Palm Sunday
A Short Story
Annabelle Marie Evans was a wild whippersnapper of eight whole, entire years old. Ms. Annie – with a proper Southern diphthong on that initial vowel sound, thank you very much – fancied herself a doer. She would not be left behind as the world kept on just spinning around her; no ma’am, she would be the very force behind that great big scooter that they call life; it would be her leg propelling the world forward and she would wait for nobody, woman or man, to give her a push. To demonstrate this remarkable commitment, at the tender age of three, she had, in a daring act of self-governance, revoked both her mother’s and her brother’s right to push her on the swings. She would be her own woman and she would navigate all that life had to offer – she would climb that big oak tree in the Smithfield’s yard whenever she darn well pleased to do so; “property lines and good fences making good neighbors are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal,” the precocious Ms. Annie had explained as she picked up her mother’s horn-rimmed spectacles and placed them low on her nose in order to achieve that condescending librarian style that she heard was rather a la mode and even chic in France these days.
Given Ms. Annie’s commitment to leaving no backyard, no oak tree, and no rosebush unexplored, it might come as no surprise that some of those nuns in their great brown habits felt that Ms. Annie might be just the teensiest bit more trouble than the Good Lord had intended and kept dragging her out of class and threatening to send her to Father Richard for confession if she didn’t start showing some respect for the rules of God and of Men. Always a religious scholar whenever being one might afford her an opportunity to speak truth to power, she routinely had a theological defense prepared when the nuns tried to scold her. Take, for example, that time she had pushed the class bully – was his name Riley? – into the rosebush. The sisters had insisted to her that the Lord Jesus had said, “turn the other cheek” but Ms. Annie had left them in stunned silence when she responded that Saint Francis had made a habit of throwing himself into a rose bush every time he was tempted towards unchastity and that she was simply helping the young Riley to perfect his chastity and charity. Now, Ms. Annie wasn’t really sure what the difference between chastity and charity was – there were, she begrudgingly admitted to herself and to nobody else, mysteries of the universe that she had yet to unlock – but surely Francis’s chastity or charity or whatnot was signified by the stigmata found on his hands, which could not, under the physical laws that God had created for our wondrous universe, occur unless the holy man of God had allowed the thorns of rose bushes to pierce those same palms. Therefore, given that Ms. Annie was determined to pick Francis as her confirmation name, this little tussle with Riley near the rosebush had been nothing short of an opportunity to emulate the saint whose name and virtue she would take as her own for the remainder of her earthly pilgrimage – or, at least, until she had left the principal’s office.
Now, like many great theologians and religious scholars before and after her, the young and brilliant Ms. Annie was simply not enamored with going to church. Father Richard, bless his heart, did not exactly seem like someone blazing in fire like Joan of Arc, or truly alive with the Holy Spirit – though Ms. Annie herself preferred the term Holy Ghost, as it conjured up images of Halloween and trick-or-treating, alongside those mysteriously morose and macabre masks that she had seen on television from the Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Still, Ms. Annie, ever the attentive scholar, knew full-well that the word spirit came from the Latin word respirare, meaning “to breathe” and she always got a full giggle and half a kick out of the thought of Father Richard’s breath, tired from its decades-long labor as a full-time smoker, somehow being the great wind moving throughout cosmic history or, better yet, being the third part of that Trinity thing that grown-up people in church sometimes like to talk about. Still, that wasn’t quite enough to get through church without being bored. Life is just too short to spend so much of it in a church pew.
There were, however, some exceptions: primarily, these exceptions involved processions. After all, when you can pray to Jesus and watch all of the fascinating humans that darken Church doors during Corpus Christi, Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and the Easter Vigil, it’s like a buy-one-get-one free deal at Macy’s. Each one of these great feasts had its high points – Holy Thursday was about the only time she could see grown men take off their shoes in church, not to mention that they’d always take Jesus out for a walk around the block after Mass and she could look up at the stars and hum whatever tune it was that the choir kept repeating; the Easter Vigil included real fire and candles and Ms. Annie always managed to get some hot wax on her hand – other people seemed to think that this was a painful experience but, for Ms. Annie, it was an opportunity to encounter and prevail over the violent and sinister forces of the natural world; Corpus Christi means walking down the street with a big gold thing holding a piece of bread and watching people stare. Generally, Ms. Annie found, the more opportunities for people-watching church presented her with, the more content was her disposition. Still, her favorite day of the liturgical year, and one of the few days in which she was genuinely happy to be at church, was Palm Sunday.
To start with, there was the procession of all the funny church people. Secondly, once the priest had finished his ceremonial water-throwing on top of the palms – which, curiously enough, Annie thought, the grown-ups didn’t ever seem to find funny – Annie herself got a palm. She had never been anywhere where palms were ubiquitous and, having that palm in her hand, she could pretend that she was a Hawaiian hula girl, as the choir sang their song and everyone yelled Hosanna. To her ears, that word – Hosanna – was close enough to the Hawaiian language, and she could just dance along holding that palm to her chest and swaying her hips. Sometimes, though, the old ladies seemed to disapprove of her method of dancing, to which she would always reply, with a hefty helping of snark, that if David could dance naked before the arc than so could she dance naked before the tabernacle and if those old ladies didn’t want to see her doing that then they could just go right ahead and enjoy her little hula dance palm procession, thank you very much. That usually got those old ladies off of Annie’s back, by means of transferring their gossip and criticism of Annie to her rather embarrassed mother.
Then there was the whole religious side of things, too. Maybe the most amazing thing for Ms. Annie during these early years was that this Jesus she heard about on Palm Sunday was the kind of Jesus and the kind of God that she could understand. Here, after all, was Jesus, almost like a clown, riding into town on a donkey and making everybody laugh and sing and dance and play in the streets. After all, if God wasn’t a god who would make you want to laugh and sing and dance and play and explore, then Ms. Annie wasn’t really sure what all the fuss was about in the first place. As she had said before, life is far too short to spend too many hours in a pew and as long as this God was all about getting people off of their little bottoms and into the street, then he and she would have nothing to quibble about. The more the young Annie thought about this, the more convinced she became that she was right – after all, did this Jesus fellow not tell a blind man that he could see, and a lame man that he could walk? For all that everyone kept telling her that “modesty” was important, was this God not the one that seemed to delight in seeing David – and, for that matter, Saint Francis, too – strip off all their clothing in the middle of the street and start dancing? That was the God that Ms. Annie saw on Palm Sunday; that was the God she understood; that was the God she wanted to adore and to fall in love with.
All of that, though, was in the good ole days. Now, Annabelle Marie Evans was a whole nine years old and could only think of how innocent and carefree her life had once been as she lay in her bed on this Palm Sunday morning. That was before it had all changed; that was back when there was church, where people were allowed to be outside, and where nobody was sick. Like the world weary prophet that she was now in her ripe old age of nine, Ms. Annie willed her bones out of bed with a sigh and took a melancholy meander over to her bedroom window. The world, these days, seemed to be devoid of color and devoid of life. Doubtless, her parents would soon be gathering downstairs to watch the Mass on the TV screen. She supposed that she ought to join them but, once you get to an age like hers, nothing quite has the meaning that it once had. So she just sighed one more time and, for her own theatrical pleasure, cast a dramatic look at the floor. She rubbed one big toe on top of the other big toe. She ran fingers through her hair. She was sad and she was bored and she yearned for the days of her youth gone away far too soon. She longed for the days of processions and hula dancing, and of a Jesus that drew people out of their rooms and into the streets, singing and dancing with the sheer joy of being alive. She yearned for those olden, golden days of yore when people could hug and kiss and push little boys into the rosebushes to help them grow in chastity.
As she heaved yet another sigh – this one too heavy even for her own sense of dramatic flair – she raised her old and droopy eyes to the window and looked out at the empty street. She tried to imagine it full of people laughing, running, yelling ‘Hosanna’ and pretending to be hula dancers. She tried to imagine Jesus riding down that paved, suburban street in a donkey and old Mrs. Allison creeping out of her home with her walker, falling to her knees and laying her coat down on the street so that the donkey would have soft ground upon which to walk. She tried to imagine her mother’s meek smile that, though embarrassed, endured the criticism of those old church ladies with far more grace than Ms. Annie felt she would ever be capable of possessing. She tried to imagine Mr. Jack Phillips, the rigid and grumpy man who always says the words of the Mass just a hair slower than everyone else, suddenly jumping for joy as Jesus passed by.
In the midst of this indulgent little daydream, Ms. Annie looked out the window and, to her astonishment, saw a young man walking along the street. Her eyes followed him as he came nearer and nearer to her home. When he was just outside of her house, the young man, as if sensing her eyes, looked up. They saw each other in that moment and Ms. Annie couldn’t bear the thought that the young man had seen her watching him, and she wanted just to run away in her embarrassment. The man, however, had a disarming smile that he flashed at Ms. Annie from the street and she found herself smiling back. He held up his finger as if to say, ‘wait a second’ and then produced, from his pocket, a red clown nose. He put it on and began contorting his face until he was but a mere caricature of a man. He fell to his knees, clown nose and all, pretending to play a guitar as if he were some troubadour, stolen out of a medieval French movie set. As he kept on singing and dancing and playing with that ridiculous clown nose, Annie began to lose herself in laughter and dance, first pretending to be a gypsy girl and then, taking last year’s palm out from behind her crucifix, a hula dancer, swaying her hips and clutching the palm to her chest.
Eventually, the young man took a bow in front of her and continued along his merry way. Ms. Annie’s watchful eyes followed him as he walked down the street, stopping outside of each house and performing the same routine. Ms. Annie was sure that she could hear, in those moments, the laughter and the singing of all of neighbors, just as she was somehow certain that even grumpy old Jack Phillips would be unable to resist the urge to dance inside room, too. This, Annabelle Marie Evans decided, was her first remarkable religious experience, for she noticed, in this moment, that the only thing more wonderful than a God who inspires people to run and dance and play in the streets is a God who teaches people to sing and dance and play in the silence of their own rooms.
#OnTheThirdDay: To help us all get through coronavirus quarantine with our humanity intact, I will be releasing new works of art every three days and invite all artists to participate.