We went to mass under a crumpled aluminum sky (not the one pictured here but maybe more on that later). The place was packed, natch, with all of the faces of the faithful and the ripe young fleshes of men and women alike in their fineries and all the olds and the crusteds stolidly in attendance and the children, impish, among the pews and howling unimportunely. Uly asked about the elevated crucifix and remembered that image from the story we told him at Good Friday's dinner table about Christ's Passion. Later, we dined on brunch at Klondike Mike's - omelettes to order, biscuits and gravy, cornbeef hash, home fries, sausage, fruit, beer, hockey. The "chef" was a young man in a RVCA hat on his last cooking gig in Alaska, on his way to greener pastures at a potato chip factory in Ohio. All to think about was absurd impermanence and biological decay.
On Friday, I learned that one of the Moosehead regulars, a woman who had signed on as witness to A's and my union, had perished. Doris would sit at the end of the bar and drink Miller Lites in between cigarettes and playing pulltabs. Her native face drooped and sagged like viscous putty as she ripped open the gambling tickets, the losers she piled into a basket on the bar surface before her. Her husband, Lon, white, equally wizened, sometimes drank iced tea and othertimes beer with their smokes, Winstons. We went to get beers at the store later and A went in as Uly and I waited in the car and listened to The Cardigans. When she came back, she said she had run into Carol, the other witness to our marriage and barkeep at the Moosehead. Carol was with her grandson and when A gave condolences, Carol reportedly said it was all for the best and that now, Doris was in a place where she could finally breathe again.
I'm in this motherfucking cafe, this fucking hell of a fucking place, crying like a bitch.
Biked into town for a beer recharge for A and a little alone time for me on a blustery Easter afternoon. Earlier, we had tie-dyed shirts with the leftover homemade egg dye A and Uly alchemized. The wind was brutal, magnificent. We had poked about at the last year's decay of our flowerbeds and tried to piece together what had been spared last year's culling and what had been introduced, new. Uly cut at the shooting grass with his child's scissors. The fat orange cat huddled by an exhaust vent. We discovered two starts of baneberry that must be dispatched another season. The cranberry stalks bore sign of summer sproutings. Now, it's this, and writing here, and another uselessly entropizing plunge into nothingness and the begged for storage of memories of a day wherein the baptismal renewal of Father Joseph's slinging hit my own and Uly's head and there was much experience and the sky remained and the earth persisted and this fiction keeps rolling on, rolling on, rolling.
Do I reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises? I do reject them.
Feet don't fail me now.
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