Going to Easter

an essay by Angela Townsend

I sometimes wonder if this magazine is too earnest, then work like Angela Townsend’s essay arrives, and I say: “Okay, it’s fine.” I also wonder how anyone can be religious anymore, but work like Angela Townsend’s arrives, and I think: “Okay, that’s one way.”

“Going to Easter” is the best thing I’ve read this month, and I believe it’s one of the strongest pieces of writing this magazine has published to date. I think you’ll dig it. If you do, please share it.

I’d note that I read Angela’s submission before reading her bio. That she’s a director at a cat sanctuary and therefore an angel had no bearing on my selection.

- 🖤AV

Going to Easter
by Angela Townsend

My grandfather excused himself for eight years. He did not feel guilty, because he wasn’t. He did not want macadamia-encrusted salmon. He did not want to use a public bathroom. He loved his family. He could talk to us on the phone and send cards he spent hours drafting before committing words to pen. He was not coming to Easter.

He loved his condo. Three-hundred square feet smelled like bananas, and three-hundred smelled like Ivory soap. He arranged his VHS tapes by personal rating system. He had a 7:30pm Sunday phone date with me. We repaired the world with tape that held for seven days. He did not have to go anywhere but the grocery store. He had grief, irritable bowels, and nothing to prove.

He had a granddaughter cut from the same burlap. I declared him my “very best friend” at age three, commissioning my mother to etch the words onto a rock from the backyard.

He pointed at the TV Guide and told me that Clint Eastwood had kind eyes. He smiled at the grocery bagger who treated him like an old man rather than a retired police captain. He would have sent muscular angels to get me out of Easter, if I would let him.

But I feel guilty, because I am, and so I go.

As gatherings go, Easter is as inoffensive as it gets. My maestro uncle summons us to a restaurant where we can order anything we want. It is three hours with eight people I love. I can go home, reclaim my ugly pants, and pin my hair back on top of my head, where hair belongs when you are a semi-feral Hobbit passing as a contributing member of society. It is three hours of my life.

Most importantly, my mother will be there. She is my very best friend. My grandmother was her very best friend. She is a roving repository for God’s promises. She is a poet from Brooklyn who slips into a Bulgarian accent when I become tedious.

She became a psychologist because my grandfather was German, my grandmother was Sicilian, and love is an imp that snorts at its own jokes. She is accosted by lambs in Walmart who missed the news that she retired.

She wears earrings the size of the Chrysler Building and patches my potholes. When they turn into sinkholes and dinosaurs emerge, she is the only person I trust to strangle them. She is the only reason I go to events.

She, and the fact that I feel guilty, because I am.

I am guilty of hiding in a condo I call a cloister. I say I am an anchoress, like Julian of Norwich. Julian reassures down the centuries that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” I shoot laser love notes into the world without soiling my soles with earth. I maintain a Sad List of fifty people I attempt to cheer weekly. I am unable to sleep the night before a three-hour social event with eight people I love.

I am going to Easter.

My Juilliard uncle gives me chocolate eggs. My graceful cousin Stacey hands me a candle that smells like cake. My mother has located the world’s only sweatshirt on which bunnies gather around an empty cross. “I know it’s an Easter sweatshirt, but isn’t it always Easter?” My mother is my very best friend.

Stacey asks how many years I have been working at the cat sanctuary. She is unprepared for the answer, seventeen. She attaches a swoop to her sentence, but the encouragement bangs me in the forehead like a low shelf. “That’s a long time!” She asks if I’m “really not dating, not even online!” I shimmy up her exclamation point to see if I can spot my condo from here.

Stacey is graceful, so she tells me I am brave. She runs twenty miles a week and thinks I would benefit from exercise. This is what she tells her depressed patients. I want to tell her that I am anxious, not depressed. I have hour-long Zoom visits with my mother every morning. I have constellations of ecstatic editors I will never meet, word-people under wool blankets my grandfather would have grasped by the tassels.

I am thinking of my grandfather, no doubt watching M*A*S*H* with Jesus, when I say, “Anxiety doesn’t run in our family. It gallops. We are neurotic.” I blow bubbles in my Diet Coke. “You can be neurotic and happy. I’m happy. Think of Grandpa. Grandpa was kind of happy.”

Stacey is too graceful to respond. She asks if I am still Catholic, or if I’ve gone back to being Presbyterian.  Or Lutheran? She can’t remember. She heard that I went Catholic when I was married. She was surprised. Uncle Jeffrey said maybe I went back again now that, well, everything worked out.

I stab a garlic knot into a ring for my finger. I tell her I am still everything I’ve ever been. The vegan pagans at the sanctuary are some of the best Christians I know. I talk to Grandpa and Mary and Gandhi and that one Beastie Boy who passed away. The one person I talk to more than my mother is Jesus.

Stacey is graceful, so she changes the subject. She says I am brave. She says she is not looking for much, just an honest man who wants to do activities together. Stacey does what real people do, trying to find threads of the same color in her friendship bracelet and mine. I would be open to a good man, right? Ajar? Wouldn’t I like someone to go to the beach with?

I tell Stacey that if God wants me to get married again, God can send a curated selection of dryer repairmen and mail carriers from which to choose. I am not going out there. I almost didn’t come to Easter. I am not brave, I am guilty. I go to the beach in winter, just me and the mollusks.

The food has arrived. Uncle Jeffrey asks if I will say a prayer. I turn to my mother in terror. My theology books are arranged by academic division, Ethics here and Systematics there, but my religion is disorganized. They want me to pray, so I pray. “Thank you, Jesus, for being alive!”

I am not saying enough. When I went to seminary, before the cat sanctuary, my Easter prayers were longer than Meat Loaf songs. I invited Samaritans and Ammonites and all three synoptic Gospels to Portofino’s Italian Ristorante. The salmon got so cold, the macadamias fell off. Now I believe more and say less. But this is the only time they will see me all year, all eight of them together, and I leave them hungry.

I ask Stacey if she feels the pressure to feed people. She is a physician’s assistant. I am sure her patients see her as a sibyl. My donors at the cat sanctuary hook their fingers in the loops of my jeans and try to follow me. When you are kind, people look in your eyes.

Stacey is graceful, so she says it’s important to have boundaries. She offers the oxygen mask analogy. You have to take care of yourself if you want to take care of anyone else.

Her salmon looks exhausted. I contemplate telling her that I think fish tastes like illness. Instead, I tell her I am guilty of hiding. The least I can do is shoot lasers all day. I tell her about the Sad List. I tell her I am an anchoress. Stacey really thinks I should start running.

My mother orders tiramisu, because today is a feast day. She puts a yellow chick on my vacant plate. Take off its head, she urges. Its innards are lip balm in a tie-dye pattern. I apply it dramatically, a vamp in her boudoir. Stacey looks embarrassed. My mother raises her fork and announces, in a voice from Bulgaria, where we have no blood whatsoever, “He is risen indeed!”

We will all hug and kiss, and my mother will squeeze me tightly enough to hold me together for a month. I will back into a BMW in the parking lot, and a woman named Candace will tell me that I ruined Easter. When she sees my insurance card, she will bare her teeth, which are many, and decree, “I would have guessed that you have the worst possible insurance.” I call them, and a man named Sanjay promises that my life will go on “blissfully uninterrupted by this minor inconvenience.”

I go home, pile my hair into a gray pineapple, and draft cards to Stacey and Uncle Jeffrey. I tell Stacey that she is graceful and braver than seven savannas of lionesses. I tell Uncle Jeffrey that he is magisterial. I tell them both that they are among my very best friends, because I love a lot of people, but I don’t get out often. I tell them I heard Grandpa giggling with us.

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Bridge Eight, Chautauqua, Clackamas Literary Review, CutBank, Lake Effect, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, The Smart Set, and Terrain, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. She lives just outside Philadelphia with two hooligan seraphs disguised as cats. Find Angela on Substack, X, and Instagram.