March 16, 2008

Moon in its one ugly moment, a shape without a name, like a marble dropped in blue jelly.

Supper at J and L’s, talking of the coming recession and our old age when we will be alone and homeless. That, or L’s building projects. Don’t know which is worse.

Palm Sunday Passion reading came off beautifully, Cody wowing them (is it right to wow a congregation?) with the beauty if his voice and the beauty of his person. All I asked to be a part were faithful; all were good. Heather and Michael, two Jews, were fascinated by what they saw in their first church service, and wanted to partake of everything. I tried to convince them it was all right to take communion if they felt so moved, but neither went quite so far. Cody–a former Texas Baptist-- couldn’t believe there was no hellfire and damnation. The last great burden is off me for a while, and I mean to keep the burdens off. If I can fib or persuade my way free of jury duty tomorrow, all shall be well indeed. I suppose that the building and the people and the situation make me physically sick would not be taken as an excuse, though it is completely true.

I have not been invited to Alaska. Crushing to me. I had already been planning the trip in my head. I’d launched into my reflexive routine about how it was impossible that any of the scripts were better than mine, and so what mendacity led them to leave me out, bla bla bla, when suddenly I flashed on a moment forty years and more gone. I was in the fifth grade, and it came time to take volunteers to be police boys on the campus of Betty Jane Elementary School. I volunteered. I thought I was a shoo-in because I was always good and never got into trouble and was certainly an example that all the teachers wanted other students to follow, but when the names were chosen, they were all the big, bad boys, tormentors and playground-rule violators to a one. I was flabbergasted. My enduring sense of violation and betrayal probably came into being at that instant, my vision of my own deserving and their unworthiness was so overpoweringly strong, so incapable of alteration. Of course, the fact is that I would have made a lousy police boy, and they made rather good ones. Don’t know exactly what message this is. Some day I might recognize it as a comfort.