easter monday morning

 easter monday morning 

I got a call this morning from my old friend, Gaspar Stephens: “I was thinking of you yesterday. Mel Ball called me to tell me you’d been ‘under the weather’ – or the weather had become too steep for you: you were trying to roll a bale of cotton up clouds too sheer.” 

     “Yeah,” I said.

     “I told him I’d been reading the blog, but I thought it was fiction.” 

     “Every word that follows makes the previous fiction, didn't you tell me that? I mean, once you write down the second word, it's a lie isn’t it?” 

     “Well, yeah. A ‘story’ anyway . . . .  But: you’re okay?” He sounded genuinely concerned, though it’s hard to tell on the phone. Or across a room, or from the other side of the bed.

     “Not exactly,” I said. I thought a minute. “But the clouds are getting, how shall I say? ‘shallower’?”

Gaspar didn’t say anything for a minute. Then:

     “Ball also said, ‘Happy Easter.’”

     “Yeah?”

     “ . . . And I told him, shit, I didn’t realize it was Easter.”

     “We went to church, Uncle Albert and I, but to the early one, so we didn’t have to listen to the strings. Bart went with us. Roz's son.”

     “Yeah, I get that. I mean that you went to the early, non-folderol service. Did I ever tell you my dad refused to use the word, which he said was ‘pagan’? - as if Easter were a goddess with great breasts and a greater laugh. To say her name would set her cavorting naked through the graveyard behind the ‘kirk.’”

     “I always liked your dad,” he said after a brief pause. Then there was another pause: “Until he cut out on your mom. Though that may have been good, right? He also cut out before he could get his sticky fingers too far into your head and up your gut.”

Gaspar's dad and God -
not sure which is which.

Gasper wrote once about his dad, whom he likened to God, because even when he was absent – a lot of the time since he was a missionary of some sort, one that didn't take his family with him – even when he was absent, he was as constantly interfering as God, always meddling though with what Gaspar called – I just found his letter, dated April 22, 1995, the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. God, he said, kept wanting to pretend he wasn’t really there; he operated with “deniable intrusion.”

I’m not talking about the God that shines the sun and sends the rain, or the God that preachers and politicians petition, but the God that meddles in our affairs, the doings and non-doings of little people like you and me, of children. I’m talking about the God that pinches our brains between his thumb and forefinger and pokes at our hearts with darning needles, that sticks his fat middle finger up our anuses or down our throats and plays with our guts – constipates and diarrheas and gags and nauseates us – that uses the rough whorls of that same finger to sandpaper our nerves.

     That was my dad, relying on his ability to make heads hurt, our hearts go out of rhythm, to rattle our entire digestive apparatus, so it was shaking in every twist, turn or sack of it, to scrape his nails across our skin till it was as raw as one huge picked-at-scab.

     The omnipresence of that part God isn’t in the world, as I see it - omnipresence isn’t omnipotence; it's not in the world - it’s in us, it’s on us, it’s sticking like permanent peppermint candy to our every finger - it’s not the power to move mountains, it’s the shriek in the night that shivers our nerves.
 

So, that was my Easter Monday morning.

04.17.17