On the road doing shows for Holy Week

I grew up fundamentalist so we didn’t do Easter and our little girls didn’t get bright new pastel jackets and lace bonnets and white gloves because we celebrated Christ’s resurrection all year round, not only in April, but now I’m Episcopalian and so I find fresh flowers in church and a buoyant mood, the hymns are of a hallelujah nature, the pews are packed, and during the Exchange of Peace when we usually shake hands, there may be some hugging. Sanctified Brethren were not huggers. We thought it might lead to dancing.

You can take the boy out of the Brethren but you can’t take the Brethren out of the boy and sometimes my wife looks at me and says, “Please smile” and I do but only for a moment. I go through life with the demeanor of a pallbearer and I’m almost 83. There are very few photographs of me smiling and the smiles strike me as forced. Inside, I’m generally rather happy or at least content, I love this woman, am grateful for my life, which has been elongated by open-heart surgery (thank you, Dr. Orszulak and Dr. Dearani) and anti-seizure meds and blood thinner, enjoy my work, am glad that I long ago quit smoking and drinking and gave up golf. But I look like a man whose dog died, though I haven’t had a dog for fifty years. Dogs are wary of me, probably feeling I will chastise them for their iniquities.

Is there cosmetic surgery that can repair a fundamentalist face? Some liposuction to loosen the lips and collagen injections to make a reliable grin with a guarantee it wouldn’t eventually turn into a smirk or leer?

Seriously, I believe in Easter, whatever terms you use — resurrection, transformation, metamorphosis, conversion, renewal — the opportunity for a person to shed pretense and delusion and resentment and be free — it’s never too late, that the 80s can be the best time of your life — that Donald John Trump could become a nice person, learn how to apologize, to express sympathy, pet a dog, tell a joke, pick up a small child and talk to it, take up folk dancing, lead men’s Bible study, not refer to his critics as scumbags. I honestly do. I believe the South African car dealer could become a philanthropist, give his little boy a name, adopt stray animals, join the Bible study group.

I went through a transformation in my mid-twenties, nothing so dramatic as those, but I dumped my undergraduate English lit courses that taught that great literature is weepy, jittery, gloomy, paranoid. Professor Foster lectured one day on Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which he said was a meditation on death, but I’d heard Frost recite it once and clearly it was a poem about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. The profs didn’t teach Mark Twain or Dickens. And they ignored Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale, the young Absolon singing to Alisoun one night at her bedroom window and she lets him kiss her but she sticks her butt out the window and he kisses that and is furious and goes and gets a hot poker and comes back and asks for another kiss and Alisoun’s lover for a joke sticks his butt out the window and lets a fart and Absolon sticks the hot poker in him. This is the beginning of English lit. It changed my life. I started writing limericks.

Kafka was lonely in Prague And lived in a neurotic fog, Groaning and keening And longing for meaning — He should’ve just gotten a dog.

And so, instead of a career teaching college sophomores to despise poetry, I’m on the road doing a solo show for elderly people my age wanting an evening free from thoughts about the car dealer and the scumbagger. It’s a good life. And it wasn’t the result of an aptitude test or counseling or sitting in a circle of folding chairs with other people trying to find themselves, it was purely an accident. I have no ambition to be taken seriously, I’m just another version of the home health-care nurse, I go when called to people who need me. On Good Maundy Thursday I was in Amherst.

Emily D. of Amherst Never was vulgar or cursed Except when birds Dropped little turds, She said, “Poop” but that was the worst.

Bless your heart.

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