Lent Remembered

by Gabe Durham

"Are you giving up something for Lent this year?" a co-worker asked me the week before Ash Wednesday. It was like she was asking me whether or not I still ran five miles, six days a week.

"Of course I'm giving something up," I said. "Aren't you?"

"I'm agnostic," she said.

I said, "Oh, that's the thing where you're not sure if you believe in discipline and self-betterment." I'm not usually so blunt in the workplace, but she's gorgeous and I suspect no one has ever been stern with her. She hates me now but she will come to love me when she realizes I'm the first man she's ever met.

Lent is a big deal. It's the Christmas of challenging yourself. It's your annual 40-day chance to prove you're not just hot crap in this world—you'll be hot crap in the next world, too.

Two Lents ago, I gave up vegetables. That might sound like so what to someone who isn't into health, but for me it was tough. The whole month before, I'd been eating almost nothing but vegetables and loving it. You know that feeling you get when you take an enormous bite into a tomato and then chase it with V-8? You probably don't.

Quick story: I'm reminded of the time I was in the locker room and this kid who'd been watching too much Major League Baseball looked at me cockeyed—because 64-year-olds aren't supposed to be in better shape than him—and asked me, "You juice, old man?" and I yanked a one-liter of V-8 out of my gym bag and said, "Yeah, I juice all the time," and took a big swig. Everybody in the place was just cracking up.

So I got the idea for the vegetable thing when everybody kept telling me how orange I looked. First I was just going to lay off carrots for a while, but then I figured I'd spiritualize the whole thing and give up all vegetables. The pangs of withdrawal were tough—much like what I suppose a heroin junkie goes through—though I supplemented with vitamins and fruit. When Easter came, I got a big ole thing of ranch dip and a huge bag of raw veggies—tomatoes, cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, cucumbers, mushrooms, celery, peppers (red and yellow, not green) and ate like a greedy farmer.

But that was a cakewalk compared to this year's Lent when I gave up democracy. No bones about it, I'm an American. I get my sweats at Wal-Mart and my salads at McDonalds. There's a magnum under my pillow because George Washington says I can have one. We're the best nation on this earth and it got off to a great start because we invented the best form of government. I love it so much that I had to give it up.

Each week of Lent, I preached a different political system. I told everyone how much better life would be if we held all things in common, one big family, then I told them I didn't believe in government, then I made a case for universal health care, then I hummed, "God Save the Queen" every time I walked into a room (that one didn't work out so well because it was the same tune as "My Country 'Tis of Thee" but really that's England's fault for stealing our great patriotic anthem), then I argued for Islamic theocracies until the FBI asked me to stop and I told them about Lent and they asked if perhaps I could just go back to Socialism for a little while and I told that I had been planning on doing "dictatorship" next and they told me that would be alright but please not Kim Jong-il, so I campaigned for President Bush to be given absolute power over Congress and the courts (and then a bunch of liberals got on board because they thought I was making an ironic statement about the Patriot Act, so when I finally figured out why they were smirking so much I told them about Lent and they looked at me funny and asked if I wouldn't mind if they kept up the ironic Bush for Dictator campaign without me and I said sure, what the hell) and around that time I looked at a calendar and realized it was two days past Easter.

I think I'd burned a lot of bridges with my conservative compatriots so I wore my American flag t-shirt to work every day for the next month. My boss said, "I support our troops as much as anyone, but could you dress it up a little more?" Next day I wore the same flag t-shirt with an American flag necktie to match! It was a Mentos commercial, the look on his face and the way he gave me the thumbs-up, and then less of a Mentos commercial when he kicked me to the curb.

Next year I'm going with something less controversial. Already the FBI has a file on me, and I don't want to go hiking in the Alps and return to find that the land of the free has shut its doors on me like I was Cat Stevens or whatever the hell he calls himself now. Here's a good Lent I just thought of: I won't talk to anyone under the age of 70. Give myself a healthy appreciation for the elderly and death and all that.

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Gabe Durham is the author of "The Complete Genealogy of Everyone, Ever," a fiction chapbook. His writings have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Daytrotter, Hobart, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon , NOÖ Journal and elsewhere. He lives in Northampton, MA and gives away free words and music at gatherroundchildren.com.