Bastien and the Cowgoddess (Piers)

Dear Piers,

° It's just no use your peering around the column after the Sequence, in hopes of espying Bastien. Wasn't there, isn't there, won't be there, all your fault.

° For your ruse failed as it deserved to fail: it failed when Lucy tried it on Ricky, it failed when Don Porter tried it on Ann Sothern, it failed when Charlie Farrell applied it to Gale Storm, it failed--well when a trick fails even in '50's Hollywood, it has no chance at all in real life.

° It failed, your ruse, by succeeding. For, a couple of Sundays ago, when you stealthily set forward by 45 minutes not only Bastien's Patek Philippe, but also every freestanding timepiece in the flat clear down to the VCR, you did manage to trick him into arriving at Mass before the Introit.

° And what was the inevitable consequence of your cleverness?

° Why, the poor lad heard an entire homily, that's what.

° And once one has heard one of those clear through, no amount of Lucille Ball (sy) henna trickery will induce a bright unbleached blond to suffer another.

§

° What a homily! Good joke beginning, and not the one about the cat barking either. This time it was a cow barking. The OT was from Deuteronomy--what is that thing still doing in the Lectionary? Hasn't Moyses's childhood grudge against Hathor gone on long enough?-- I reckoned the theme was to be an admonition against worshipping golden calves. Don't know where I'd find one to worship, if so inclined. So that was that.

° Bimeby, as I gazed about listlessly, I was conscious that, in threequarter rear view, so that one cheekbone shows, Bastien is your spitting image. Even his crown is on the right, surely not a naturalborn lefty?

° And then for a while I examined folks' clothes. That awkward season, too early for the good wool, too late--well, there was one sixteenyearold in midanklelength cargo pants and a blue and pink and yellow Hawaiian coconutpalmandsurfboard print shirt, that was entertaining.

° And then for a while I drifted alongside Proust and Mozart. Dove sono? Dove, indeed. There's where the gentle and kindly woman who was dying of cancer all last year isn't sitting this year. There, down front, survives the nonagenarian exmodel, still very spiffy in this seasonally drab crowd. There, on the right, isn't the nervous youth who used to come for--well why did he come? Every few minutes he used to turn and peep at the entry, but no one ever came to join him, no one ever spoke to him, that I saw, even at the Peace. Pretty much just sat and peeped and started at creaks in the floorboards, poor little tyke. Gone for good, frightened or despaired.

° Rafe, emigrated to your aisle this year. Rafe, religiously scrupulous not to acknowledge, by any community action, the liturgy that interrupts the Pachelbel he's come to hear.

° Tevye, two yards and all seven planets from Rafe. Tevye and Miklos, puzzling out the slow Cheshire Cat (tish) dissolving of the sweetvoiced Cantor, was it the January Pansy Festival? Was it--?

° Near at hand, an exCouncil member, as immaculately groomed as the exmodel, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. tanned and handsome, drawing the lines on the children's ConnectaPicture--no, it was a crossword puzzle, ripped out of the morning paper.

° So many and so clever ways of coping with the long aimless verbal drift toward the Offertory. Puzzles, blind stares, abandonments of religion for good and all, gentle Sister Death herself, so many ways of coping.

° Yet Bastien, blond and stalwart, listened doggedly to it all.

§

° So he didn't jump halfway out of his seat, as I did, when the homily ended.

° With a bombshell.

° "Choose Life!" Out of the blue, just like that, "Choose Life!"

° I started just as the nervous little pansyflower used to, if only a greybeard medico cleared his throat behind him.

° "Choose Life!"?

° You mean to say the thing wasn't an attack on the Cowgoddess all along?

° You mean to say I was so lost in Mozartian space that I didn't register foetuses, bloody broken tornfleshed little foetuses, with fotos to illustrate?

° Good thing I wasn't solving a crossword puzzle, might've lost the preacher's thread altogether.

§§§§§

° But just because your stale clockstopping ruse won't work, it doesn't mean I can't tell you what will work. That's what I do best, spread contentment and resolve difficultnesses.

° Just program Blondello's cell phone to play Sanctus Bell at maximum volume. And slip the device under his pillow all unawares.

° Then, just before you cue up the Sanctus--that was a very amazing intonation of the Preface Sunday, Clergy been watching Weeping Camel, have they?--dial Bastien's number.

° I know his family's been lapsed since the loony Wesley brothers, well, since loony King Hank himself, but it's in the blood, like Pavlov's dogs. Dingalingaling . . . dingalingaling . . .dingalingaling--he'll fall off the bed smack dab onto his knees, the pain'll rouse him, the accurate clock'll shock him, he'll be showered and dressed and coming in the door just in time for the Dan Locklair Rubrics (V), Blues Bin Bloody Mary Brunch immediately following.

° Buon consiglio omnibus hominibus bonae voluntatis in questi giorni . . . .

° I hereby solemnly swear that I am up to no good, woof woof, Giac.

° P.S. Altar Guild? I know I not speak the English so good--the hours of revision these letters take, just to try to pass for--! But you can't honestly have imagined--!