When Derrick first saw the vintage Indian scarf I hung up on my wall the other day, his eyes went wonder-wide and globe-y, big blue sky marble and sniff-sniff-what's this. I later found one of the sequins on the pillow, so I'm guessing he was enchanted by the way they glimmer enough to explore, all paw thump and nosebump.
He actually reminded me of myself the other night, when I was running on the East River right as night fell. Have you noticed how silent, how aching, how beautiful and secret the sky is in November? I think it has to be my favorite. Anyway, as the light fades the sky goes all stripey, from robin's egg to royal to naval to midnight, and the river gets all moony and gentle like a bathtub, and I'm like OMG…Sky! How can I have never seen you like this? Like I've had a crush on you my whole life, and finally this is our first date, you're all twinkly and dressed in velvet and whispers.
A couple months after I made my First Holy Communion, I was stopped by our parish priest, Father Huntington, on my way home from school. I can still remember walking next to a vacant lot between our house and the Larsens’; it was all lion-colored dried grass, a nice big mighty zero with plenty of space to hold my intense little-girl thoughts.
Anyway, Father Huntington, tall and stern and white-headed and looming large a la Snow Miser in "The Year Without a Santa Claus," stopped me to tell me there was a problem with my behavior at mass.
It seems I was biting his finger in my fervor to receive the Body of Christ.
Oh, groan. Even now I cringe for my younger self, and how completely embarrassed I felt at the time. I had an eating problem as it was, getting up at 5 a.m. to stuff my face with miniature Reese’s peanut butter cups out of the freezer, so I somehow tied that intense, insatiable, shameful hunger—for what?! Oh, so much!—to my priest-biting tendencies. I mean, it’s gotta be bad when the communion host is viewed as an hors d'oeuvres. We then practiced the receiving of communion multiple times, right there on the street, until I could successfully slide my tongue back into my mouth without grinding my teeth together like some sort of rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth creature.
Ha ha now, but then--not so much. I went home crying, this strange mix of shame and excitement that someone paid attention to me, and told my parents. They thought it was funny, but what do you expect? The last 4 digits of our phone number made the sign of the cross, for chrissake. (Oops. Sorry.) I hope we’ve made up since, but I really felt like I’d fallen out of favor with Jesus & co. Transubstantiation? More like a lil’ snack from a Catholic box of Rice Chex. I know, I know, that’s not funny. My 7-year-old self just couldn’t fully fathom that level of miracle/mystery.
Fear biter? I don’t know, but it’s funny how the sacred and profane are always meeting up. It’s like if you don’t invite them both to the party, whoever didn’t get the invite is gonna crash it anyway. Like I recently found this completely ridonkulous poem I wrote oh so long ago (musta been circa 1995 per the title), and it’s sort of a strange but fitting running mate for my communion story… I don’t think I’ve showed it to anyone before, so please go easy on me. (I have no idea what prompted it, but boy, I must have been PMS or just read The Handmaid’s Tale!) Go ahead and laugh—I promise I won’t bite ; )
millionmanmarch
i am sick.
i swim in
the dizzy bright white of nausea,
catch a breath and vomit
gallons of sperm.
every last drop
swallowed by the whole of womankind,
ever.
now i know why smart girls spit:
it’s hard on
the stomach.
so, yes i drool and
sigh as it inches down a thigh,
wormsquirming past my knee only
to stall at a phlegmcrawl, stuck in unshaved traffic.
oh and at the time i meant to scream
but all i got was a mouthful.
next time will be different:
one false move and off with his head
Brian on the above song, the vocals for which were recorded in 1966: "I was sitting at my piano thinkin' about holy music. I poked around for some simple but moving chords. The boys were overtaken by the arrangement. I taught it to them in sections, the way I usually do. The purity of the blending of the voices made the listeners feel spiritual. I was definitely into rock church music."
No post on the sacred/profane is complete w/o a Prince song. I know, I should have gone for the cheap thrill and featured "Head," but that's just so obvious, isn't it? You can always find it on YouTube and read the comment from the poor guy who sang it, when he was 8 and didn't know what the lyrics meant, at his grandfather's birthday party.
Second time I'm using this song in a blog. Who's gonna complain?
I’m fine with that. I think meditating is like doing pirouettes, where you have to get worse at 'em before you get better. Try to do one more than you usually do and the first few times you’re knocked on your ass or out of orbit, flailing and flapping all chickenly. It’d be hard for a chicken to do a pirouette, though, since they’re all about head bobbing. Can you even imagine? That would just get confusing for both chicken and viewer, should the chicken be on, say, Dancing with the Stars…
Argghhh! Digress? Yes! But actually that’s exactly what happens in meditation. Thoughts fly in out of nowhere, and you’re supposed to let them float by like clouds. I had one thought recently during meditation that was so enticing, calling to me like a Siren—oh, let’s up the ante and make it a dark chocolate-wielding Siren with a basket of French bulldog puppies—that I had to just freakin’ flow with it.
I don’t know if it had to do with the fact that I was sitting directly in front of the air conditioning unit, but I started thinking about major league-level peace as a gi-normous snow-covered mountain.
Oh wait, it’s not just a mountain…it’s a cat as big as one! We’re talking Himalayan-sized, fur bright & snow-white. The cat’s shoulder blades form a big valley, the line of the spine a ridge, the tail a trail to the mountain’s base… And since we’re in the Himalayas, that means hundreds of gi-normous kitties all hanging out together!
It’s sort of surprising that I would envision peace as a mountain, since I function optimally at sea level. OK, I get majorly creeped out at the thought of being landlocked. I didn’t realize this until my infamous Denver vacation in the late 1990s. Here I am at the Buffalo Bill museum in Golden on our first full day, smiling like an idiot who had no idea in 20 minutes she’d be passing out just outside the door of her hotel room:
Even though we’d also just toured the Hakushika Sake Factory, I wasn’t drunk—I didn’t even take a sip! I realize in hindsight I must have been finishing up acclimating to the higher elevation, because I was right as rain after that, line dancing and riding the mechanical bull at the Grizzly Rose and hiking like a pro…until I read the travel guide in the car en route to Colorado Springs. Elevation sickness…what the heck is that?
So, of course, over the next few hours I gradually began to cook up interesting symptoms for myself, like dizziness and shortness of breath. I did such good work that my friend and cotraveler Petra had to drive me to the emergency room in the middle of the night, where they determined the level of oxygen in my blood was higher than most Colorado natives, but gave me a bunch of it anyway. The ER doctor was so, so sweet, and told me in the kindest way to put a bag over my head and get therapy. (Dude, I’d been all over that already for years!)
Does it come down to this—that ignorance is bliss? Because I have in fact displayed my best self on a mountain top. Here, just check this out:
This photo was taken in Greece, roughly a decade before the Colorado incident. We’re on an archaeology field trip during my semester abroad in college, and I’m pretty sure we’re somewhere in the Peloponnesus. That thing in the middle is a big honkin’ loaf of bread that I did not carefully arrange as the scene suggests but FLUNG there randomly from many feet away. See how it landed so perfectly? At the time it seemed a powerful sign to me—art is random and magic and everyone has the power to create, and you can find it anywhere if you just take a chance.
I don’t know why I was throwing bread, but I am sorry, Greece, for littering. And I hope the birds ate it.
