Pat, I don't know what he's talking about.

Commenter Pat writes this on a St. Francisville Topix thread, referring to Rod Dreher's blog on "The" "American" "Conservative":

There's a lot of things still going on around Ruthie [Leming]. One recent post shows Rod [Dreher] picking up Hannah in NOLA as if he was the man of that family. Another, "The Little Way of LeBron James", has something to do with Rod's book about Ruthie having something to do with LeBron James returning to Cleveland. Pauli, I see you're from Cleveland. Is that so? Whatever, Rod seems to be all over the Leming family these days, but maybe only in the same way you'd want to shake your leg to get him off. How do the Lemings feel about all this? Normally I'd think this was a private matter, but Rod keeps making it so public it seems okay to ask about.

I've never fathomed the way the mind of Dreher works, nor really even been able to even follow his line of reasoning. I've admitted as much on several occasions, notably here and here. That applies doubly to the post to which Pat is referring.

Initially my reaction to Dreher's titling the book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming was confusion. Little Way is obviously a reference to St. Therese the Little Flower, a Saint and Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, the church which Dreher famously left. The only notable similarity between the two women seems to be that they both died young, Therese at 24 and Ruthie at 41 years of age. (I write more about the problematic "saint" moniker and comparison in my Amazon book review.)

Now he comes out with the post title The Little Way of LeBron James which fails further at coherence. After all, the way of Ruthie Leming was little precisely because she was the one who stayed in the hometown and didn't leave to seek her fortune elsewhere, let alone enshrine the choice in a television special with the grandiose title The Decision. Little Way? not so much.

I think what he really is attempting is a comparison between LeBron James and himself, even though he throws the name in for Ruthie's. He was the one who, like James, left and came back. But this seems to be projection and merely another failed metaphor. There are plenty of people who move back home after living somewhere else. My neighbors, for example, lived in Michigan (gasp!) for years before coming back to Cleveland and starting a business (husband) and getting elected to public office (wife). My parents moved back to the town we grew up in about 10 years ago. And I have friends whose kids moved away about 5 years ago but they're moving back now that John Kasich and Josh Mandel and have fixed the economy here in Ohio.

I mean really, the coming back home theme is so old and commonplace that the observation that James's reasons for coming home somewhat match his own at points seem to be the presentation of a truism as some type of cosmic revelation. Also, check this out: LeBron James was famous and a superstar before he left Cleveland and after he left, a number of people got irritated. Now he's come back even more famous and a bigger superstar and almost everybody is elated around here, even a nerd like me is experiencing second-hand joyfulness. Reading the Topix thread I referenced earlier will show you that this is not always to case when a famous person returns home.