Baptizing Anne Frank

After the headline “Anne Frank baptized by Mormons after Death.”

Most of us would have assumed that even God,

capital-B bureaucrat though he is,

capital-S stickler,

would have made certain exceptions and

let the Girl into heaven anyway,

or let her wander freely between the multiple heavens

that are surely necessary to keep the peace,

flashing a passport as she moved between

Jewish heaven and Mormon heaven and

whatever heaven the good but unaffiliated are

filed away to–those regions of the afterlife,

which is not a borderless place but, evidently,

as closely watched as any border we know.

Though she was probably used to the feeling

of being tugged from one place to another,

and out of the arms of her mother and father,

still, what a shock, to be sitting on the safe side

of the finish line and feel, suddenly, cold water wash over you,

like the cooler upturned over the coach after a winning game–

and then to squeeze the water from your eyes and find

an equally confused George Washington and some old pope

(who had been enjoying his Catholic heaven)

blinking at the faces of these unasked-for samaritans.

Could it be heaven if, on arrival, one has to ask,

Where am I now? And could it be heaven

if one has to then ask,

Can I go back, back to the other heaven,

the less real heaven that was heaven enough?