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

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* 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.