The Snort

                                                            The Snort

              After attending churches, synagogues, temples, prayer meetings, healing sessions, and gala gatherings at stadiums and in megachurches, Charlotte called it quits. What she meant by “it” was the search for God/gods/higher power/supreme being/true god from true god/the Trinity/Allah and so many other names she lost her common sense when she tried to remember them all. Quits had the same meaning for Charlotte as The End. She’d completed her search, there was nothing left to search for - End/curtainsclosed/donedeal/nomore/fini/over/collapsed/finished/kaput.

              Her epiphany occurred one Good Friday at 3 p.m. in an Episcopal church/aka Anglican church, in the South End of Boston. It was raining. The Cardinal had come, given the sign of the cross to the damp people gathered in pews as rain thump, thumped on the roof and trickled like a tear down a wall behind a twelve-foot-high crucifix.

              Women in plastic kerchiefs wept into Kleenex and paper towels. Men snuffed and wiped their noses with their fists. No children were present. They were in schools where they should have been. The place smelled like wet wool. Rather it smelled of wet wool, because everyone was wearing something woolen. Late March in Boston was full of puddles which ricocheted their contents onto unsuspecting winter jackets, scarfs and caps.

              The protocol was to not say a word, phrase, sentence, to not mutter and try not to cough or sneeze or clear your throat. It was three, as silent as possible, hours, in which to ponder on the crucifixion of a man named Jesus who lived 2000 (or so) years ago.

              The ah ha moment for Charlotte came at exactly 2:30 when, at first, she thought she could no longer stay stuck to the now sweating wood beneath her bottom, and then she involuntarily snorted like a hippopotamus emerging from a clear pond from which it had quenched its thirst and was having a moment of sheer relief.

              The woman in the plastic thing around her head in front of Charlotte turned, frowned and put an index finger to her lips. Charlotte nodded that she understood. She shrugged as if she wanted the woman to understand she had no idea where the snort came from, that it was completely beyond her control but that she thought it an innocent snort and should not be construed as being rude.

              Charlotte was wearing a cloche kind of a hat, white. She pulled at it because it had begun to itch her head. Whether it was that small gesture combined with the snort and the woman in plastic, she didn’t know. What she did know is that all the searching came tumbling down like Humpty Dumpty, but instead of falling, she felt she was uplifted in a spiritual kind of way. The searching hadn’t been in vain, but now it was done. She felt  decades of guilt fall from her shoulders and the back of her neck.

              She pictured herself sliding down a waterfall, encompassed by water that rocked her and caressed her. It was the best, this waterfall, even if was only in her brain that was clearing itself of superstition, nonsense and belief in baloney.

              To further confirm her unbelief burden, she tiptoed from the church to see a slice of sun trying to make its way from the back of a coal-colored cloud. She stood on the sidewalk on Columbus Avenue while schoolchildren hopped and skipped around her. Gentrification was happening all around. Old, battered walk-ups were turning into trendy condos and apartments. The gutters no longer contained nip bottles and candy wrappers and beer cans. A florist on the corner displayed bunches of daffodils and tulips in green cellophane. No one sat on curbs with signs written on cardboard that said they were hungry and had lost their jobs and their children.

              Then church bells rang, slow and sad, then louder and gleeful. She knew this meant Jesus had completed his agony, had died and that he would be resurrected somehow and go up there somewhere and sit at the right hand of The Father. She wondered how she thought, when she was 21, that this made any sense at all.

              At 22, she’d moved on to Judaism which believed none of this but did think there was a Messiah but that it hadn’t come yet but would. By 23, she’d come to believe this wasn’t going to happen. Jewish people, she’d thought and still thought, could use a Messiah after all their ancestors had endured.

              She’d dabbled with Islam and read about Hinduism. More mystical stuff. Yet millions of souls on this earth believed what was taught by the men, and it seemed they were all men, of these two religions. Hadn’t they dabbled like she had? Why hadn’t they asked questions when some of the beliefs were contrary to reason? Maybe, they had, and they’d chosen belief over reason.

              Charlotte was glad for caffeine in the morning and wine in the evening. She was thankful to herself when she’d abandoned confessions and prayers to something unknown. She didn’t feel ashamed at lust and, on special occasions, gluttony. She didn’t covet anyone’s husband, nor did she steal or (knowingly) get led into temptation to do stupid things like skydiving, not at her age of 60. Recently she’d almost been led into the temptation of riding on the back of a motorcycle across the Zachem Bridge on a Sunday afternoon, the cyclist being a man who was not good for her mental health.

              Now she was glad to have worn boots even though this morning’s report hadn’t mentioned rain. But she never did trust those Doppler graphs. She bought a bouquet of daffodils for herself, ambled along to her office building and took the elevator to the twelfth floor where her cubicle was.

              “Were you into Good Friday,” Meredith in the next cubicle asked? I should have, but this report can’t wait. I’ll make up for it tomorrow somehow.

              Charlotte shook her hat, took off her coat and said she’d done Good Friday.