I've been thinking a lot lately of days in the past. Childhood memories, good times from dusty days many calenders ago. I suppose it's a natural reaction to bad times in the present that you think back to good times in the past. I realize looking back that my memories don't seem to draw lines in the dust. They rarely have any story line at all. Events are nonlinear, they don't have plot, motivation or denouement. My histories are played back in flashbacks, glimpses of a scene more likely driven by sense than sensibility. I paint in scents and colors, broad strokes of intuition and vertigo. A scene can be written down in a poet's short stroke verse, but not in progressive prose.
This is frustrating. It seems impossible to learn any lessons from my past when all I have are glimpses, three dimensional, multi-sense still images. Without the context of the moment, I can't tell why its important, why my addled organic computer has chosen that instant to record and recall. every one of us is a product of our histories. The influence of deepening experience and the tracks of time are undeniable. Surely there is a larger direction, a theme, a guiding channel to the stream of time. If I aould just gain the correct perspective, I could say out loud, "Ah, so that's the road that led here. And so, ergo, this must be the road that leads ahead." I am destined to move forward without that bigger view, as I believe we all are. Part of the human condition is to seek the mountain top, the arial photo, and never to reach it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if my final words were "Oh! Now I get it! Well damn..."
Perhaps I've always been a sensualist in the classic meaning, for it's the tastes and smells that call me back to the emotions of a particular day. Somehow when I organize these details and fill in the structures, it pins down the butterfly and seals the glass case. No matter how fine, bejeweled and beloved, they are dead. They read like tasteless lies or, more offensive, they are simply boring. Let me suffer any number of hideous fates, toss me to the four winds and let me roam like an argonaut, but please, Lord, don't let me look back at my life and feel that I did nothing, that I saw no peaks or valleys. I suppose that it is the battle of every man to instill some deeper meaning into the lives we lead, even when they are routine. It may be the only thing that sustains our self image, the only thing that gives us the courage to stand up out of bed every morning and go outside to face the tedious wolves of the day. If we didn't hold to some sense of the divine, the magical, the bigger-than-I-am, our ego would simply surrender in the glare of the world. It would just be too much.
Easter
I can feel the grass reaching for the sun this year, just as I can most years in the spring, but somehow it's more this year. The first warm breezes smell like the spring in my childhood. Somehow images of spring are always tangled up with Easter in my memory. Religion was always an important subject growing up, and Easter was the second highest peak of the year for church going folk. First was Christmas, it seemed, but maybe only because of the presents. Greed and religion were hard to separate, especially as kids. Some people still haven't learned.
Easter was the sudden burst of light and breath into the dark chill world of the late winter. In the sunny south, I'm sure that it wasn't by any means the first warm weather of the year, but I always think of it in those terms. It made the warm days legitimate, invioble. Children burst forth in whiteness and finery, the sugar treats somehow a welcoming of the grace passed from christ through easter baskets into the blooming earth. In my memory, shimmering plastic easter grass migrates from theose brightly colored baskets and somehow mixes with the fine mist of green lawns and yellow-headed dandelions thrusting up from moist coffee-colored soil. I can see huge expanses of green lawn edged in lush growth of azaleas and the crucifix-white dogwood blooms. The smell of hyacinth bulbs bursting from the earth is intoxicating, like perfume on a soft warm breeze. The whole of goodness and warmth came full formed into welcomed being. I taste the sickly sweet, white sugar of the cheap candy eggs in glassine, crinkling cellophane. Malted chocalate eggs taste of the bitter chemical food color before melting into bliss. There are easter egg hunts with other children behind large white houses. At least, i think there were. I cannot name a single friend that lived in the big white house of my memory. Does that make it a fantasy instead of a memory? I don't know.
I do know that we always dyed boiled eggs for easter. Sitting at the kitchen table, small cups of assorted vintage scattered randomly across the newsprint-covered table top. The smell of the small amount of vinegar in the mix to make the store-bought dye tablets infuse the shells. Carefully lowereing the pristine eggs on little wire loops, or spare dinner spoons, into their colored baths. Inevitable my creative color mixing progressed to the point of a rendering naught but a thoroughly uninteresting brown. Brown was always useful, though. Before I arose on Easter morning, my father would hide a dozen eggs around one or two rooms of our house and I would start the day with my own personal egg hunt. The eggs were always carefully counted to assure we didn't leave a solitary, lost egg to pollute the indoor airwaves.
Easter also meant sunrise service. A short ceremony at the earliest peak of the dawning sun on Easter Sunday, with everyone bundled up against the pre-dawn chill. I can only remember one specific attendance of this service as a child, although I know my parents regularly made the early morning gesture. The metal bleachers at the high school field were hard and cold, and I was impatient, watching my breath fog ever so faintly as Pastor Dusty delivered his message and read some scripture. I was far to young and chocolate rabbit obsessed to catch the amazing symbolism as the sun climbed over the tree line to bathe the assembled in light and warmth. Now as I think back, I can still feel the cold aluminum bleacher, it's ridges and small pits and flaws rough to my touch. I can practically taste the chill on the clean, small-town air, and I think perhaps the scene has become somehow mythologized in my view. Looking back through the filters and blinders of adulthood and time, it seems a perfect metaphor of action, a tableau so sublime that I wonder if any assembled truly felt it's depth. I would like to believe that the officiant was far-thinking enough to plant this seed with the expectation that it would grow to this sort of mythology in the future, but daily actions are seldom held in that light. It is entirely possible that the mythic scale of the event was enhanced by its normality, its repetition. One Easter in a thousand sunrise services across the christian world, one small phrase of an ageless testimony. The repeated act becomes a chant, a sanctification of the coming of light, of warmth, of mercy, and of spring.
