The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [41]
Even Jesus died a failure.
She said, “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; a simple look turned toward heaven; a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”
Patron saint of air crews, florists, AIDS sufferers, and orphans, those who know her pray to Thérèse. Broke and desperate, sick and suffering, blocked and annoyed, they pray. In their dreams, she brings them money, fresh determination, the energy to forgive. Come morning, her gifts sparkle real as granite.
Honor Thérèse by walking the Little Way of love in action. Say, “God, help me to simplify my life by learning what you want me to be and becoming that person.” Build an altar with gold paper hearts and flowers—violets if you can find them. Say, “Thérèse, you were little, but bad-ass. Teach me to be such an awesome failure.”
“Are you Catholic?” I ask Dorothy as we’re gathering wood for the fire at dusk. I’m thinking of the Saint Thérèse book and the Joan of Arc statue in her cabin.
“Oh, yes,” Dorothy says, looking up.
Her affirmation sounds strange. Not “was” or “lapsed” or “recovering.” No apologies. Just “Oh, yes.”
“Why do you ask?” she smiles, her stern features casting quick shadows across her face.
“I just—you know—the church is such bullshit. All the rules and the hierarchy.”
Dorothy arranges twigs and cut logs in the circle of blackened stones, ignites the thing with a single match, sets a pot of water to boil. “We’re all Christ and we all get crucified. What’s hierarchical about that?”
I guess I never thought of it that way.
Dorothy stares across the lake into the darkening blue. “You can worry about the hierarchy of the church if you like—someone has to—but more importantly, there comes a time when you have to start making a choice, don’t you think?”
“A choice?”
“Yes. A daily choice. You can wake up each morning thinking about all the backstabbers in this world, about all the people who have betrayed you, about everything that has been taken from you. Or you can open your eyes and you can ask yourself, ‘What’s my love strategy today?’” Dorothy bends pasta into the boiling water, stirs it as it softens. She arranges cubes of pickled eel on tin plates, grabs the handles of the pot with her bare hands, and removes it from the fire. In an iron skillet, she crushes a garlic clove, pours in a little oil. She fries the garlic with a handful of peppers and herbs, adds the cooked pasta. “It’s not much,” she says, heaping it onto the plates next to the eel, “but it’ll do.” She empties what’s left of the dandelion wine into our Sierra cups. “Anyway,” she says. “Everyone has to have a strategy, don’t you think?”
I shrug. I’m more impressed with her quick dinner.
“The question is,” she points her fork in my direction, “is it a war strategy or a love strategy?”
I take a bite of pasta, sip my wine. “Of course you have to have a war strategy if you’re going to war. In war you have to take things over, fight. You have to win. But love. I mean, love just happens.”
She nods, wipes her mouth with her hand. In the light of the campfire, her face looks like something otherworldly. “Is that your experience?” she asks. “That love just happens?”
Delicious as her herbed pasta and eel dinner is, Dorothy is starting to bug me. Weird frumpy woodswoman who talks to birds.
“I wouldn’t mind living out here like you do,” I say, changing the subject. “But not so close to the trail. I’d build my cabin way up there.” I point to a far snowcapped mountain on the other side of the lake. A star shoots across the night sky, but there are so many of them, you’d hardly miss it. I think I can hear children singing campfire songs on a far shore.
Dorothy shakes her head. “Oh, Frankka. Anyone can be a saint on a mountaintop.”
Chapter 15
THE TOMB
Once, just once, my grandmother took me on a Muni bus to the giant concrete passport office in San Francisco.
I couldn’t stand still in line. I tapped my sneaker incessantly on the cold floor. “Where are we going?”
“A holy place” is all Nana would tell me.
On the airplane, my ears ached. I ate