Si on avait besoin d'une cinquième saison..
I think we’d have to call it chilly Easter. Or something.

It didn’t take too long into Lent before I regretted my giving up of non-essential music. (Briefly described, any music that is pleasurable, non-liturgical, not for work-outs, non-accidental and/or not totally outside of my control. That means I wouldn’t think of attempting to ask music to be turned off in a public venue. But I wouldn’t linger too long in the produce aisle at Dominicks’ because, for example, I couldn’t tear myself away from the Beach Boys’ Help Me Rhonda. Likewise, I would graciously endure music that ordinarily makes my nerves raw, such as that ‘cool jazz’ station of which my husband is so fond.)

I thought this Lent would be ‘easier.’ Last year I was anticipating surgery three days after Easter, so Lent was filled with prayer of greater depth and more time of reflection. The self-imposed quasi-silence was efficacious, though there were low moments when I wondered if I were facing death without one last run through the Beatles’ entire oeuvre. As if everything would have been much better if I had spent March and half of April in the fetal position, getting out of bed only to switch from Sgt Pepper to White Album to Abbey Road.

As a whole, it was easier to bear pain and dread than to, as this year, just offer up the general tedium and sense of blah-ness. But if this year was meant to be blah, I would accept it. Perhaps this was the best possible time to be faced with a degree of spiritual dryness, since I couldn’t try to out-run it, avoid it or ‘self-medicate’ it away with copious doses of Springsteen and Stones. Or even find a brief respite by letting my brain glaze over while watching VH1 at 6:30 in the morning.

Back to the above album. A bit of Quebecois rock from the 1970’s. I never really owned it, just a cassette made from a friend’s vinyl. In the past decade the cassette disappeared - as well as the availabilty of cassette players. I was looking around Amazon.com before Christmas and actually found a CD of Les Cinq Saisons for the outrageous price of $49.95. I liked that album a lot, but not $50 worth.

Then, not long after Christmas, I was ordering some school related stuff for the boys on Amazon and gave the CD another look. Now they had some copies available for $19.95. Still a lot, but considering the free shipping we were getting for the school stuff, I bit. The books arrived within days, but the CD delivery date was pushed back multiple times. I acquiesced to the last order update, even though the projected delivery date was May 25. At that point it was late Lent, so why would I be in a hurry to receive a CD I couldn’t listen to.
By Holy Saturday, it was so out of my mind that when a small Amazon package arrived in the mail I assumed it was for someone else in the house. But it was for me.

What a lovely way to break the ‘music’ fast - drifting off to sleep to tunes I hadn’t heard in years. I would call it a nice ending to a less than perfect day. Detachment from my perfectionist fantasies is a slow process. And I tend to focus on the negative rather than the positive. The coordination of family members who wanted to dye eggs but couldn’t agree on a time did not leave me as dismayed as it has in previous years. The grim look on the boys’ faces during the Vigil Mass annoyed me but didn’t drag me down into despair. (There was the consolation that we were there. And that they didn’t set themselves or any fellow parishioners on fire.)