Excerpts from Clinging
| Altar Boy | Battle Stations | A Cook Dies |
| It’s Better to Give and Receive | Challenge Quest |
Altar Boy
My first Sunday as an altar boy, I was confronted with a major dilemma. Four dead flies were floating in the blood of Christ. I looked up at the altar, hoping for divine guidance. My hopes were greeted by an impatient glare from Father Murphy. Okay, I thought, I’ll let him deal with it.
I carried the wine-filled chalice up to the altar and presented it.
“Their souls must be in heaven, right Father?” I whispered. Drowning in the blood of Christ seemed the holiest way to die short of crucifixion. Father looked into the chalice and grimaced.
The congregation was full of blank gazes that morning, as if most of the people had spent their Saturday night doing the same thing as the four flies—except the congregants had lived to repent. As I sat down, Father blessed the wine, raised the chalice high and then slowly lowered it down to take a big gulp. Later in the mass, when I returned to the altar to collect the chalice, only three lifeless flies remained.
Battle Stations
By the corner of N.W. 18th and Pettygrove, I was concerned. My stomach had been bothering me for the last mile, but suddenly the mild annoyance had escalated into the red zone. The waves of a rollicking sea swashed in my belly. I held my breath and clenched my buttocks, hard, as if a group of aliens had tied me to a gurney as they discussed various probing options. But the sea rollicked harder.
Forty minutes earlier, nothing had been amiss. After eating a leftover chicken salad sandwich, I’d pulled on my running shoes, grabbed my iPod and headed out the door for a five mile run. It was Sunday afternoon, a perfect spring day.
The strain of nature’s call was causing beads of sweat to populate my forehead. Still, I wasn’t concerned. Home was only five blocks away, up on 23rd. I figured the pressure would soon subside and I’d be in the clear. But for the moment I was at a dead stop, in the middle of a residential neighborhood, unable to move, fighting a battle in which surrender wasn’t an option.
A Cook Dies
“I’m sorry Chris. I am pretty sure he’s dead.”
Katie’s tone was sorrowful, similar to the one an emergency room doctor uses to deliver bad news. She grasped my left hand and caressed my palm. The sincerity in her voice affected me more than her words. She seemed to have a mutant gland near her epiglottis that secreted generous amounts of tenderness onto every syllable. Even so, I couldn’t pinpoint the feeling mushrooming within me, but it wasn’t the emotional convulsions that typically accompany news of death.
As I stared into Katie’s sullen eyes my mind scrambled to understand my mild reaction to her announcement. I’d met death before, and unless it was befalling someone in the process of mugging my mother, it proved invariably gloomy. Yet in the wake of Katie’s words, I stood unaffected, as if immunized against death’s devastation.
This was not the death I knew. This death had apparently enrolled in a comprehensive etiquette course, reforming its ways to become a compassionate, downright cordial death. Hi! Death here. Sorry about all the senseless violence. That’s in the past, I’m reformed! Here’s a coupon for half-priced ice cream. Take care! Or maybe death was washed up as a villain, its emotional wallop finally giving way to the ravages of time. Regardless, Katie’s message didn’t extract tears. It made me giggle.
It’s Better to Give and Receive
“Never try to buy a candy thermometer on Christmas Eve,” Mom warned.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with my brothers and sister, nibbling on Christmas cookies that our mom had made the day before. Her tone caught us all by surprise. It reminded me of the passion in her voice years earlier when she warned us to avoid drugs.
“Okay, Mom.” I answered. “I’ll avoid candy thermometers at all costs, on every day of the year.”
My siblings laughed, but the mocking reply didn’t seem to register. She went on to explain her advice. “The candy thermometer I’ve had for years stopped working yesterday and I went to three stores to get a replacement and couldn’t find one.”
“That’s awful,” my brother Kerry said with exaggerated concern. We all laughed again, but Mom kept working away, stirring a large vat of some candy concoction that she was cooking up on the stove.
All parents tend to give their kids obvious advice on occasion—don’t crash your car, avoid people who carry guns, pay your bills. Our parents did, too, but Mom tossed enough quirky gems into the usual mix that we always listened. And from time to time she’d reward our attention with obscure, unsolicited guidance, telling us not to put eggs in our beer and promising that we could subsist on construction paper if we ever found ourselves in the midst of a famine. “The red paper tastes the best,” she said.
As my siblings playfully pondered the value of the thermometer advice, I changed the subject. “By the way Mom, there are some presents for me under the tree and the tags on ‘em say that they’re from Santa. I’m 32 years old. How dumb do you think I am?”
Mom added some more sugar to one of the bowls by the stove and stirred the contents. “I don’t think you want me to answer that. And if you don’t like presents from Santa I can take them back,” she threatened.
“Take them back to who?” I asked.
“Just back. You needn’t worry to whom.”
“Well I love gifts from Santa,” I promised. And I do.
Challenge Quest
“No one can pee on that electric fence and live.” My cousin Tom crossed his arms and swung his head toward the fence that corralled his family’s small herd of cattle.
“Johnny Bench probably could,” my brother Karl argued, referring to the gifted Cincinnati Reds catcher. “Nope, not even Johnny Bench,” Tom said.
“Are you kidding?” I bragged. I tugged open my zipper. “Watch this!” I walked over to the fence and released a stream onto the middle wire. The barbed metal snapped and hissed. Electrons, eager to explore a new path, charged up the stream and slammed into my groin. I fell to the ground and twisted in the dirt. For several seconds I remained prone, motionless, frozen in a fetal position, my blue jeans cuffing my ankles. Karl and Tom were hushed, silenced by fear, aware that their weekly allowances would die with me.
The punch of electricity was fierce and immediate, arriving in one brisk, powerful jolt. But the pain dissipated almost immediately, fleeing the scene as if it had pressing work to do in some Third World country. I soon regained sensation in my extremities, followed shortly by a return of my motor skills.
To allow drama to build I stayed down longer than necessary, my face pressed into the dirt, clumps of grass pricking my ears. I enjoyed Karl and Tom’s palpable fear. Their discomfort brought me joy, like an early Christmas present. When I felt that I’d maximized their anxiety levels, I stood up slowly, wobbling for effect. I reached down to my ankles, pulled up my pants and then dabbed at the scattered dribbles of urine that spotted the denim.
“I told you I could do it,” I said matter-of-factly, brushing blades of grass off my shirt. “Wasn’t even a challenge.”