To Talk of Many Things

I lit three candles.

The first somewhat inappropriate I suppose, since my grandfather was not fond of Catholic rituals. But I figure Lutheran is a good compromise between what he would have liked and what I need. My faith in ritual facing his stubborn elementary faith in God.
 
I lit a candle for my grandmother, too, though her heart still beats and her diaphragm contracts and sucks the stale air into the vacuum it creates. I am sure most people would find my private ritual today offensive. But I am lighting a candle in remembrance of a woman who is gone. All that she was with her sharp edges, bitter and strong - her "love" more readily written in fat letters on a Hallmark card than an embrace: read in the patience it takes to allow a 6 year-old to roll pie crust over wax paper, in the painfully tight snap of foam curlers. The world could be made exact and beautiful - but not without a measure of sacrifice - however small.

All that she was is dead. Etching into my childhood faith, the  faith in a meeting place where she might recognize my face among the cherubs and lost pets. She died in pieces, label by label lost and the world unrecognizable beyond cups and spoons. The last time I told her I loved her, on Christmas day, she was still polite to a stranger: Thank you, she said.

She is shattered, dead. Or I am, perhaps. What does that say of heaven?

The organist is playing something chipper. Practicing a baroque piece at a break-neck tempo. The tourists mill about the lectern. Taking photos without flash. I scribble in a notebook and wonder if my sitting here is appropriate. Somehow the notebook seems more acceptable among the pews than my laptop. Handwriting appropriate for contemplating the iconology of my childhood and the stripping of the trappings of my faith, like the labels falling from of my grandmother's memory, like fragments of a shattered shell: the definitions that held her form, defined her world, defined her in the world.

Has she hatched into something that I will one day recognize?

A woman lights a candle and crosses herself. I have tried that. In all the churches I went to in Rome. But the body language felt foreign. Feigned. And I could hear my grandfather in my ear: not a word, but a snort of scorn. Hocus-pocus is not faith.

I lit a third candle. For the man who took my innocence at six. Who took much more for many years, but I can admit to knowing he wanted more to give. It's okay now. I think. Then I cry and bypass thinking and the shell of identifying a phenomenon. He is dead. The six year old is dead.

I placed his candle on the far side of the globe. Opposite the others. And it resists lighting. Three times I try to light the damn thing and the wick comes away trailing weak, grey smoke. I am self conscious and do not laugh out loud really at the way events play along so well with my private little ritual. It is okay. And if it is not, I am.

The organist pauses and I can hear planes flying over the cathedral. Around the room, on the ceiling, the painting figures are encased in bubbles, like shrouds, or bell jars, or amniotic sacks.

On the far wall is a fresco of St. George and the dragon: a winged crocodile who belches tick-tock, tick-tock warning me to never let go of my childhood faiths.