Heckuva Friday

Tonight, to celebrate the ritual slaying of the Lord, I'm going out for dinner and drinks with three old friends. I haven't been a practising Catholic for two decades now, and I've been trying out flippancy all day--most notably on my Jewish friends, who have just all been passed over, successfully, for like the three thousandth time--but it's just making me feel a bit sad, really. I actually miss the comfort of believing in It All: the miracles, the saints, the boulder rolling back, the tongues of flame, walking on water. All of it. As a story teller, I can recognize a great narrative when I see one and always feel disappointed when a scientist points out, for example, that Jesus was probably walking on ice and not water. That the Israelites were walking through the REED Sea and not the RED Sea and that the eruption of a Mediterranean volcano can explain the whole drowning of the Egyptians thing. That Jesus was a kind of blissed-out hippie who conned Judas into having him killed so he could zip to the realm of the stars all the quicker. "Just let it go," part of me wants to say. It's a bit like pointing out that Humpty Dumpty was just an egg, couldn't talk, and that there is no way in the world that even one of the king's horses, let alone ALL of them, would have bothered trying to put a smashed egg back together again because horses have no opposable thumgs and have been vegetarians for millennia, as proved by the recent unearthing of fossilized horse poo in Anatolia dating from BCE 5 zillion. Where is the magic? We don't read biographies to our children at bedtime, we read them fantastical adventures, full of talking animals, trips to the stars, small boys transformed into kings, girls who save the world one small mouse at a time. Why do we deny ourselves the same pleasure?

So tonight I plan to tell stories with absolutely no basis in fact. Something about my aunt who has webbed feet and the 64-year-old goldfish named Zenobia who sings her to sleep. And wash it all down with a ridiculous cocktail or two. And, I guess, celebrate a pretty good Friday, another spring, good friends, and a flippy pink skirt that I haven't work for four years. And I guess, too, it might pass for a spiritual experience.