My Sunday Morning Walk began at eleven in the morning. I looked outside before leaving, and already the tall trees seemed as though they were condemned to death by the early heat. The air was baking over the asphalt, and as I entered its fury, it became the slightest weight across me, between my shirt and my back. But a cool breeze blew from the west, between buildings and trees. I was reminded of the hot summer mornings in Carcavelos, walking to the sanctuary amid the smell of a cool and friendly sea.
I walked past cafés and their patios, crammed with pastel-laden families and wide brimmed hats that invariably made ladies young and old look prettier than they were. I tripped once on McPherson’s cobblestone as I stared into the eyes of a frail old lady that seemed altogether blessed by the mere reverence of her surrounding family. She seemed like a soft and abiding mother, maybe like my own. I bought myself a coffee and a sandwich, loving the thought of Sunday never stopping. On sunny, nap-inviting days like this one, the notion of a world without end turns my heart on its side.
Despite all the people, and despite the poundage of the hot humid air, it had been the quietest, most quaint and vivid morning until a heel-clad woman in a short white skirt that revealed all too much actually found a way to distract attention from such things with the audacious squeal of her shouting voice. From the middle of the street, walking toward someone that clearly could not hear her, her white heels scraped and clanked as she shouted Simon in the direction of a fellow who clearly was not listening. For one awful moment, her words became my burden.
At a black iron table by the yellow curb and a pigeon, I realized to my own surprise that for the first time in a quarter-century I was spending the Sunday that follows the first full moon of the Northern Spring without a family of my own. In a strange and pagan way, I finally felt at one with the rest of the world. I watched families dine and revel in their soft-hued assortment. Overhearing commentary about today’s message, or the quality of its music, I thought these people were strange. But no stranger than ever.
My sandwich’s zesty red sauce found its way from the turkey to my chin, and an endearingly bubbly bus girl by the name of Veronica offered me more napkins than I needed. From there I rose and walked east down a wide and well-kept street with colonial homes and sidewalks so uneven that a man on a mission might stumble. But my eyes were fixed on each crack, on the abrupt and undulating surfaces, they were each so absurd, unfair, and unpredictable. Though there might have been one, it was impossible to find an underlying rhythm. My eyes, lost in the concrete’s cruelty, could only consider how it might feel to truly fall.
Along that path I came across a wide and entirely Jewish old woman (just the sort that can be expected in the neighborhood) with such an enthusiastic expression that I knew one word would invite ten minutes of well-meaning jabber. So I passed her quickly with a closed-lid nod, and in that instant the frayed rubber tip of my aging sandals finally found an inch of concrete I hadn’t accounted for, and my sleepy figure scurried and stammered across three more slabs of poorly poured street.
By that time, my walk had found its way an hour deep into the afternoon. The heat had reached a stage I wasn’t ready for, and if it had been any other Sunday, with less holy-looking people all about, I might have stripped to the bare essentials for the walk’s fierce remainder. Peering out, from behind the pink and green petals, I spotted the great basilica cathedral’s dome. It stood with such care and might that even eyes and minds of unbelief find in it magic, and spirit. Ready to finally turn around, my legs kept on like those of a tired slave, whipped by enchanted ears that heard the faintest sound of an aria throwing itself in circles beyond the stone. Those quiet echoes haunted me, and I wondered if they were real.
I drew closer to the court wall, between me and the rotunda’s tall cylinder. The sound, ever stronger, came steadily from a tall, barely open door. On it, there was an official but clearly temporary sign, fixed to the wood with nails. Not a Public Entrance. I opened the door anyhow, happy to break a rule, and entered a Catholic church in full service for the first time in my life without even knocking. The door was open, I would explain, but they were speaking latin.
Between me and the voices, and beyond a flight of marble steps, another pair of elegant doors stood sealed. This small room, with side doors leading to officially locked and secret places was an onslaught of sensation. The brightness outside left me seeing green and little else, there in the dark as I stared toward the next pair of doors which each had a window, and in them bright reflections of the sunny outside from which I came. I finally squinted in and saw before me young people dressed full in white, wrapped by the aura of their own voices, turning the architecture into an instrument, and long colonnades of regular people, standing straight, awake, and following each word. And then there was the smell, I turned and there it was beside me. Some shiny brass thing like scales of justice held a plate full of incense embers. It smelled like forgetful old women and ancient ritual, at once.
Lost in the voices I slowly sat on a marble step, and resigned myself to simply listen to that mighty swirling sound. Massaged into the wonderful state of Being that only an encounter with otherly music can put us, I became engrossed in emotions so foreign. A thick and unshakable sense of longing came over me, similar to the way I often feel about my mother, or a girl. But deeper, more cinematic, yet more real, and without a name. I felt doubt, and doubling doubt. There was no model of reality for me to fully grasp. Now wary, and now crouched, clawing, bleating, I was solitary and destroyed.
A gush of air-conditioned wind blew at my back, and with it the voices took on the air of the hyper-real, as I finally heard them without wood or glass between. In a terrifying, triumphant sort of way, it was too much, and it soaked me like water. Flooded and heady, I was incapable of responding appropriately to the white-robed altar boy who was now addressing me, smoky swinging brass pendulum in hand. In New English, he said for a second time, you aren’t meant to be here. I was stunned not by his orders, but by his mere presence. I rose to leave, and saluted, “Indeed I’m not.”
From there I began home, bent on rest. And I surveyed the unchanged world I had so recently come across. I felt done with it, ready for something else. No longer charmed by the cracks and seams in the concrete, I wanted my way home to be made new. But my mind was also floating an inch or two above such matters. Sure as always that unlike the throngs before me, it is not the stream of money, or even time that I go a fishin’ in. It is rather the uncanny waters of hope, as I was so reminded by that pulsing dark room on the west side of Heaven, between Newstead and Maryland. So with force and purpose, I sealed those strange and many thoughts behind and beyond the inky depths of my mind, sure to return some other day. Like dark and obedient hounds.