Zonked

Best word ever for that weird feeling of displacement and sustained fatigue that stems from travel. Last weekend in Milwaukee I was zonked for most of the travelling and the wedding, although I wasn't so zonked that I couldn't cut a rug (dance) with my baby.

*

I'm not very religious anymore. This is Palm Sunday, and I didn't even know it until we arrived at the church were my cousin's baby Aiden was to be baptized. Actually our arrival was sort of funny: with my dad driving and the Dostoevsky somewhat inadequate to the task of keeping me awake, I slept all the way there - conked out, you might say - until I rubbed my eyes and there stood the church. It's hard to describe how beautiful the temperature, the weather, and the church all conspired to be simultaneously; I'll satisfy the descriptive task by swiping a phrase that JBG used to describe the weather in Vegas. (More on Vegas soon.) The phrase is "golden blue." It was that kind of a day. Inside the church, which was a grand, recently renovated sight to see made of light beige stone and much interior space, was packed with people who'd been standing, sitting, and kneeling since 9:30 AM. Catholic calisthenics. As it turned out, that had been the bishop himself up there officiating, and that's why the mass was still going on by 10:45 or so. You could tell by the number of people slipping off to the restrooms that it was the kind of mass where you sing every verse to every hymn. And so there we were -

Here's a quick family tree-style primer or refresher on my family's setup, if you need one,

Baba (Grandmother) - Pa (Grandfather)
/ | \
The LeBeau Family The Filonovich Family The Lobko Family

with lots of grandchildren and a swelling number of great-grandchildren. It's really something, considering Baba and Pa's immigrant origins fleeing pogroms and hunger and futurelessness. So there at the church a whole slew of grown grandkids and great-grandkids are scampering around waiting for the ceremony to actually start. Greetings ran to the garrulous side of things. I was wearing my sunshine yellow sweater and feeling particularly daisy-fresh thanks to the nap and thanks more simply to just seeing everybody. It felt more, well, holy than any kind of "Quick get into church mode" conduct could have. I had no interest in taking communion.

I'm really very interested in this. I was thinking about Jon at various points today, in part at how unlikely it would have been that he'd have been in attendence had he happened to be in Syracuse and, well, alive.* It hadn't been for sure that I was coming until two nights ago, when I first heard of it. (I tend to be removed - not by choice or anything - from the funny catch-as-catch-can lines of communication.) I can picture him there, in gym shorts and a white T-shirt, or maybe even if we really tried to get him there a button-up shirt of some solid color such as charcoal grey or royal blue. But I can only so picture him because I know that it's a fiction. I wouldn't lay good odds on his choosing to attend if he were around. He hated church. And I don't think that it was merely with the disdain some people have for organized social activities. I'm surmising and inferring things left and right here but I suspect that religion was a nettle in Jon's side less for the obligatory C.C.D. / Religious Ed obligations that all young Catholics are made to endure, and rather had a lot to do with what he regarded as its mysticism. Its easy-answer appearance. Its profession to know one's soul. One of the tragedies of Jon's life was that he didn't learn to depend or trust other people; he wasn't accustomed to enlisting anyone's aid. He was one of your roughs; you could say that there was bred in him that brand of rugged individualism that would have made him a good frontiersman circa the 1870s. I think his take on religion was somewhat Marxist, actually, and in opium plus masses.

Kneejerk responses to this (potential) position of Jon's would center on faith. Namely that he didn't have it. But I'm not really interested at the moment in the theological implications of Jon's stance on these kinds of activities and ways of thinking. Instead I wonder what he considered holy. I don't mean to confuse what he felt to be happiness with what he felt to be holy. Happiness and holiness are distinct, one potential distinction being that of the scale of the emotion or experience. Maybe happiness is a sense of personal fulfillment, and holiness is a sense of a contentment and happiness within a larger communal or even cosmic context. I see a picture like this,




or this,




and I have to hope that these moments were, for Jon, more than simple moments of a transient happiness. I like to think that they represented bigger instances of that happiness that is hopefully typical in our daily lives. And that any such expansion of scale in this happiness had everything to do with Jon knowing that there were people around enjoying themselves and himself. That there was this rapid-firing back-and-forth acknowledgment, both implicit and explicit, of the fact that everyone there is glad for everybody else's being there, and for everybody else's being happy - on and on like that. That sounds about right for the definition of holy I want to sketch here.

*

More pictures follow.




Max and Shane playing with toy soldiers at the edge of the font. The toy soldiers were the kind with firm oval bases. I loved this part. I snapped a photo that inadequately captures the game Max played with his younger brother Alec; Alec, 2 and 1/2 years old, started dipping his finger in the font behind the priest's back and commenced baptising by chasing them down and wiping his finger off on their skirt or pant leg. Max got in on this soon after. Then they began baptising each other, but without any of that pesky ceremony. It was as though they wanted to see who could make the other brother more hallowed, or something.




Aiden was dipped three times. Didn't cry. It was actually awesomely cute. The priest dipped him in the water and Aiden vocalized his displeasure with this crotchety-sounding old man's cry. As soon as he was lifted out, he stopped. Think of a Geiger counter being brought near to and away from radioactive material. It wasn't a real cry, but let you know that if you left him in there then he was really going to cry for you.




Oh, well now here's that shot I mentioned. "You're blessed!" "No I'm not, you're blessed!" Running in a circle, thinking thoughts like that.



My cousin Tasha and myself, surrounded by posters lauding Italian mobsters of the silver screen. And Tony Montana.


* I realize that that sentence has some redundant elements, but I stet it because such redundancies actually remind me, in writing, like right there BAM on the screen, that Jon is in fact dead. At times I must resort to saying it repeatedly, as with a mantra, for it to sink in.