Sunday, March 4, 2012

March 4: Project Memoir Part 1, New Cartoon

Well, today I'm stepping away from A Christmas Carol to make good on my Lenten obligation.  Not to worry.  Tomorrow I will return to Ebenezer and Fred and Jacob and all the ghosts.

However, I have the first part of the introduction to my memoir complete.  I've been working on it all weekend.  Remember, this is a rough draft.  When I say rough, I mean rough.  Be kind to it.

Saint Marty presents Project Memoir Part 1.

Confessions of Saint Marty

Prelude

January 1:  Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

Don't expect any of that Saint Augustine crap about praising God and restless hearts here.  It was the end of one of the best and worst years of my life, and I felt like shit.  I was forty, and a finger of pain was digging into my stomach.  It was probably muscular, a reminder of an hour-and-a-half-long sled ride I gave my seven-year-old daughter, Celeste, earlier in the day.  We were delivering some late Christmas presents to friends.  As the two-mile trek dragged on, my daughter got heavier and heavier, as if all the laws of inertia and friction, all the Newtonian principles governing the universe, were riding in the sled with her.  By the time we got home, I was drenched in sweat, and my arms felt strangely light, as if they were floating in water.  By nine o'clock at night, I couldn't rise from the couch without grunting like an eighty-year old man with bad circulation and emphysema.

In my more paranoid moments during the evening, I diagnosed myself with the early symptoms of a heart attack or some fatal abdominal aneurysm that was preparing to unleash a comet of blood into my body.  My maternal grandfather died of stomach cancer.  My mother, a no-nonsense woman of Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, told me stories about how she would bring him a bowl of soup when she was my daughter's age.  My grandfather would eat the soup, laughing and joking with her.  When she left his bedroom and closed the door, she'd hear him throwing up in a metal bucket.

I looked over at my daughter, sleeping next to me on the couch, her auburn hair nested around her head, her cheeks flushed, her breaths deep and even.  A jolt of pain in my belly, and I thought of my grandfather and the bucket.  I wanted to see my daughter grow up, her already long limbs stretching, reaching like a crocus toward spring sun.

Another muscle spasm.  The previous evening, my sister had phoned me.  "So, we're decorating for the New Year's Eve party tomorrow morning."

I waited for her to say something more. The party, an annual event at my parents' house, required a few hours of hanging streamers and inflating balloons.  We cooked pizzas, chopped fruit, and wrapped pigs in a blanket.  I was usually in the thick of all these preparations, had been every year since I was about thirteen.

"I'm not coming," I said.

"That's what I kind of figured," my sister said.

My wife, Beth, and I were struggling back from the brink of divorce, and my parents and siblings weren't making it any easier.  On Christmas day, my father, a tiny granite of a man, stood next to me in St. John's while I took a picture of my daughter in her dress in front of the manger scene.  He said, so only I could hear him, "This is a one-time deal.  Your wife can come over to the house for Christmas for your daughter's sake."  He sounded like Don Corleone.  If I violated the terms of his offer, I'd wake up with a horse head at the foot of my bed.

That was why I was sitting at home with my daughter on New Year's Eve, alone, sore and tired, waiting for my wife to get off work.  Mother Teresa, in a letter to a friend, once wrote, "Jesus has a very special love for you.  As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear."  As the clock approached ten o'clock, I understood the silence, the emptiness she was talking about.

A few days earlier, I'd gone to a local Catholic bookstore and bought an illustrated copy of the Lives of the Saints.  I couldn't completely explain my impulse for the purchase.  It had something to do with the Lives of the Saints I read as a child.  That one was burgundy-covered with the title embossed in gold letters.  Inside were portraits of men and women, boys and girls, in hues of red, white, and brown.  The sky was always Easter egg pink; the sun, bright as salt.  The saints themselves were always smiling, suffused with a gauzy happiness, like Donna Reed staring up at Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life.  The illustrations made being stoned to death or shishkabobbed with arrows seem almost orgasmic.  They looked so goddamned happy.  All the time.  That's what I was looking for.

Mrs. McDonald, my first grade religion teacher, once saw me reading the story of Saint Stephen.  "You could be a saint, too," she said, "if you try hard enough."  At the time, I didn't have the heart to tell Mrs. McDonald I was just looking at the pictures, Stephen's forehead bloody and crushed by stones thrown by a pagan mob.  This December 31, though, I wanted to believe Mrs. McDonald.  I was desperate to believe her.

My daughter and I had driven to Wal-Mart earlier in the evening to have dinner with Beth, who was working the late shift at the deli.  The store was busy, people picking up last-minute beer and booze and ham for their parties.  Every customer seemed to radiate anticipation, as if they were all about to sprout wings and soar off to Times Square.  Anything seemed possible under the fluorescent lights.  I chalked it up to alcohol consumption, or the anticipation of alcohol consumption, as my wife finished slicing some roast beef and emerged from behind the meat case.

She gave me a quick kiss and whispered in my ear, "Just to let you know, I'm dropping an egg right now."

To be continued...

Confessions of Saint Marty


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