Of All the Times to Tell You

I don’t know why I feel late today. I was the first one in the lot, the first one, an hour early, alone, waiting in the rain under Saint Teresa’s white chapel. I feel like I should’ve been here decades ago I’m so late. I know that doesn’t make sense.

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I can’t help but picture the scenes from that one movie, I think it was black and white, of the children running and screaming, tripping on the blacktop to make it up the slick hill to the door of the church. And that one straggler off in the distance. I see him slip and fall, Extra Fifteen or something, carried up and away by a swarm of crows. And oof there goes his carotid artery all over the windows of the old schoolbus, poor bastard. Who knows if that’s what actually happened in the movie, you never let me watch it as a kid. The Birds, that’s what it was, from 1963. I meant to see it, you know. I meant to sneak out with my buds on a Friday, when Halloween rolled around. It’s a little late for that, I know.

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I never much minded the rain. It has a nice constancy. But your memorial just inched itself closer, intensified the sweat building between the bones of my shoulder. Don’t take any offense, but I hated to go inside. You know me, I wasn’t meant for the indoors. I met the preacher, minister, whatever man in his raincoat when he got here. He went back behind the church to start the heating system, and I thought, you’d have thought it a funny thing, a church like this, like a one room schoolhouse, having a heating system, blowing the hot, holy dust from the holy eaves.

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The preacher told me to come in or stay out, he said I’d let the cold in with a frown like mine, standing with the door open. Prick. As if a crack in the door would let the sanctity of the place loose. I don’t even know what kind of a church this is. I just saw the Big Book. Catholic, Christian, Presbyterian; it’s all the same to me.

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I waited outside while more cars showed. A bunch of old folks arrived out of their carpools and went inside, cursing at the sky. They awed at the stained glass vignettes of angels and miracles set in the white paneled walls of the chapel, and they crossed their hearts, praising hallelujah to wipe their heels on the doormat. You’d have thought the rain was fire to see them running out of it, all of them. You really drew a crowd of your own. I wondered if they’d all fit, all those old bodies and white hairs in their mink and tweed. I wondered more how it would smell. 

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You know, I’d bet that I was the youngest in the room. Your highschool basketball coach made it all the way out here to see you, you know. I’ll be straight with you, dad, I’m going grey, but fuck, you were pushing ancient.

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When I did go inside, I saw how they did you up in your urn. A metal milk jug of grandpa’s and a baseball cap to top it off. They had you up front of the aisle before the altar on two plastic folding tables, up front of the twelve foot tall saint, the one with Dollar Tree doves hot glued to his shoulders and feathers on a gold painted halo. What a holy image. It took them twenty minutes to lay out three pictures of you and two of your old bombers. You’d think it was your wedding day for Christ’s sake. People crying, people smiling. It’s not a funeral, they said, it’s a celebration of life. My ass. Something like this can’t be smiled away.

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And you can’t fool the people who knew you. I never saw you smile so much in all of your seventy three years than in those portraits they put up of you. I guess it only takes three good, well posed photos to do that, to show your best angle. But I know you’re smiling now, somewhere, with the cherubs and the winged angels in the silk and the gold. You get to look down on everything from where you are in the up-high. Death does that to people, it’s part of the deal, it’s innate to the thing. Even the egoists get to be omniscient in the end. I bet if you were here and I asked you, you’d know that they propped one of your photos up on a bucket of red vines from the trunk of my wife’s car. I bet you’d even know how many months that bucket’s been there with the sand and the beach towels. You might smile at that. But I know you wouldn’t be smiling at me. I’m not omniscient, but somehow I know it. 

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I gave the door frame a good kick on the way in to the church to get the mud off my boots. I did my best to ignore the folks on my way by, not because I don’t like them or anything, but they look at me like you would look at me. They want to bring me close and shake me with sympathy and with words that make me feel like a damn kid. Well, I’m not a kid. 

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I walked down the aisle and squeezed mom’s hand on the way, angel that she is with her pink cheeks. She sat in her pew, front and center. Everyone came to see her. I sat by the wall. I was right about the smell. Once the heaters got going and the hot air was blowing up between the bodies of every person over fifty, it was like putting your nose over a rain barrel after the pollen’s had its spring fling.

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I love mom. She’s the best thing that ever happened to the family. She wore her Kirkland white sweatshirt, she had her hanky, one of your old walking canes from the cabin, and a band aid on her chin. You must see a lot of stuff in the ether, so you must know that she fell last week. She ditched the hospital for this gig. I’d go to hell if I didn’t stay for the whole thing.

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