Jeanie Tomasko
Still Life with Squirrel
The thing is it doesn’t matter whether Good Friday is in Spanish or English. I mean because you don’t have to know the words. Either way the church is filled with love and grief. Someone will call for their mother because children do. A man will take the cross down and then lie down beside it with his keys and wallet in his pocket because grief has no timetable. Once I was taken down by an African musician. Words I didn’t know I knew sang about longing. What is language, anyway? Animals look you in the eye. Steve says how do animals know about eyes? My friend is going to the Spanish service because her co-worker called in sick and she can’t leave work for the English one. She talks to the squirrels on her way in to work at the County. They look her in the eye with a language they have hammered out together. What I tell her is it doesn’t matter if the squirrels are Spanish.
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