The 5th Sunday after Epiphany

 The 5th Sunday after Epiphany 

The plan was this: to pick up Uncle Albert at twenty till eight; we would go to church and be back in time - we would come here - to watch Crystal Palace vs. New castle and Liverpool vs. Tottenham. Roz was going to make waffles - from scratch! I had already set up the ancient teak TV-trays, so we could eat - and drink our coffee and orange juice - in front of the first game.

     It was snowing when I left home - lightly, dust-mote snow floating gently through the gray air; it wouldn’t impede us. What did impede us: Uncle Albert was up and dressed - and he still dresses for church, coat and tie and Sunday shoes, today galoshes both to protect them and for better traction. He was up and dressed - in his galoshes if still unbuckled, and his wool overcoat and wool watch-cap. He was sitting on the porch, leaning forward onto his cane. But he didn’t want to go to church.

     “Why not?”

     “I can’t say,” he said, then paused, “though cant may have something to do with it.” He had been rehearsing that sentence.

     “The Bishop,” I said, remembering His Grace was coming on his annual visit. “Maybe the weather will have prevented him,” I said.

A bishop in a pear tree.

     “You don’t think he came last night and stayed at that posh B & B down the street from you?”

     “That posh B & B closes in February,” I said.

     “He’s here,” Uncle Albert said. “I can feel it.”

     “In your sigmoid miter,” I said.

     “He’s here,” Uncle Albert said again. “And he’s ready to set his crooked, yellow, soft English teeth into First Corinthians: ‘Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel, though if I do, it is no grounds for boasting. Rather I have a duty, to proclaim it free of charge. I am a servant to all!’”

     From my stance on the steps I climbed onto the porch to get under the roof - the snow was falling now not so much as dust motes but as gnats. “You don’t like the bishop, do you?” I said, kneeling down to buckle Uncle Albert’s overshoes.

     “Not so far,” Uncle Albert said.

     “You’ve only heard him once,” I said, “that I know of. We’ve only heard him once.”

     “Maybe I just don’t like his voice,” Uncle Albert said. It grates in my ears. It gets under my hearing-aids and runs around like a microscopic colony of mealworms in a rotting french fry.”

We decided to skip church.

     “Roz won’t be ready for us,” I said. “I don’t want to . . . ,” meaning get there before she expected us.

We went Corner Coffee for a cuppa with - “We’ll join the cheerful atheists,” Uncle Albert said - only they didn’t look so cheerful, flapping their New York Times or Washington Posts, or peering self-pityingly into their screens.

     “He’s a bureaucrat,” Uncle Albert said of the Bishop, “a mid-level manager of religion. Jesus hated the class - the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Scribes and High Priests, angels and archangels, archbishops and bishops.”

     “And our bishop,” I popped the p to emphasize the singular.

     “Career politicians,” Uncle Albert hadn’t finished his list: “superintendents of schools, assistant principals, coaches, band directors . . . ”

     “Would Jesus hate our . . . ?”

     “ . . . deans, house-parents, vice-presidents multiplying like hares, COOs, CFOs . . . ”

     “UFOs,” I said.

     “Their captains and first mates, yes,” Uncle Albert said.

I helped Uncle Albert get back into his overcoat; I rebuckled his overshoes; I began humming “Jesus Loves Me,” then put it quietly! to words: “Jesus hates them, this I know.” Uncle Albert joined in, “For the Bible tells me so.

     “It does,” he said.

to be continued - here       

02.04.18