Inside Our Lady

 Inside Our Lady  

Blocking the aisles were signs in French and English to the effect, “Don’t move me, don’t cross this line. You can see and hear, can’t you? - that there’s a service going on.”

     But even if it, the service, is in French only, I can also see and hear that it is coming to an end. Soon, on his way out, the priest, a large man in a glaring white alb and shoes that look like either would go on either foot, will move the sign that blocks the center aisle and turn it around so it says nothing. Then, I can walk into the nave proper. I can peer around. I can sit in a pew. Then, what do I say to whom, who labeled the picture in my previous post, “Notre Dame, where we prayed for Uncle Albert”? (See here.)

What kind of prayers will I tell him I offered? Will I say to him at all, “We prayed for you?” Then, will Roz say, “Well, I didn’t”?

     And what will either of us mean? Do I mean only this, that “I sat in a pew in Notre Dame and worried about you"? Does Roz mean she didn’t worry? “I sat, because he sat,” indicating me, “but I wasn’t worrying about you but about how long we would be sitting there,” meaning breathing the scattered glitter of the windows, the candlesticks, the columns, the paraments, and the incense.

And how will Uncle Albert answer, tucked in up to his chin in a glaring white sheet? Will he say, as I suspect, “He does seem to have a fascination for those things; or, at least, he believes he should”?

08.22.17