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