Totally Losing It For Lent

I've decided to give up moderation for Lent. This has been a running joke in our house for years now--I always have plenty of suggestions for Martin on what he might give up for Lent (of course they always directly benefit me) but all I am willing to give up is housework (especially laundry) or self-control.

But this year, I'm totally serious. Last night we were eating beef (a rare occasion at our house). I had carefully set aside a piece of fat so I wouldn't eat it but Elsepth, as befits her perfectly, grabbed it up and stuffed it into her mouth. "That's disgusting!" I said. "Don't eat that! It's yucky!"

"It's GOOD," she said, and she chewed it up and swallowed it. Seemed appropriate on Fat Tuesday. Elspeth eating beef fat for Mardis Gras. But before you vegetarians (sorry, my sister) faint dead away, I do have a point. I'll get to it eventually, maybe (unluckily for you people, I've given up pithiness for Lent as well).

Those of you who know us well know that Martin and I have moved an ungodly number of times before settling here at Wazoo. One of our years was spent in an incredibly frigid part of Iowa, in a picture-perfect little Dutch town. I do mean, PICTURE PERFECT. It was like a set from a movie. The streets sparkled, the park was immaculate, and the sound of mowers roared up and down the streets all week long, except on Sunday, when a preternatural quiet fell over everything like a blanket of create-in-me-a-clean-heart snow. (A couple people warned us that Sundays were serious business, but I didn't really believe them until, right before we left said perfect town, we ventured out to do a little gardening on a Sunday. And by golly, the nay-sayers weren't lying. We felt as if we were sacrificing goats on our front lawn to some unknown god instead of digging holes for flowers in the soil.)

In the spring, tulips popped up in absolutely perfect rows as if they were in a florist's window. And I wouldn't be joshing you if I told you that people went out with little bitty scissors to manicure their grass. Those of you who have ever driven by Wazoo know enough about us to realize Martin and I were totally and completely out of place there. And it was a funny thing, too--though everyone was very nice, I've never seen such sour, dour expressions on the faces of women.

After some months of this absolute perfection, what I wanted (even if I didn't articulate it then) was loud neighbors, big-boobed grandmas wearing skimpy tanktops that showed their armpit hair who called their children with booming voices. I wanted a Mama living next door who knocked people upside the head and boiled huge pots of pasta. I wanted some guy with a hat on backwards to take his shirt off and fix the car on a Sunday. I wanted a Mardis Gras parade in the streets. Instead, there was a Tulip Festival, where all the girls clad themselves in wooden shoes and swept the spotless streets so clean that you could eat Dutch sausage right off the pavement.

Now we live in such ramshackle glory that one sad day I actually yelled after a motorist like a banshee: GET A MUFFLER! But, despite the rather loud cars without mufflers and the coal mine not far away, Martin and I feel much more comfortable here in our completely imperfect corner of Pennsylvania than we ever felt in Dutch Perfection.

So I'm paddling slowly back to Lent here. La, la, la. It seems to me that many of us Puritans or self-deniers have a lot to learn from ramshackle, from the people we squint at who are too loud or too expressive in their grief or their joy. We use the same expression with both people who have lost their heads in tears or lost their heads laughing: Oh man, she's totally LOST it. Thank God, we think, we've got the self control not to slop ourselves all over the place. So we retreat to this great, terse, pithy sarcasm to sum up what's deep and mysterious within us. It's so East-coast of us. So funny. So dry. And so Oscar Wilde, too, and so smart. It makes us feel in control to arrange our thoughts and our faces so neatly and picture-perfectly.

I think I'm going to give that up for Lent. I've never been any good at it, anyway. I will not attempt to be a park full of tulips. I will be the weedy garden I am all the time, and I won't make anyone miserable because I'm not perfect. Hey, everyone, I'm a mess! And so are you! Happy Lent to you!

Becoming more and more loosey-goosey is a job for some of us, especially those of us with Finnish or German blood. Martin has a dose of Italian and Irish or Scottish, so he's okay. I, on the other hand, must continually remind myself that I want to be an eccentric, happy old woman, not a tight-fisted, angry one. And I want to do it largely without chemical stimulants.

Also, for Lent, I am taking up dancing. Or I should say, returning to regular dancing, since everyone dances when they are children. Every night after I deposit the children in bed I will turn up the music and I will dance like a fool. Martin is joining me. He has to wear a purple hat with a tassel in order to really loosen up enough to get his joints swinging. But once he tightens that purple hat around his ears, he's crazy magic.

If anyone would like to join us, I expect we'll start at around nine at night and go for about forty-five minutes. Bring your hats, bring your fats, bring your messy selves.