The joy of existence

Thirty-two degrees, clear as a bell, with a stiff breeze coming out of the northwest. I watch the fat moon fade in the rising sun. Easter. Even my neighbor's beat-up F-250 looks good in this light. Sky blue, navy blue. Out back, the brook races headlong to the lake after yesterday's rain and the surface of the lake scuttles rapidly toward the south. Running water. Royal blue. I spotted six mergansers yesterday afternoon -- good to have them back again. No kingfishers yet.

Pantokrator. Omnipotens. Quist said, "I have no idea what I'm talkin about when I talk about God. I'm just flappin my gums like everybody else. Seems this is Satan's world -- there's a helluva lot more evil around than good. "

The Easter Egg Hunt at Heaven Hill Farm is ready to go. They've got a whole course set up in the sloping field that runs along Route 94 toward Warwick. That's where they have their corn maze and haunted house in the fall. I guess families come after church. The farm is down in the valley where the forsythia and daffodils are bloomin like crazy. A stone's throw from the Appalachian Trail. Up here at the lake, spring is still a week or so away, but all the plants are finally showin buds, even the little Japanese maple I thought had died.

It's impossible to think of good and evil as absolutes on a morning like this. Tell me, how does the world give way to abstract thought? Quist also said, "They say Nature is indifferent but God loves us. Bah. That's just Man talkin. You give me a little more whiskey we'll figger it out."

I'm holding it in my hands, the New Scofield Reference Bible, Oxford University Press. I've had it nearly forty years. Sunlight streams through the kitchen window and I look at the pages in amazement. How did it happen that a boy abandoned Paul for Job, Revelation for the Psalms, John for Mark? In a world of so many books -- my neighbors would say too many -- this one remains The Book. Brilliant, poetic, fatiguing, sublime, preposterous, instructive, filthy, insightful, cruel, it's fallin apart from thumbin through. You gotta learn a vocabulary if you wanna start 'wording the world.' The Bible is where I learned mine.

Easter. The empty sky. The big incomprehensible book. I thought I'd run away from it all, another frightened materialist pretendin that the Road to Riches led to the Kingdom of the Righteous. What an effin joke. You lose your job and take stock of yourself, you find out what you really need. Food and shelter. Peace and quiet. Love. Human love.

I see a little boy painting an Easter egg at the kitchen table years ago. His face is scrunched up in deep concentration. He tries so hard but his brush slips and his egg is ruined. Who will console him now, poot? Who?