One morning you find a comrade in a dead person whom you have never met. I have never read Art Buchwald. If he had not caught my imagination with his own video obituary, in no way would I have written this.
As a kid, Buchwald shuttled from one orphanage to the other despite having born to parents who where alive. In the course of regular stale course meals, he reached a Queens boarding house for sick children run by Seventh-Day Adventists, where he learnt that eating meat, fish and eggs was sinful.
As a boy who rang the morning church bells on Saturday in our local Seventh-day Adventist Parish, I found myself quite superior to my ‘pagan friends.’ I never had to, study after the sun knelled the parting day on Fridays, never ate pork which was filthy, never had to suffer a drunken father. More than everything I used to feel pity at my peers who would not make it to the ‘kingdom of God.’ Always bold with my guardian angel beside me, I never ‘cried to dream again’ at night.
Sitting in our modestly modest drawing room cum bedroom cum everything room, one holy Friday evening, an Adventist family friend chastised my pastor father for letting his kids eat meat and drink tea. “You will have to answer on that big day,” he warned my father, who thought it was ok if one star from his crown was stripped for the crime of drinking tea.
As we held hands and prayed that night, Lucifer entered my nostrils from a distant kitchen stove where beef was being cooked. I questioned the no-meat uncle, my tea-father and God. Time not too far from that day, I could sense my guardian angel hovering so near yet so far- watching me indulge in phallic pleasures, wiping off half-dead lives with my bed sheet fringe and falling asleep with fantasies unholy.
While turning Buddhist prayer wheels, in a distant land, my ears yearn for the Saturday church bells. “There is still a tiny Seventh-day Adventist inside of me screaming to get out every time I make a pass at a tuna fish sandwich,” said Art Buchwald.
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