The Last Sunday of Epiphany

It is the last Sunday of Epiphany, Lent days away. My inbox is full of Lenten opportunities, the seasonal advertising of New Year’s resolution gym deals. I walk into my local Italian bakery to get a Carnival pastry. An ecclesial shock to my tongue.

When I ask the woman at the counter for one, she doesn’t understand what I want. I repeat myself to no avail. She asks the woman next to her what I want. I repeat myself. She pronounces it correctly. SFIN-jee, instead of my hard “geh.” I realize I’m pronouncing the word as if it were German. She tells me it’s two dollars and fifty cents and I hand her a five. She dully gives me my change and my mispronounced confection. Protestantism 0: Catholicism 1.

Back on Court Street, the wind is cold and sharp in the bright afternoon sun. The second day of March is leonine. I take a bite of Carnival and my teeth and gums sing as they sink in. I am listening to an episode of the Paris Review podcast, a memoir of a lover dying of lymphoma from AIDS in 1994. Everything is heightened and I am experiencing that heady eeriness I get when attuning myself, availing myself to writing. I soften myself up like this. It’s a bacchic synesthesia for craft that I do not recommend.

Sfinge are for St. Joseph’ Day, later this month. But it will do. It’s the alcoholic’s binge before going dry. Tomorrow, a Danish fastelavn. Tuesday, a Polish pançzi. Shock the system. Shock the system. Shock my system just two months into this officially fascist America. Then Ash Wednesday with the oil and the ash and the pressed smear and the warm words of death with the sugar still in my gut, circulated through me.

Ash and sugar and dust and fried dough topped with cream. Wipe my creamy finger on wax paper. Wipe your oily finger on my face. Remind me of who, of what I am. It is the last Sunday of Epiphany. Eat your weight in revelation. Gorge on the shock of the new. Lent comes quickly.