…Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up as a little girl with flowers. —Yehuda Amichai, Memorial Day for the War Dead
Americans spend their Memorial Day and its weekend roasting hotdogs and going to the beach, occasionally stopping by a cemetery to put a flag on the grave of a dead service person.
My father was in the navy. My cousins were in the army and would come home on leave with beer steins from Germany, or Korean dolls. It’s the way poor people from Kentucky could get ahead, maybe go to college. When my cousin’s kids grew up they enlisted, too, along with my sister’s oldest boy. By then it was the family business. If I’d gone to med school before hitting the road as a missionary, I would have ended up there, too.
I remember going to a parade, once, in a small town in upstate New York. There were blooms of patriotic bunting over the Main Street, flags on skinny sticks from every facade, old men exploding the buttons of their beige World War Two and Korean uniforms, Viet Nam vets with long hair and biker jackets. They looked uncomfortable, like they didn’t quite know why they were there on the streets with the geezers and a marching band. Little kids gaped at them from the sidewalk.
After living in New York almost a decade where you only saw flags over used car lots, it felt weird, otherworldly even standing there in this small town in the sun staring at the men, and the tiny brigade of female nurses. Maybe it was. All our worlds co-existing but on different planes. The one I was standing in was primitive and hot, populated by the dead who were briefly more real than the living. Afterwards, the Girl and I bought soft serve ice cream and licked it as fast as we could.
In France, meanwhile, we celebrate Pentecost and Whit Monday. The country isn’t very religious anymore, but who doesn’t like a day off?
I always liked the story of Pentecost. That after Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, he spent a few weeks surprising his friends, and then went back up to heaven. But things weren’t quite over. The apostles were hanging out having dinner together, and celebrating the Jewish Feast of Weeks—which happens fifty days after Passover—when there was suddenly a mighty rushing wind and little flames appeared over them, entered them, and they started to speak in tongues.
Christ said he would baptize his followers with the Holy Spirit, and there it was. I always thought that would be cool— to speak in tongues. I definitely believed it was possible. Like I believed God could still do miracles and the stories of them weren’t just dead words in a dead book. It’s just that miracles weren’t part of my daily life.
It was like going in the ocean but sticking close enough to the shore that you could still feel the bottom with your feet, while the mysterious stuff was further out, deeper. Like at school, I’d listen to the teacher talk about evolution but somehow it was still also true that the whole creation of the earth had taken six days with one off to play hooky, it just happened that way in some other dimension.
Still, when I got invited to a Pentecostal church I asked my mom if I could go. She said yes. The guy used to go my church. She knew his mother. So I climbed in his second-hand Corvette and we set off.
I think we sang hymns for a while, and the preacher preached. When emotions were good and high, people lined up in front of the pulpit and the preacher anointed their foreheads with holy oil and almost immediately they began mumbling and babbling, their hands raised to God.
Then it was my turn, and I remember submitting to the greasy touch of some strange man on my forehead, and then going back to my seat, raising my hands to God and waiting for ecstasy, while Chip said, “Go ahead, speak, let it come.” I opened my mouth and went, “Uh, uhm, erm,” which was just me clearing my throat. And Chip said, “Look, you’re doing it. Praise God,” then babbled away himself, his eyes rolled up in his head while the preacher shouted and I stood there self-conscious, silent, battered by the surf.
In Other News
Another piece tangentially thinking about social development and constant smartphone use which means you never have your attention where your body is. As one mother says about her daughter, “I want her to experience life through her own experiences, not comparing herself to what other people are doing on their phones. Or to do things just to take a picture of it so that she can show it off on social media.”
My thought after reading the article—no wonder kids these days aren’t having sex (tho they’re watching porn). There’s something about feeling like you’re looking at others looking at you looking at them at you at them at you that makes it seem like far too great a risk.
That’s it for this time.
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xoxo K