown and his wife, Mary, live in Tifton, Georgia, the primary setting for In His Own Image.

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Copyright © 2016 by Lewis Brown.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016912608

   ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5245-3141-6

      Softcover   978-1-5245-3140-9

      eBook   978-1-5245-3139-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/08/2016

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CONTENTS

An Uncomfortable Man

Drugs or Jesus

The Way Things Were

Meanwhile, On the Other Side of the World …

Cleave and Munirah

September 2001

Change

An Uncomfortable Man

For the first time in his life, Stan’s brain rested quietly. Prior to this occasion, Stan could have been described as someone obsessively aware of his surroundings. Normally, his brain was constantly and almost unconsciously engaged with the evaluation of his environment. There was no off switch. The process went on without any plan to do so; it was automatic.

He not only analyzed the actions of those around him, but their motivations as well. He analyzed people and how people perceived his analysis. He calculated his risks, his vulnerabilities, his ongoing condition in a complex world. It was a trait that provided some advantages; he saw things that most missed. Keen awareness of his environment was a unique gift, yet the gift was compensated by a lack of concentration to the current task at hand. The result was a curious combination of consciousness of the typically unnoticed and a disregard of that clearly obvious to most. This time, however, the brain that normally raced at an exhausting pace only idled in neutral, temporarily incapable of processing information.

On this unique occasion, replacing Stan’s normal hyper-awareness of his present condition was an unfamiliar acknowledgment of his past. He normally had no time to dwell on the past, but on this occasion, stored and almost forgotten memories kept popping in and out of his present like sporadic gunfire in the dark. For a fleeting moment, his mind took him back forty years to his childhood church where he was listening to a preacher indistinguishable from the one that now stood before him. The live version was delivering a prayer at least as long as those he had endured as a young boy. The live version of the hard wooden pew under him reinforced his memory. His brain replayed that mental video of himself as a boy with his family in a routine Sunday morning ritual. Faithful regulars like his family always sat in the same place, as if God had assigned seats. Three elderly ladies occupied the real seats corresponding to his former vantage point. If their eyes had not been reverently closed, they would have been very uneasy being in the path of his reflective stare. Through his now much older eyes, he saw what he used to be. He saw it, then it was gone, vaporized into the funeral scene in that Baptist church in that small Southern town on that hot September day.

The real prayer that he heard, but barely acknowledged, was delivered by the pastor of the New Way Baptist Church. Rev. Frank Everly had summoned all his years of training to create a prayer capable of capitalizing on the emotion of this occasion. Stan sat quietly, but his head was not bowed and eyes were not closed. He didn’t even attempt to hide his irreverent glare from the preacher who was using one hand to wipe his brow with his handkerchief and the other to shake his Bible at the unseeing congregation. From Reverend Everly’s perspective, Stan’s face would have been easily distinguishable from the sea of bowed heads, but Everly’s eyes were closed as well. His face wrinkled from the considerable effort to squeeze his eyes shut, as if he was trying very hard not to see something. Stan’s catatonic stare was evidence of his numbness, and on this rare occasion, even Frank Everly couldn’t coax his normally predictable reaction—a combination of amazement and disgust.

Stan had once been a kind and patient man, but the years had taken their toll, and patience was no longer one of his virtues. Those that knew him well would still describe him as kind, but he was more blunt than before, and his honesty was often mistaken for rudeness. Ironically, Stan’s paradigm of the world made it difficult for him to be part of it. He found it difficult to be a character in that ongoing performance that fed his brain a relentless string of data. He was a detached observer, somehow unable to participate. In the absence of provocation, most found nothing particularly offensive in his manner, but everyone found him difficult to understand.

I did not have the pleasure of meeting Stan until later in his life. We were tenants (Stan would say inmates) in the same assisted living facility. Stan was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. My affliction was merely physical, and the boredom of growing old contributed to my fascination with his story, a story that I feared was close to being lost to future generations if not recorded. Stan was having periodic trouble with short-term memory, but his long-term memory was still good when we first met. He often couldn’t remember what he had for breakfast, but on certain days, he seemed to want to exercise the memories he had left, and he would talk for hours. Usually, he was still a detached storyteller, speaking in the third person, but as his condition worsened, he began to say I said this or I felt that. Occasionally, he would get emotional and begin to cry.

He claimed to have the virtues of patience and politeness as a young man, but those traits were long gone by the time I met him. Many would describe him as an old, bitter man, but I found something more in his reflective conversations, which were bracketed by hours of cold, blank stares. I had never met anyone like him, and when he was in a talkative mood, his perspective on the world intrigued me. I like to think that we became friends, but I’m not sure Stan really had friends. Most of the time, he preferred to be alone in his thoughts, but at other times, he needed someone to listen to him. There was so much going on in his head full of jumbled memories that sometimes he needed to let something out, or it would burst. It took many months of those sporadic conversations before his amazing story was revealed to me. I always had a fascination with storytelling and had a few amateurish attempts at writing, so it didn’t take long to sense the significance of Stan’s story and begin the process of recording it. Much of this story comes from those personal conversations in the assisted living facility. But as the awful disease began to take more and more of his memory, I relied on accounts from others that knew him and on his personal writings that he eventually shared with me.

Our first conversation was about that funeral in that small Baptist church. The mystery of the identity of the deceased and why that funeral had impacted Stan so profoundly took months to unravel. Stan himself was a writer and told much of his own story, but his writings were as disorganized as they were insightful. I’ve tried to use his own words when I can. I’ve also thrown in some historical perspectives that I think Stan would like. Later in life, he became more aware of the importance of history.

Even as a child, the gift of awareness gave Stan a certain distant look that was especially difficult for another child to interpret. He was not quick to make friends, and characteristically, he was very conscious of how others reacted to him. Yet Stan had not really been the stereotypical misfit, nerdy kid. In fact, he seemed quite normal at first contact. Stan understood normal. He observed normal all the time. Just like any other adolescent, he had once worked hard to be normal, to not stand out, to conform. But somehow he just couldn’t conform, and he did stand out. He understood the safety of being normal, but he also understood the necessity of being unique. Normal protected Stan from ridicule, but uniqueness gave him that all-important quality of identity. He understood that identity marked one’s place in their culture. Stan understood the danger and the value of an identity. Everyone had an identity that was randomly, and sometimes cruelly assigned by those innate, unchangeable things like race, sex, socioeconomic status, religion, and physical appearance. To establish a unique identity within those predetermined limits was to carve out your place in a very complex and often cruel matrix of human culture. Stan understood that without identity, you were just the wallpaper background of the world in which those with identity operated.

Stan understood these rules from an early age, but understanding them didn’t make them any easier to follow. To the contrary, Stan would find that understanding the rules made them even more difficult to follow. He could see a lot of things others couldn’t, but it was something that Stan couldn’t see that made him incapable of performing the role of a character in the human dramas he observed all around him. There had always been something nagging at Stan from the inside that he didn’t understand, something that kept him from being like everyone else.

The funeral that impacted him so deeply provided Stan his first reason to set foot in a church since the day he walked out mid-sermon years before. It seemed that the entire town had turned out for this funeral. Stan grew weary of watching the animated preacher and glanced around the church hoping to find someone else with open eyes. He only found the eyes of a single young boy, again taking him back to a long-ago Sunday morning. At the boy’s age, Stan’s entire world consisted of one block of Giles Drive in Huntsville, Alabama. At that age, he was oblivious to the political forces that were shaping a larger world that he was yet to discover. Church was the center of social activity for Stan’s family when he was a child. Church picnics and similar social gatherings defined fun in those days. Religion was as much a part of growing up as school and puberty. It was just there. There was no consideration of whether it was right or wrong. It was just there, as predictable as the prayer before dinner every evening.

The hypnotizing voice inflection of Frank Everly’s prayer finally ended, and the congregation awoke. The horrific reality of Everly standing over an open casket containing the lifeless body of Cleave Keller still remained, unchanged from before the alleged communication with God. Only three days earlier, the image captured by Stan’s glazed eyes was unimaginable.

Cleave Keller’s lifeless face was the only one in the building not exuding sweat on that hot afternoon. It was unusually hot for late September, but the forecast called for rain that night followed by the arrival of the first fall weather of the season. This death was very disturbing to the citizens of Tifton, Georgia. Why should a handsome, successful young man with so much to live for take his own life? There had been no suicide note (unless you call his final email to Stan a suicide note), no indication of depression, only an empty bottle of sleeping pills by his cold body. None of the theories presented so far had any supporting evidence whatsoever, but that had not slowed the speculation. When something like this happened in Tifton, it didn’t take long for a collective agreement on an explanation. The unexplainable did not exist in Tifton. There was always an explanation. The unexplainable was the vacuum that nature abhors. In Tifton, all evil had its roots in the devil, and all good was due to the grace of God. Some events were easily credited directly to one or the other, but some required more creativity. When every other possible explanation made no sense, God works in mysterious ways was the generally accepted cop out.

Suicide was not foreign to those attending this funeral. Most everyone knew of someone that had previously succumbed to the ever-present threat of depression. Truth be known, most everyone had their experiences with their own temporary bouts. Most never seriously contemplated suicide, but many of those middle-aged and above had experienced those times when nothing seemed to make sense and struggled to justify the considerable effort they had expended to be whatever they had turned out to be. Most of that age had experienced a realization of the fragile nature of their self-image in a complex web of human culture. Most did their best to ignore those thoughts and buried themselves in the safety of their artificial existence.

The group explanation for Cleave’s death was a difficult one and was still being formulated. But even before Cleave’s suicide, Stan’s keen senses had detected the community’s disapproval of his influence on the young man. No one at the funeral knew it, but Stan had the best perspective of the circumstances leading to Cleave’s demise. Yet, even with that inside knowledge, Stan still didn’t understand why Cleave had come to his fateful decision. As a professor of biological sciences, Stan understood that with the appropriate scientific method, it was at least possible to answer the who, what, when, where, and how questions. It was the whys that gave science so much trouble.

Cleave had been one of Stan’s students, and everyone recognized that Stan had influenced the boy’s life. Now Stan’s influence on Cleave was sure to come under more scrutiny. Most parents in Tifton, including Cleave’s, were passionate about getting their children a good education so they could find jobs and improve their standard of