PINTA PARADE

 

            It is Sunday and my paper bag is fraught with rubber banded twisted stems. My bag is around my shoulder. I am tackling one side of the street while my parents are planting papers inside the mailboxes and the screen doors of the other side of the street. It is January but it is not freezing, bristle bone chilling January. Sunday mornings the paper come pregnant with inserts, comics, coupons and adds. We march from house to house.


The last time I saw Renae was three days after Christmas, at the mall, where everyone turned up.

 

 

Myself, always with coffee mug or Styrofoam chalice, especially at Church, where after the service is dismissed and the hymnals are slid into their respective diminutive wooden vats—Reverend Schudde sliding down the aisle clad in the unblemished bed sheet white of his cloak, floating down the center aisle with the Assoc. Pastor Disbro where, halfway down the vector of the cross shaped aisle, the pastor who gave the sermon proceeds straight to the back of the standing congregation, head bowed in reverence like obedient husks, the other pastor veering right, so that they stand upright and sentinel flanking the exits totemic in posture, erect. The hem of their gowns a ghastly wisp as they float to their respective positions, palms splayed out like a lever at a gas pump, tightly squeezing the by-passing  palms of Sunday-dressed best bodies floating past him in a herd of ties and gray hairs and wrinkles. My family, always, sitting up in the front row, sitting up near the altar; near the light. Mother squiggling down everything the Pastor says in her spiral notebook in a current of chapped ink. My father, remaining hushed, standing, sitting, his hands and fingers coalesced in a flesh bouquet near his waist designating prayer—the same method his hands will be crossed near his waist as he lay supine in his coffin in less than a decade—unbeknownst to any of us. I sit next to my father, the coated backroom of his heavy breath skiing over the splayed open landscape of the Lutheran worship and my father’s harvest baritone resonates with prayer and thanksgiving, caroling out a brute hallelujahs in veneration for that being who has navigated his life. I stand next to father, my glasses resting heavy around my eyes, sunken into the slope of my nose so that when they are removed it leaves an arch of creased flesh. I stand next to my father, feel his breath hushing out across musical soil of the hymnal—hear his voice as he is singing praises brushing through the opening of his countenance directing into the metaphysical welkin in the ceiling to the one who is the answer and who will provide—his faith, childlike and benevolent. His kindness and heart to strangers. My father, next to me—his voice and breath and organs and heart, snapping a glimpse of my father from the periphery of my vision, from the sight of my eye where vision slips past the taupe frames of my thick glasses, catching my father’s forehead and sand-flecked swirled gray hair, I mentally compare my height to my father as we stand, father and son, holding our hymnals out into the white marble of the front altar which is clad in a purple cloth emblematic of Lent, singing praises in joy and ardor to the only God I have ever known. 

 

After we grapple and shake the clutched palms of the pastors as we exit the sanctuary, skiing down the ramp into the old school where all Sunday school classes are held. I am fifteen. .

I come home. I look at the mirror in my parents bedroom. I pour myself a cup of coffee.


 I realize that this is the time and that I know have to do what needs to be done anyway. I need to break up with Renae.

Without thinking I reach for the phone.