Jeanne turned and smiled at her lunch guests. Not long before this charade was over.
She held the first
two plates – salmon roulade, rocket leaves, a drizzle of balsamic reduction –
in either hand as she approached the huge cedar dining table beneath their
kitchen’s weathered eaves.
Her husband, James
Bassett, looked round at her fondly as she approached the table, his glasses
sliding slightly down his nose. He’d started sweating already. But then, that
was hardly surprising when you were forty pounds overweight.
“Here we go”,
Jeanne announced with a forced grin.
She set a plate
down in front of Dave’s girlfriend, a blonde twig in her early thirties who
looked like she hadn’t eaten a full meal in years.…
It’s Monday night, and a car is blocking the dumpster with the DO NOT BLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT sign on it. And there was never any hope that things would go as hoped.
Walking home from my job I wanted, on the morning of day one, to love, I might as well be putting a book over my heart and allowing the bullet through anyway. There was never any hope for such a thing
as being born to be ecstatic about everything. The traffic at this intersection is just terrible. The little store sells beer to minors. I’m out of gum. I refuse to go in there,
where the light of the world is so dim. God knows when you’re in a rotten mood you should just examine your knuckles,
as much as your skin will allow, get home from your job, or wherever you’ve been, and sit down and examine your invisible
The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about (True Grit 42).
I was raised
Methodist and have thought a lot about it. Most of my thinking occurred after I
left the church, for while I was a member, what I mainly thought about was the
drudgery of attending Sunday school and church each week; the horror of the
torturous deaths in both testaments; and the reality that my only interests in
attending church at all were (1) singing hymns both in the choir on Sunday
evenings and in the congregation on Sunday morning, and (2) sitting next to my
adolescent peers on those same mornings, playing games of hangman or, if I were
really lucky, rubbing legs with some equally squirmy girl.…
