PUSILLANIMITY

Expiry Dates

I awoke this morning from uncharitable dreams; my shoulder still mortared to breastplate and collarbone. This persistent pain is mercenary, Catholic at best. My friend shared a story from his childhood with me that is nothing less than emasculate. He recalled being an altar boy in some nondescript Catholic Church in Montreal. He was sent to the rector’s closet to fetch some ecclesiastic whatnot, and while there took a peek into the fridge where the sacramental wine and Eucharist were kept in cold storage. He looked at the packaging in which the biscuits were hermetically sealed, and notice, much to his astonishment, that there were expiry dates stamped on each freezer bag. Christ has a best before date, he figured, how strange in deed.
(Thanks, John)

Not long ago I was employed as an addiction counselor for nonprofit organization here in the Nation’s Capitalist. Many of our clients were either homeless or on the verge of homelessness. Some were from other cities, such as Hamilton and Toronto, and others were indigenous to Ottawa and the surrounding hamlets and suburbs. One of our clients (a fifty-ish First Nations gentleman with terrible nightmares that forced him to sleep on the floor on a blue pinstriped mattress, army issue no less, least he topple head over teakettle onto the hard linoleum tiling) told me a story, a real story, that left me with my own nightmares. He was interned in one of Canada’s infamous Residential Schools when he was a young boy, where he was subjected to such heinous crimes; so heinous and unconscionable, Nuremberg should have reconvened to mete out more appropriate punishments. One of his schoolmates, a lithe, unassuming little fellow, submersed himself in a bathtub full of bleach, thinking, if he could only lightened the colour of his skin, the abuse and torture would stop. Well it did not, and so begins the night terrors and addiction to whatever numbs the pain of remembering what no one should need remember. (For Abe, should you still be walking this earth)