The Third Sunday of Easter Blues

 The Third Sunday of Easter Blues 

Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

 

 

We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises; and we hew, and we polish every stone, that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and regular work. But in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.
                                                                  — John Donne, Devotions upon
                                                            Emergent Occasions, Expostulation I

 

 

The blues are one of the reasons I have come to write only weekly (weakly), sometimes not even that often. They come without warning, and they stay until they choose to leave.
     They come in a rush like a wind-gust that you wonder why it hasn’t knocked you over, but they settle in like stomach flu: your chemistry is thrown out of balance. It’s as if the gust holds you suspended between the step you have taken and the step you need to put down so you won’t fall, and you are sick at both ends.
     They come in a rush, yet they are waiting for you. Often they are waiting in the kitchen, where you might least expect to be blown over, but what better place to poison you?

You have carried the dinner dishes in from the dining room, the smell of dinner clinging to them, red-beans-and-rice and mixed greens  “Southern style” from a can. The plates are stained with dinner, gray flecks of the greens, sticking grains of rice, a red kidney-bean smear. You are rinsing them off to put in the dishwasher. You rinse the plates and the flatware, stacking them wobbly on the counter before transferring them to the dishwasher beneath. And the gust hits you and you lose your balance; the dinner rises into your throat and sinks to the bottom of your bowels. You stop, you try to hold still to keep from weeping.
     You think: “Jesus, where did they come from?” The blues. You think, “I let my defenses down” as if keeping them up were to any avail.
     You open the dishwasher and begin transferring the plates, the knives, the forks, the spoons — one piece at a time: one plate, one knife, one fork. Moving slowly, carefully, to keep the blues from shifting in your gut and pulling your head, your, arms, your legs, your entire body in after them.

It isn’t working. The tears come.
                                                                            04.24.23

Everyday Pretensions

 Everyday Pretensions  

I was sitting in Axel’s study. I had come to remind him that he was going to come by to visit Uncle Albert, who said he was dying but clearly was not. Yes, he remembered, Axel was saying as he shuffled through his morning mail. There was an appeal from DayOne, once The Protestant Hour. There was another from “TransLutherans.” And, at the other end was a letter from “The Sons of Nahum,” comparing Biden to Nineveh.  I was practicing synesthesia and imagining the TransLutherans as canary yellow and Nahum as a purple fading to rose. But it wasn’t working; that is, I was only imagining it, I didn’t see the colors; I was only telling myself the words, “canary yellow,” “rose.”

the TransLutheran Flag

“Where is Miss Virginia in this?” Axel looked up from following the next-to-the-last piece of post into the trash can under his desk. By “Miss Virginia” he meant the priest at St. Jude’s, the former Miss Virginia, Susan, Uncle Albert’s priest; by  “in this” he meant his impending demise. He meant, “Isn’t Albert’s dying her job?” But he wouldn’t say that.
     “I don’t know,” I said. Miss Virginia had become something of a ghost since her divorce. She was there and she was not there. You couldn’t point to her not being there, for the moment you extended your finger, there she was. But the moment you put your hand down, she was gone again.
     “Well,” Axel shrugged, meaning he didn’t mean to be throwing stones. He would be the last to pick one up, other than to put it in his pocket and bring it back to his study for a paperweight.
     There was a knock on the door. It was Nils but not there to see his brother. He had been by the house. Uncle Albert told him I was here.

“You didn’t finish your Masters series,” Nils said to me. “I was disappointed. You needed to go on: ‘Passover is a tradition like no other, the Masters is a damn golf tournament.’ ‘Easter is a tradition like no other, The Masters is a damn golf tournament.’
     “‘The Masters is not a tradition like no other; it is a pretension like no other. There are church, synagogue, and family picnics older than the Masters that let Blacks play in the softball game before 1975, and that welcomed at least one African American into the family before 1990.’* You could have gone on and on. I was disappointed.”
     “Sorry,” I said.
     “Well,” Nils said. What he meant was, “You should be, but you are who you are.” By “you are who you are” he meant I wasn’t angry enough. Anger is whatever is between purple and red though I couldn’t see it; I couldn’t even for the moment find the word. Not raspberry. Not plum.

After Nils left, Axel said. “I love my brother, but he’s not the Angry Man (capital-A, capital-M) he wishes he were. And, both sadly and to his credit, he knows it.”
     “No,” I said, both statement and question.
     “He’s the irritated man he wishes he weren’t,” Axel said. “Small-i, small-m.”
     I looked up from my color wheel, meaning “go on.” Axel opened his eyes a bit wider, then shook his head. “That’s it,” he said. “It’s sad but true.” He meant by “sad but true” that none of us is as big as he wishes he were.
     “It’s Dad’s fault,” Axel said.
     “How’s that?”
     “Just is,” Axel said.
                                                                            03.29.23

_______________
* Lee Elder was the first African American to play in the tournament – in 1975. Augusta National’s first African-American member was Ron Townsend, former president and general manager of television station WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C.

Friday

‘Good Friday is a “tradition like no other.” The Masters is a damn golf tournament.’
                                                                                                                             — Uncle Albert.

Thursday

‘Maundy Thursday is a “tradition like no other.” The Masters is a damn golf tournament.’
                                                                                                                             — Uncle Albert.