i still like this. i'm glad i wrote it.

'as i get older, and nearer growing up, i often sit wondering here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that i can't reconcile you to home better than i am able to do. i don't know what other girls know. i can't play to you, or sing to you. i can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for i never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about when you are tired.'

-- charles dickens, hard times

i want to get a call in the middle of the night. i want to answer that call and find i'm wanted, needed, and to scramble to get clothes together. i want to wonder for a moment how long i'll have to wear those clothes but banish that thought as irrelevant so i can focus on getting to the car. i want to curse the engine, the keys, and the clock, time itself, for not going, turning, passing faster. i want to drive safely and alertly, but with haste, and i want to let other thoughts flit across my consciousness because there's no sense dwelling on the situation just ahead, any thoughts at all-- huguenots, the ralliement créditiste du québec, john dryden, the labrys, cinnamon, the anachronistic marxist flag of angola, pink post-it notes, visual field screening, jean rhys. i want to make sure (at stop lights) that i brought bottled water, then i want to feel thirsty. i want to tell myself that it doesn't make sense to waste limited resources now, and it's probably just nerves anyhow, but secretly keep a mental checklist for signs of dehydration from that point onward. i want it not to be serious, but to be appreciated for having tried. i want it to be night into morning and i want to belong somewhere through the alchemy of the event, for all involved to be bound in it and to it, into tomorrow.

http://www.twitter.com/annus_mirabilis

carlea (looking at women's leadership conference pamphlet): i don't get how they mix being green with feminism.

me: ecofeminism. it's a thing.

carlea: they should just call it the vermont happy conference.

yes. let's have one more snowstorm, one more day and night where we wearily congregate in warm places and talk about slick roads and shovelling. let's watch it fall one more time and appreciate our interior spaces.

my car crests the big hill by the lutheran church in salem at or around three in the morning, mid-november. emmie and i are driving with the windows open despite the cold, or maybe because of it— there is spastic sitting-dancing, music blaring, singing: ‘when you call my name, it’s like a little prayer…’

i have a lot of memories like this, because ‘like a prayer’ happens to be among the songs of my life and, if not many others feel the same way, those who do gravitate to me as good friends. sometimes, they need a ride, and will readily sing-scream with me in the manner of the insane, the possessed, the blessed.

*
‘like a prayer’ was, and remains, the center of an experience i had that, while logically explicable, is my only brush with transcendence that stuck. in late nights of my youth, i tuned the archaic radio set into the recess of my headboard to a dance music station. my head was just below the speaker, and i would thrash it from side to side with the beat, tiring myself at last; occasionally i went beyond this mechanical purpose to actually enter into a song. there seemed to be a pretty regular playlist, so i got to know a few songs very well (this is before i owned any recorded music), to the point where i could reproduce them in my head when the power went out (which always seemed more frequent and catastrophic in childhood) or when i wanted a distraction in school. this accounts for my encyclopedic knowledge of mid-90's hip-hop singles, if you're keeping score at home.

one night, in drowsy half-sleep, the opening of ‘like a prayer’— orchestral, churchlike, everything serious but with a hint of the personal that makes you think that this is part of the officially sanctioned Big Thing but that it is meant for you— brought me back up. i was on automatic recitation, channelling the songwriter. this is what happened: i sang along, knowing every word and being able to visualise words and lines ahead just as singers do, even though it was the first time i had ever heard the song. i surprised myself even as I did it, trying to find an explanation as i teared up on ‘no end and no beginning,’ touched that the radio, with my help, was bringing that fleck of ephemeral beauty into the dark world.

it must have been playing before that night, of course. it seeped into by brain as i slept. ‘like a prayer’ was sponging out old memories, or filling in unused space— one intense night, or a string of them, in which it must have been producing the most beautiful dreams i don’t remember having.

there i was, an impressionable pre-catholic, not yet in enough to comprehend the faith, let alone reject it (although that would come later). i realise now that the theological engine driving me those nights was more akin to that which is familiar to me now— anything that sounds angelic must be angels, anything that means something means everything. these are signs, provided for you, wherever you may find them. madonna may very well have been the actual queen of heaven of my french-canadian grandfather’s favourite prayer, ‘hail, holy queen,’ which my uncle recited at his funeral in after years. the song carried me into sleep, and each word became embedded into me night after night as the song entered regular rotation, or as i modified my sleeping patterns to be awake around the time it played every night.

these are not point-by-point observations on the song’s lyrical precedent for heterodoxy. the message of the song, taken on its own, is that sex is the closest thing to authentic religious ecstasy. this is likely the best systematic theology humanity has ever come up with up to this point, or is likely to in the future, despite what sex-phobic religious will tell you. but my idea at the time was that religious things were not to be discussed lightly and on that everyone was copacetic. there was an amicable agreement at regions above and nothing would filter down that was not God’s truth. therefore, any discussion of religion was received wisdom, or what they used to call a revelation. ‘like a prayer’ was a prayer, and the sexual subtext (or, if you will, text) present was irrelevant in what i took away from the song.

so i learned to take my religion where i could get it. this took years of reactionary attitudes and sexual guilt before it sunk in, even though i should have known it when the madonna first visited me in my bedroom all those years ago. i still want that transcendent moment, but not necessarily for the eerie autosuggestion, but for a manifest identification with a creation. musical, literary, otherwise— i want to enjoy something that i could have made myself to the point where it feels as though i create it simultaneously with my first witness of it. that it was meant for me because it testifies to my condition— that my name is being called. we all build our own vocabulary of what attracts us as well as what ails us, but the interactions necessary for that to come about, the common points of culture we rally around, the moments we share and need others for— your voice can take me there.

amy and i are talking about good friday, since she's trying to give up men for lent (her mother would rather she gave up drinking) and i find it all a wonderful bit of cognitive dissonance, considering church sexual teachings. anyway.

'my grandmother is crazy about it,' amy says. 'at her house you can't speak between noon and three o'clock. she sits there and prays. we'd have school off that day and it sucked because we would have to stay at her house and we couldn't even watch a movie or something. "you don't watch tv. you sit there and pray and think about jesus up there on the cross giving it all for you!" i'm like, yeah, i recognise that, but three hours? ten minutes, yeah. i get it.'

'christ our lord appreciates your support,' i say.

'he does,' amy replies. decisively.

ellen and her husband loved children, but they only had one of their own-- his name was adam, and he had a strange blocky head that sort of resembled that of the boy in the hands resist him. ellen is, as i recall, dottie's daughter, which makes her related somehow to julie, my closest childhood friend. dottie lived in our neighbourhood and let us use her pool in the summers when i was growing up, and it was during this time we often ended up playing with adam or being supervised by ellen.

i remember one particular afternoon, although there was probably a whole series of them, of wavy green grass and blue skies, but on the one i remember julie, adam, ellen and i were lying in sort of a spoke pattern in the back yard of my parents' house. we were talking about ellen's new baby: if it would be a boy or a girl, how big she was going to get (she was just starting to show), what she would call it, and when it would be old enough to come and play in the pool with us. she explained the whole thing in calm, teacherly language (she may actually be a teacher, i'm not sure), but i remember being able to hear the excitement in her voice as she talked about the coming addition to her family.

then i remember seeing ellen and adam a lot less over the next few months, and it must have been sometime during the next summer that i was lying down around the same spot and it suddenly occurred to me that the baby and ellen should have been separate entities by now, and that i should have met her. in my mind, the baby was a girl. i didn't think to ask my parents about it, but i knew that something had gone wrong. in after years i realised that she must have miscarried, and i was informed by my parents recently that exactly that had happened, and a few more times since. ellen couldn't carry another child, and even lost twins at one point, a devastation for her that i cannot begin to imagine.

'that poor girl,' my mother said.

the image of that afternoon, of that hopeful young woman looking forward to the birth of her second child, stays with me today.