The night before Easter

This night feels like a tomb, cold and still, nothing moving in here. All hope left outside the cold stone door, where it will be warmed by the morning sun. Hopefully.

Thinking about Easter a long time ago, maybe 1959. Everything was a sunny day and a brighter future. Everybody loved Ike, and everybody wanted a home in the suburbs with a fallout shelter in the basement. The Dodgers were gone and the Mets hadn't yet come, but I was a Yankee fan so none of that mattered.

That was probably the first year I was old enough to go to the Easter Vigil service on the night before. In the Catholic school culture of the time this was a big deal, a kind of rite of passage. We went to Saint Matthew's, on the top of the hill called Crown Heights. I'm sure it wasn't as big as I remember it, or as grand, but that's how my memory sees it to this day. Even in all the old photos we found in my aunt's house after she died, the sun is always shining on the grey stone church and the yellow brick school, and we were always in our Sunday clothes. Getting your picture taken was a much bigger thing in 1959.

Walking into the church at night was always so strange. All the tall stained glass windows that let in such bright Sunday morning light were dark and somehow sinister looking. Luminous saints and Bible scenes turned black and muddy in the night, even the window showing Christ's resurrection looked more like the monster rising from under your bed. All the statues and paintings were covered with purple drapes, looking like mournful ghosts. The altar was bare and no candles were lit anywhere. No matter what the weather, it felt cold.

The only part of the service I remember today is the making of the new fire. At midnight all the lights would be turned off except for a single lamp shining down on the altar, and the priest would, literally, strike a new flame using flint and steel. The rest of the year the candles were lit with wooden kitchen matches, sometimes even with a Zippo lighter. But here, at the pit at the bottom of blackness, with the Savior cold and dead, nothing artificial would do. If you wanted light you had to make it with your own two hands. The spark from the flint would land in a little pile of tinder and the priest would gently blow it into life, then use it to light the tall Pascal candle that stood on one side of the altar. The flame from that candle was used to light all the others, as midnight passed and dawn, though still somewhere far out over the Atlantic ocean, was surely on its way.

All these years later, and 1959 is faded into sepia memory, but that image stays with me, that picture of the spark lighting the tinder, and that idea that knowing how to make your own light was a really good thing.

Good Friday and the Triangle Fire

(March 25, Good Friday, is also the anniversary of the Triangle Fire in 1911.)

Late night, late March, Good Friday night and the smoke from a million incense burners in a million churches has been extinguished for the night. The believers mourn for a man who died two thousand years ago. Was he the Son Of God? I don't care. He lived like he was, that's what counts.        

 A little more than nineteen centuries later, in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Greenwich Village, a spark landed in a pile of rags and did what sparks do. Almost two hundred people, mostly teenage Jewish immigrant girls from the Lower East Side, went up like incense smoke into the cloudless blue sky.

The next day dozens of the police who responded turned in their badges and resigned, too sickened by what they'd seen to ever do that job again. They said most of the girls jumped from the tenth floor windows in twos and threes. The sight of them stranded on the window sills, fire behind them and sky in front, was more than anyone could take. Their bodies hit the pavement one after another too fast to count, with a sound people later prayed to forget. But everyone said that when they jumped there was no panic on their faces. They held hands or wrapped arms around each others' waists and jumped from one world to the next with no apparent fear.

The first true love of my life was a teenage Jewish girl from Brownsville, granddaughter of one of the few survivors of the fire. Every year on the anniversary he would light a yahrtzeit candle for all the friends he lost that day, but he would never talk about it. Even half a century later it was still too close for words.

I was thinking of him tonight, hoping he found some peace.