Mandatory Margie is Scared of Good Friday Blog Entry
Friday, March 21, 2008
Well hello, Deadest Day of the Year.
I understand the solemnity of this day, I do. I understand that, even if you do not subscribe to a particular faith as is the case with me, there is a need to hush up and think about certain things. But this hasn’t stopped me from dreading Good Friday. I’m the type who needs a live city, who finds comfort in the knowledge that all this artifice is functioning as it should. That, and memories of Good Fridays past, especially those during the early 90s, have continued to lend a special lethargy to this day that’s just plain hard for me to stomach each and every time.
One particularly bothersome Good Friday always comes to mind. I was around nine or ten, an age that my grandparents felt gave them license to spook me with those you are a sinner, you will go to hell, look straight into the eyes of that man bleeding on the cross and feel the licks of flame you so obviously deserve kinds of sermons. And as if I wasn’t harrowed enough, this was the Ramos brownout era, which made that sense of gloom and doom far more palpable. The shadows. The hot, flat summer air, the equally stifling silence. There was no juice to run the Family Computer, the one true object of my salvation in those days. And if the power did happen to flicker back for a while, the only thing on TV were end-of-the-world documentaries, or consciously creepy features on miracles, the ones where the image of Jesus slowly surfaces on photos developing in darkrooms, or blood starts trickling from the eyes of countless plaster Marys. I was a kid. Of course it was hell.
Fortunately, Good Friday is a tad more tolerable now, what with dibidis and better cable fare and the fact that, as announced in part by a superbly sacrilegious print ad of the McDo façade gleaming from outside a church window, more commercial establishments stay open the hour Christ conks out. It is 3:07 as I type this sentence, and I hear tricycles sputtering outside all the same. The only regrettable thing about the latter is that I can’t lie down in the middle of our street like I used to in recent Good Fridays. Can’t bake myself on the asphalt anymore, can’t relish the fact that everyone else has locked themselves in, mumbling from frayed prayer books, sluggishly feeling sorry for things, while I’m outside having my own little blip of reflection. But I’ll live.
posted by marguerite @ 3:20 PM
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