Maps and Legends

(This was going to be a short piece about how it’s the thirty-ninth anniversary of R.E.M.’s album Fables of the Reconstruction and how important the song “Maps and Legends” is to me. R.E.M. is still in here, but in writing about the song, I’ve ended up down a rabbit hole into my anxiety-riddled adolescence, back to the bedroom that I’m just now realizing was literally covered in a striped yellow wallpaper that could very well have been in the story of that name. I do eventually get back to the song–but I’m leaving the memories that the song brings up here, as they demonstrate why the song continues to have such meaning for me.)

This year marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of R.E.M.’s album Fables of the Reconstruction, the band’s third studio album. My friend Jen marked the occasion recently on her Tuesday afternoon “Radio Nowhere” radio show on the Minnesota State University Mankato’s KMSU station. Having spent that morning sitting still in an online conference, I was glad to have Jen’s good taste in music along for a well-needed afternoon walk. 

It was especially wonderful to hear Jen play a song specifically for me, knowing how much I love the album generally and this song specifically. The song is “Maps and Legends,” and it’s a song that got me through some especially rough times.

When I was in high school, my parent’s marriage was deteriorating. My dad was not doing well at work, either, and he compensated for the trouble he was having at work and at home by throwing himself full-tilt into teaching Sunday school. He had an entire shelf of Bible concordances and guidebooks he used to prepare for the one hour each week when he was the star. One Sunday morning in 1989, he announced to the class that the Lord had appeared to him in a dream and told him to sell his possessions, move to Indiana, and go to seminary to become a minister.

Next to me, my mother bristled. “This is the sort of thing that one really should discuss with one’s wife before announcing it to the church,” she muttered. I kept my eyes on my hands, folded over the red leather New American Standard Bible in my lap. The lesson that Sunday was something from Romans–my mother now refers to that time as “the summer that your father thought he was Paul.”

She ...