EPISODE 309.5: PEEPS

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

She is Risen!

I know I know, the Ramblers didn't make the finals. But their whole story is a glimpse of Easter, isn't it?

In my family Easter tradition is that my mother sends us care packages filled with Peeps and chocolate bunnies with the ears (or heads) bitten off. I have no idea how it started, but yes, you're right, it does explain a lot.

Not having your mailing addresses to offer you the same, I send along the next best thing, a couple little things that one way or another felt like the holiday to me. Whether Easter for you is a religious celebration of God's faithful love or just an excuse for a really fantastic brunch, I hope you have a great one. ++

Definitely the Peeps I'm looking for.

++

At the end of Stephen King's novel Insomnia (definitely in my top five King novels -- not a horror story but the spiritual journey of two people dealing with aging, loneliness and cosmic fate), the hero, Ralph Roberts, sees a truck barreling at a little girl, an act engineered by a demonic Rumplestiltskin-like creature called Atropos who is trying to punish Ralph and his wife Lois for having kind of in their own small way saved the universe (the main thrust of the novel).

Ralph runs out into the street to save the girl. Here’s King's description of what happens:

Ralph got a brief glimpse of Nat’s wide blue eyes, and then he shoved her in the chest and stomach as hard as he could, sending her flying backward with her hands and feet thrust out in front of her. She landed sitting up in the gutter, bruising her tailbone on the curb but breaking nothing. From some distant place, Ralph heard Atropos squawk in fury and disbelief.
Then two tons of Ford, still traveling at twenty miles an hour, struck Ralph and the soundtrack stopped dead. He was heaved upward and backward in a low, slow arc – it felt slow, anyway, from inside – and went with the Ford’s hood ornament imprinted on his cheek like a tattoo and one broken leg trailing behind him. There was time to see his shadow sliding along the pavement beneath in a shape like an X; there was time to see a spray of red droplets in the air just above him and to think that Lois must have splattered more paint on him than he had thought at first. And there was time to see Natalie sitting at the side of the street, weeping but all right...and to sense Atropos on the sidewalk behind her, shaking his fists and dancing with rage.
I believe I did pretty damned good for an old geezer, Ralph thought, but now I could really do with a nap.
Then he came back to earth with a terrible mortal smack and rolled—skull fracturing, back breaking, lungs punctured by brittle thorns of bone as his ribcage exploded, liver turning to pulp, intestines first coming unanchored and then rupturing.
And nothing hurt.
Nothing at all.

A few pages later at the book's very end, Lois holds his body, and is unexpectedly granted a gift by the weird Fringe-bald-guy-like angels that had intervened in their lives in the first place:

Lois looked up suddenly, her eyes wide and surprised, her grief forgotten as a gorgeous feeling of
(light blue light)
calmness and peace filled her. For a moment Harris Avenue was gone. She was in a dark place filled with the sweet smells of hay and cows, a dark place that was split by a hundred brilliant seams of light. She never forgot the fierce joy that leaped up in her at that moment, nor the sure sense that she was seeing a representation of the universe that Ralph wanted her to see, a universe where there was dazzling light behind the darkness. . .couldn’t she see it through the cracks?
‘Can you ever forgive me?’ Pete [the truck driver] was sobbing. ‘Oh my God, can you ever forgive me?’
‘Oh yes, I think so,’ Lois said calmly.
She passed her hand down over Ralph’s face, closing his eyes, and then held his head in her lap and waited for the police to come. To Lois, Ralph looked as if he had gone to sleep. And, she saw, the long white scar on his right forearm was gone.

++

Somehow this too feels like Easter to me.
++

And lastly, a cartoon from the great Australian artist Michael Leunig that captures a bit of the boldness that Christianity aspires to.