April 21, 2014

Easter Monday. Gout medicine disagreed with my stomach, so it was an interesting night. In its last dream, Julie Andrews had turned into a champion of Icelandic culture, and I was an Icelandic schoolteacher who was to receive and honor her in my classroom. Despairing of how to decorate, I’d asked around, and returned to find the stairway to my classroom blocked with pots of vibrant red flowers, which were, apparently, the symbols of local culture. All I had to do was arrange them about the room and wait for Miss Andrews to arrive.

People blame wine for the gout, and I have recently increased my intake, so–

Made a comment about Easter on Facebook in which I said it is experiential, that if you have been transformed by the event, you believe one thing, and if you have not, another. Amid the cloud of agreements were one or two who flatly insisted that no such experience existed, and to have had it, then, was a form of delusion, or that one lied in saying so. My original point was that if one had not had the experience, it lies outside of one’s sphere of competence to evaluate, but there are people who are, evidently, so wise as to be excluded from that rule. Cynics do not generally understand how faith-based their convictions are, how much rests on vehement scorn for things which, to wiser people, are everyday truths and open doors– on things which the cynics do not, in short, understand. Let me not sit in the seat of the scoffers. Even when I think something’s really stupid.

In moments I will go back to 62 and fetch the pitcher plants back to Lawrence’s pool.