Memorial days

A vacation, or holiday, supposed, but the hammock waits every day, faithful, regardless, for the taking.

The career never came; instead, the hammock, landlocked, constricted by the copse of cool trees. Yesterday, he saw an oriole. Or something orange enough to make him gasp.

Mary sang to him, enlightening, "He has shown strength with his arm, He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, He has put down the mighty from their thrones, And exalted those of low degree; He has filled the hungry with good things, And the rich he has sent away empty."

So Luke recounted to him, as he paged through "The Politics of Jesus" by John Howard Yoder, a book picked up some 35 years belated, alternating as he rocked with a Spanish translation of El hombre duplicado of Saramago. And drank coffee, colder and sweeter with each sip before setting it back in the dirt.

He went to church, late, wearing short pants, while a convert, a friend, delivered his first-time-to-the-pulpit sermon, wore a tie. The novice preacher spoke the serenity prayer to begin, setting a perfect pitch of humility. He spoke of power and peanuts, of sharing and service and selflessless.

The sharing time involved many proclaiming their careers, their travels, their sabbaticals, their plans to relocate to lakes, to Ontario, to other Edens, temporarily, and the clarity of their requests for prayers seemed more like boasts when they should have been laments. They would miss the return of the oriole, probably.

He left church early, so as not to diminish the thoughts with coffee and conversation and the cheer of fraternity. The fellowship needed another day, not this day, not this morning, when he realized how much apart from love he had strayed, how eaten up he had become with the strife from the evangelical dogma of neighboring congregations, with the anger of letters, of killing, of justification, of politics, of wrangling by those who refute reason with misinterpreted law.

When he got home, he made more coffee and returned to two-fisted study, Yoder and Saramago, peace and mystery, until the bird returns.

He did not want to go shopping for the holiday. He did not want to move. He did not need to move. It all came back to him. A smell of Mexico City. A flavor of Provence. A street sound that positioned him in Manhattan. Everything is illuminated and rocks. He rocks.