from THE KENYON REVIEW
And this our life, exempt from public haunt.
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks.
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
—As You Like It, William Shakespeare
When Father Phil Castor counseled his parishioners, he advised them to pay attention to the things they didn’t want to think about—the shadows, the echoes, the uneasy feelings. “That place where your mind skids away? The thing you won’t even get close to? That’s where your trouble is. That’s the thing to notice.” Seeing the complacent look seep across the face of whoever sat in his office that day, Phil would bear down. “Don’t imagine that you think about everything. You don’t. No one does. And your downfall is going to come from that thing you don’t want to see.”
He knew better than to share his own experience, even if hearing a few stories about the real lives of priests might do prissy Maiy Holt a world of good. The kind of parishioner who came to her priest for guidance did not want to hear about the small, shameful lapses of charity— the way Phil had blurted, “I thought you were on a diet,” when he saw the church’s two-hundred-pound secretary, Dorothy, ferociously eating a Blizzard at her desk; the dog he’d kicked when it barked, advanced on him, and lifted its leg. Ashamed of himself, Phil apologized to the secretary and put out some leftover hamburger for the dog, but his penitent actions were not the point. The point was the way Phil still let his mind tiptoe away when he saw that skinny, rough-looking mutt stalking around the church parking lot. His lazy mind was willing to let him think he was a genial man, full of unforced kindness, and it was up to him to remind himself otherwise, whether or not he shared his hardwon wisdom.
Today’s parishioner was Wendy Markham, a twitchy woman who
writhed with prayer during Mass. Phil had to force himself to listen to her mousy whisper and not the din from the street outside—a new office complex had recently gone in, and no one had figured out what to do with the sudden step-up in traffic. Twice Mass had been interrupted by accidents, and Wendy had complained about that, too, as if Phil could have stopped them. He already knew that she would leave todays session trying with all of her might to find the thing that she was not thinking about, and he also knew that she would never come a mile near it. What Wendy needed was not spiritual counseling but a bathtubsized bottle of Xanax. “When did your sense of anxiety begin?” he said loudly, to overcome the honking.
“Last Sunday, during your sermon, when you said that God is a trickster. Now I look at everything that I used to hold as holy and wonder, Ts this just a joke? A trick from a trickster God?’”
I was making a larger point. Our ideas of holiness are constricting. God’s holiness is larger than our ideas can ever be.”
“Trickster, you said.”
“I’m very sorry if my choice of words was misleading or upsetting.”
“I haven’t slept since. Is my marriage a trick? Are my children tricks?”
Phil closed his eyes against the monumental temptation to tell her yes. He had no memory of talking about the trickster God from the pulpit. What had possessed him? If she complained to the bishop, Phil would be called to the chancery office in record time. “Are you chastising me, Wendy? I did apologize.”
“Of course I’m not chastising you. You’re a priest.”
“Good to know,” he said.
This was the second time someone had recounted a point from his own sermon that he did not remember. Two weeks ago Matt Maynard had mentioned Louise, Phil’s sister, dead at the age of fourteen from a water-skiing accident. Phil had been nine and had loved Louise beyond reason. His mother often said that he never would have joined the priesthood if he hadn’t lost Louise, which might have been true, but carried overtones that made Phil nervous. Although he dreamed of her often and restlessly, he didn’t like to mention Louise’s name, which even now felt like letting cold air onto a wound. Hearing Matt talk about her made him furious, though he knew he was not being fair to Matt, the kind of stalwart who showed up at the rectory after a big snowfall ready to plow the parking lot.
“It’s just like you said, Father—the loss of innocents is hardest of all,” Matt said. Surely in his sermon Phil had said “the loss of innocence.”
Did it matter? Now Louise was part of the parish conversation. Phils brother, Gary, called two nights later, and Phil was surprised the news had taken that long to travel. “Leave me off your pulpit.”
“No problem. You don’t present good homily material.”
“Honestly, Phil. What were you thinking?”
“I have no idea.”
Gary laughed. He always did, eventually. “You make me worry for the future of the church.” >
“Stand in line, bro.” Phil hoped that he had not mentioned the rope of chestnut hair that Louise had bribed him to brush for her. The bright, sweet smell of that heavy hair.
He had used to be a disciplined preacher, faithful in applying the homiletics principles he’d learned in the seminaiy. He did not come to the pulpit unprepared, and he studied scriptural commentary to supplement his never-sufficient knowledge. He could not remember when he started to veer from his scripts, only that he began to get more enthusiastic responses from parishioners after Mass. “What a helpful sermon that was, Father. Thank you.” Sometimes the parishioner thanking him was a young and pretty woman, and Phil liked that, of course. But he wasn’t setting out to flirt. It just happened lately that while he was giving his prepared remarks, something would occur to him—a useful example, a demonstration of a principle. Not an inspiration, nothing like that, but the tardy arrival of an idea that should have occurred to him when he was writing out his notes two days before. A thing, you might say, that he hadn’t been paying attention to.
He had not thought much about these on-the-spot additions until parishioners started quoting back to him words he had no memoiy of using. Louise, for instance. Or what had apparently been a pretty long analogy involving mortgage debt. Or, now, a trickster.
His computer screen was bright with waiting e-mails, but he did not look at them. Tonight was his night to go downtown and do a lock-in with at-risk youth, a ministry he liked. The boys taught him phrases, not always vulgar, that he hadn’t heard before, and they were a tonic break from overwrought self-appointed saints in the parish. The at-risk youth would be just what Phil’s doctor would have ordered, if Phil had had a doctor. The at-risk youth would be down with a trickster God.
He knew that he needed—soon—to think hard about what was happening in his preaching. He had slipped out of control, and out-ofcontrol people did harm. He would find an hour to contemplate before he finished wilting next Sunday’s sermon.
# *
The sermon wrote itself, which should have made Phil suspicious. It did make him suspicious, but he didn’t have time to sit and track down what was troubling him. One of his at-risk youth, Jeff, called Pelicano because he liked to cany things in his mouth, had collapsed during Phil s shift. He fell without making a sound, and he was dead before the ambulance even arrived. At the hospital, ER doctors guessed that Pelicano had shot up a speedball before wandering into the youth center; all Phil knew was that suddenly the boy was gray and still on the tile floor. The other boys had waited for Phil to do something, but what was he supposed to do? He wasn’t an EMT, and he wasn’t Jesus. He held the boy’s heavy head in his lap and felt tears spill out of his eyes. “Pussy,” one of the boys said.
That was Wednesday night. Thursday was taken up with reports to the hospital, to the police, and to the three separate boards that oversaw the program. “This terrible incident shouldn’t jeopardize the entire program,” Phil said in a phone call to one of the board heads. His voice was a little desperate. “The program does great good.”
“The program isn’t in any danger,” the man said. “You need to calm down.”
Thursday night: a wedding rehearsal followed by dinner with the bride’s extended family. Friday: he was late for hospital rounds after nearly getting clobbered by a pickup truck shooting through the intersection on the last second of a yellow light. Then he paid a visit to the nursing home where Mary Otis, a Holy Name founding member, was living. Her daughter was in town, and Maiy had called three times to make sure Phil would come and meet the girl. He entered the sunny room already smiling. Mary, a tiny creature who looked like a cocoon after the butterfly had departed, beamed. “Do you go to visit your own mother, Father?” she said, while Phil shook hands with the daughter, a rumpled, tired woman who would look exactly like her mother in thirty years.
“I wish I could. She died at fifty-two, of cancer.”
“How sad. But your father?”
“He died a year later. I still have a brother.”
“So the two of you are all alone. The stained glass, eh?”
“I’m sorry—I don’t follow.”
She looked at him sharply. “Your own words, Father. Our lives as stained as glass.”
“Of course,” he said.
On his way back to the rectory, Phil stopped at Liquor Bam, bought a small bottle of Stoli, and tried to remember when he could have talked about stained glass to Mary Otis. Nothing came back to him. He could hardly remember the last time he’d seen the woman.
That night, after appointments, a meeting with the Worship Committee and dinner with the Men’s Club, he seated himself at his desk with the lectionary, a Bible, and a pile obcommentaries to write Sunday’s sermon. The reading was the Good Samaritan. For once, an interpretive path opened right up and Phil gratefully followed it. He wrote for two hours, rewarded himself with a belt of Stoli, and went to bed.
Recent history being what it was, he looked carefully at the sermon before Mass the next evening, but nothing looked exceptional. Stay on script, he warned himself as he vested. Don’t make me have to tell you twice. That was a shout-out to his mother.
The Good Samaritan! “We know that we should try to model ourselves on him, and that is true. We should help the people who need us. But the parable also invites us to consider the pleasure of giving comfort. The traveler was naked and bleeding; he would die if someone didn’t help him. Imagine the consolation the Samaritan felt as he cradled that poor man’s head and wiped the blood from his eyes. Imagine the pleasure that came from saving someone.” He was crying. Tears were off script.
We should wish for the chance to save someone, he thought suddenly. We should hope for violence and devastation, if we can bring some measure of healing. Well, no—that wasn’t right.
“We should give thanks,” he said lamely, and hurried on to the Creed.
After Mass, Phil couldn’t shake the sense that he had nearly closed his hand around a profundity. This was a new feeling for him; he had been a so-so seminarian, a plodder who did not exactly earn the Bs he received in philosophy. When he went to see his teacher for the third time about Aquinas and the Summa, his teacher had said, “Let it go. There’s not much call for scholasticism in most parishes.” That had proved to be true. Phil would have been better off taking accounting.
Now he felt a realization breaking upon him, nearly visible, and he tried to keep it before him as he shook hands after Mass, greeted Mrs. Parcell’s sister, here to visit for the week, and promised a group of boys a basketball game. When he finally closed the rectory door behind him, giddy excitement washed through him.
Drawing the blinds in his study, he sat in the armchair and closed his
eyes. He turned his thoughts to the Good Samaritan, moved to pity by the beaten, dying man. Phil tried to imagine himself into the scene: the load covered with dusty yellow dirt, the blazing sun and the sweat running into his eyes and beard, the scrubby bushes at the wayside that gave off a hot, sharp scent. The beaten man, flies lighting on his sores, moaned through broken teeth. Seamlessly, Phil’s thoughts moved to Pelicano, whom he had not particularly noticed on Thursday night. If he had, Phil would have forced Pelicano to leave; the shelter forbade drugs or any obvious signs of using. What the hell had Phil been doing, not to notice a two-hundred-pound gangster high as a kite, carrying cotton balls in his mouth?
It was only too easy to imagine himself on the footpath beside the man beaten and robbed. Helplessly, Phil saw himself—his robe clean, his new sandals making a pleasant slapping sound on the dirt—approach the man, look at him, then straighten up and walk past. A dense smell of incense rose from the soft linen of his robe. Light caught on the tapered silver leaves of an olive tree, and a bird’s song sounded like tumbling water. Sitting in his stiff armchair, listening to the rattle of the air conditioner, Phil cried as if knives were slicing through him.
“Don’t you think you’re making yourself out to be just a little important?” said Gaiy. “You’re getting above your pay grade, Phil. The kid O.D.’d. You didn’t kill him.”
“I sure didn’t save him.”
“You were there to supervise a roomful of teenagers, right? What were you doing when the kid collapsed?”
“I was talking to some of the other boys. There was going to be a job fair downtown, and they wanted to know whether they’d be taken seriously if they didn’t show up wearing suits.”
“Good question. Deserved an answer.”
“I think a person can answer dress-code questions and still notice if a kid is about to collapse.”
“The kid could bench-press 350 and he was jacked out of his mind. Do you think he was going to let you give him a hug?”
“He deserved to have somebody notice,” Phil said doggedly. “Anybody deserves that much.”
Gaiy sighed and shook his head, and they settled into SVU. “No way is that guy the perp,” Gary said. “The killer was a runner. Look at this guy’s arms.”
“You don’t run with your arms.”
“Shows how much you know.” Gaiy put in thirty miles a week and liked to poke Phil’s paunch. “You figure your spare tire gives you more cred with the gang bangers?”
“They told me I look just like a priest.”
After the show was over, Phil hugged his brother, watched his car turn the comer, then turned off the TV and rinsed out their glasses. He waited for the satisfaction that usually caifie when he checked the locks and turned off the back-porch light, those sweetly fussy evening gestures. Instead, he remembered Pelicano, and barely made it to the kitchen before he vomited.
His sadness was devastating and physical; in the days that followed Phil felt as if body parts were being pulled out of him. By the middle of the week people were starting to ask him if he was all right. “Did something happen? You look gut shot,” said Matt. He was better than Grace Mattea, who laid her hand sympathetically on Phil’s arm and said, “I can see your pain. I am praying for you.”
“Thank you, Grace, but I’m just a quart low on sleep.”
She smiled at him and shook her head. “Not everything can be talked about, I know.”
But priests were supposed to talk. That was their job description. All day long Phil was expected to talk to committees, talk to engaged couples or kids in trouble, talk to the sick and bereaved, talk from the pulpit, talk on the phone. Now his mouth felt like sand and words refused to take shape; when Otto Mersing hauled his son who had just been arrested for joyriding to Phil’s office, all Phil could manage to say was, “Was it worth it?”
“Yes,” the boy said, earning him a pop from Otto.
“We grab at what we think will make us happy,” Phil mused. “Sorrow— grief—is insupportable, so we do whatever we can to push it back.”
“I was bored,” the hoy said.
“Talk to him about jail,” Otto said to Phil.
Things did not improve that night when he emceed the wine auction, a fund-raiser that was rowdy by church standards and for which he needed to adopt a light tone. He scoured his joke books and found a few acceptable stories to tell, but he could feel the ghastliness of his smile as soon as he arrived in the parish hall. He had printed out six jokes, stopped after the second, and no one protested when he handed over the microphone to Matt, auctioneer for the night.
Sitting in the back of the hall while Matt made the kind of racy jokes
a priest shouldn t laugh at, Phil felt grief move through him in waves. He could not even say what, exactly, he was grieving. Gary was right about Pelicano, a boy whom Phil had barely known by sight. He grieved because he was a priest, and because he had been in that room, and he had seen no reason to stop talking to teenage boys about covering their tattoos. He grieved because Pelicano had shot up. Jesus, that was a good enough reason.
By Saturday evening he thought of Mass with actual panic. He xeroxed a sermon from one of his source books, choosing a talk about finding the face of God in the people around us. The sermon had nothing to do with the readings, but Phil thought he could get through it without breaking down, which right now was his only criterion.
And he was wrong. He had read the sermon in his office, of course, but he hadn’t read it aloud, and it turned out that there was a tremendous difference between silently looking at and actually saying sentences like “God is before us every day, in the people we love best as well as those we pass on the street.” Phil’s voice broke in half, and he stood, trying to recover himself, his shoulders shaking, for over a minute before he could say, “Let us stand and pray.” After Mass parishioners fled.
He could get his doctor to prescribe Paxil. He was probably the only priest in the diocese not taking the stuff. And in the meantime he would exercise and think positive thoughts. Watch Mr. Rogers. Whatever it took. Nobody objected if their priest had a little bit of existential angst going on—it made him interesting, like a movie priest. But ciying in the pulpit, like bringing up irrelevant stories during homilies, unnerved people. Another month of this and he’d be handling serpents.
He went for a long walk and had worked himself into a pretty decent mood by the time he got back to the rectory. There he listened to the single message on the voice mail: Gaiy was in the hospital, the victim of a hit-and-run. He was in ICU. One of the attending nurses had recognized his last name and called the rectoiy.
Phil was in the car before he could think and had pulled into the surging traffic before he could feel. Or rather, he felt a keen wind filling his rib cage. Gaiy, an early-morning runner. So easy to imagine him dreamily moving along, hardly bothering to check for traffic at six on a Sunday morning. A driver who might have been drunk or just sleepy or as relaxed as Gary himself, because when you’re up at six on a Sunday morning the world belongs to you. Phil let out a noise, an awful sound.
ICU was, of course, a nightmare. Phil had to force himself to look at his brother’s swollen face, the bruise that closed one eye and the gash across his forehead, and the tube jammed into his neck. Gary s throat would feel like sandpaper once the tube came out, if it came out.
“You can talk to him,” the nurse said. “He’s sedated, but he’s not completely out. He can hear.”
Phil nodded. He would have preferred that Gary not be able to hear the miserable beeps and clicks that monitored the movements of his heart and lungs, both of which had been injured- He had been thrown fifteen feet and landed face first on an ivy embankment. A homeowner shuffling out to get his newspaper saw Gary on his ivy and thought first to call 911 and indignantly report a drunk on his property. Then he heard the rattle of Gaiy’s breath and saw the curious shape of his body, and tlie man’s hands shook so badly that he spent over a minute punching buttons on his phone before he could get the ambulance to come.
“That call saved his life?” Phil said.
“Yes,” said the nurse carefully, and in the pause before that word Phil realized how far Gaiy still had to come back. Sitting beside his brother’s bed, Phil mechanically moved through prayers but did not listen to his own words. Gaiy’s bony face did not look serene and did not, thank God, look suffering or ill. To tell the truth, he looked annoyed. “Is there anything I can do to help?” Phil said to the nurse.
“Pray.”
“Anything else?”
“I could use a sandwich.”
Phil left ICU and came back half an hour later with the biggest sandwich he could find. The nurse laughed and thanked him. At the end of the visiting time, the sandwich was still mapped up at the nursing station, weeping lightly into its wax paper.
Through the week Phil stayed at the hospital as much as he could, watching his brother drift in and out of consciousness. The doctors were having trouble keeping Gaiy’s lungs inflated, so his blood-oxygen levels kept plummeting. He had two operations to repair his tom heart. Phil brought more food to the ICU nurses. On his ninth day there, when Phil was at church, Gaiy died.
“He was veiy quiet, Father. He didn’t look like he was suffering at all. He just let go of whatever he’d been hanging onto. An embolism— it’s painless.” Phil stood in front of the doctor and wept without covering his face, like a child. The doctor shifted his weight and said softly, “He’s in a better place.”
“How did he get there?”
“Pardon me, Father?”
How did he get to the better place? He doesn’t know the way. Who showed him?”
You’d better sit down,” the doctor said. By the time Phil left the hospital, he was holding a prescription of his own. “I don’t feel good about letting you go,” the doctor said.
Nothing happens to me,” Phil assured him.
Priests from three neighboring churches, friends, or close enough, came to Holy Name and said Mass in Phil’s place for two Sundays. The worship committee put together services, the budget committee compiled the accounting statement, and every morning Phil opened his front door and found more casseroles and plates of brownies. Should he be concerned that no one wanted to come in and talk to him? Maybe people had heard the ululations he sometimes made at night. A sound like that would be enough to keep him from knocking on a door.
His mind was a gluey sludge of platitudes and prayers, none of them useful. God does not give us more than we can handle. God is closest to us in our brokenness. What did that even mean? When the bishop called and reminded Phil that he could not have kept his brother alive, Phil said, “That does not help.”
“I’m sorry. It’s time for you to get back on your feet.”
“I’m not lying down.”
“Fathers Campbell and Martinson have been happy to step in for you, but their parishes need them. As Holy Name needs you.”
“Are you saying that I’m being selfish because I’m grieving my brother?”
“Yes.”
Gary’s laugh would have rung out. He often said that priests were the most heartless people in the world. After hanging up on the bishop, Phil dropped to his knees and crawled back and forth across his study. He scraped his face against the rough carpet and cried until he was gasping, one shuddering wave followed by another. He had no idea how much time passed before he finally stopped and lay panting gently beside his desk. If he were a drinker, this would be the time to start a bender. The bottle of Stoli, so little it was cute, still stood in the high kitchen cabinet, missing only one drink. He wished he could offer the rest to Gary, who had liked vodka martinis.
After a while, numb, he pulled himself back to his feet. He was too old and had counseled too many people to expect a breakthrough, just as he had long ago given up expecting God to walk forward and offer divine aid. Phil’s faith had taught him to hear God’s voice in the voices of people around him, and to see God’s hand behind the three dishes of lasagna filling up the refrigerator. God used people, a phrase that could be heard more than one way, and that was typical of God. God was close by but invisible like any goqd prankster, maybe leaning against the pantiy door, smiling at Phil expectantly, waiting for him to catch on. A whole world of suffering, and only God seeing the funny side. Maybe Gary was part of the joke now. Maybe Gaiy and God were splitting their sides. “Honestly?” Phil said aloud, facing the place God might be standing. “I’m done.” He hit the lights on his way out of the room.
The next day a clean wind blew in from the west. The weather had been sticky, and now Phil, standing at the end of the rectory driveway to get the newspaper, tipped back his head and inhaled this new air that brushed over him like a feather. It had a sharp, refined edge, and Phil imagined it sliding across his skin, shaving off the thinnest imaginable layer, leaving him just a little smaller. When he opened his eyes, he nodded at the sky, blue as the cornflowers Dorothy had put in a squat potteiy vase on his desk.
He could preach about the beauties of nature, he thought, and looked back into the impassive sky. One tom cloud rippled like a slow banner, its edges dissolving. Another, sheer as a veil, rearranged itself over his head.
From the maple behind him, recently pinned into a lollipop by Matt, a mockingbird broke into a torrent of chatter. No other birds answered, and after a moment, the bird recommenced its speech. “You should consider the priesthood,” Phil said, and the bird flew irritably away.
Resisting the habit of prayer—thanks or praise or acknowledgment— was easier than he expected. The wind felt good against his face, and he stood at the end of the driveway for another few minutes, long enough to wave at Matt when he drove by. Matt looked startled at Phil’s thumbs-up. He must have thought that grief is a nonstop process, a shroud that the griever dragged to eveiy corner of his life. Phil had used to think that, too.
Another car went by, and then another. Phil was looking at the tree,
hoping the mockingbird would come back. Then a shriek of brakes, and a crash. Phil took off like a dart.
Halfway onto the curb at the edge of the intersection, a silver convertible, top still up, was smashed into the side of a beater Honda. Phil heard his own rough breathing as he ran, and he heard an engine’s warning bleat, but no screams or calls for help. The scene was calm, which made him run faster. Bits of glass that caught the morning sun crunched under his feet and the bitter smell from the air bags, bad as burned hair, swept over him. Why was no one else coming? Why weren’t the drivers crying out?
By the time Phil got to the cars, the driver of the Honda—a young man in a Hawaiian shirt—had already slid free, coughing a little. The silky red shirt was covered with powder. He smiled weakly and held up a hand. “Are you OK?” Phil said.
“No. My car was just wrecked.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Do you have another car?”
“I’ll call the police.”
The man pointed at the convertible. “He’s doing that.”
Sure enough, the driver of the convertible, still wearing his seat belt, was on the phone. Catching Phil’s eye, he nodded, as if he and Phil were agreeing to something. The man touched the phone’s screen, then called through the window, “Can you open the door? It won’t work on my side.”
Phil pulled the handle and heard something in the mechanism move. The whole front end of the car was buried in the Honda—no surprise that the door wouldn’t work. The surprise lay in the fact that nothing was on fire, and both drivers seemed not just unhurt but unruffled. The driver of the convertible would have been more upset if he’d taken a fall on a basketball court. Now, in this intersection, the only heart juddering in its chest seemed to be Phil’s. He yanked harder at the door and heard another frustrated mechanical noise. Then a muscle in his shoulder ignited, the door shot open, and its window tipped out, exploding on the asphalt.
“Fuck,” said the driver, another young man, this one with hair cropped to the skull and a minute goatee.
“Sorry,” Phil said.
“That will be one more thing to replace.”
“I think you’re going to have to replace the car. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Not lucky. I paid for good engineering. But thanks for coming over.”
Phil pointed at the rectoiy. “I live there. Do you want me to get you some coffee or anything while you wait for the police?”
“No, man. I’m good.” He looked away. Stubbornly, ignoring the plain invitation to leave, Phil remained until the police arrived. “Are you a witness, sir?” the officer said when he finally pulled up.
“No,” Phil and the two drivers said.
“Then I’ll ask you to step back.” The officer was probably fifty, like Phil. His gut spilled over the top of his splayed belt, and he kept running his hand over his hair and sighing. He directed all of his questions to the two drivers. Eventually Phil shrugged and walked back to the rectoiy. They knew where to find him.
At the edge of the driveway, he paused underneath the tree. The mockingbird had returned and was belting out its borrowed tunes. Phil recognized this near-joke, its punch line that never fully arrived. It reminded him of Gaiy, who had been a practical joker when he was a boy. A few months after Louise’s death, Phil had gone to her room, lain across her yellow bedspread, and fallen asleep. When he woke up, his fingers were laced together with ribbon Louise had used in her hair and Gary was snickering behind the door. Phil got up to chase him, but he couldn’t hit him hard because his fingers were wrapped in ribbon.
A sound crowded Phil’s throat, either laughter or agony. He knew that as soon as he made noise, the bird would fly away. But when he started to laugh, the bird stayed.
Nominated by Jay Rogoff, Melanie Rae Thon