April is the new April
“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot once reminded us. I’m not sure things have changed. Writing from foggy, blustery England, he first captured the brute resurgence of green Nature in an unforgiving landscape before moving on to other meanings.
Still true, I claim, in this wacky fourth month of the year in Tennessee, an unforgiving landscape of its own where freezes and monsoon-like rains alternate with temperate climes in a scattershot pattern. Weather in this city has become so impossible to predict in recent years that, for those of us who check our trusty Iphone weather app, the update can change from hour to hour. And then back. Hope offered, hope taken away, if you are looking for the sun.
A friend said the other day, “April is the new March,” alluding, I suppose, to the old “comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion” adage. I disagree. April is still April. It is the month where nothing can be taken for granted. Especially for those of us who enjoy planting things, a fresh “crop,” however slight.
Now it is also the month where people get killed in a Waffle House just one city away in the middle of the night. In April in a Waffle House, four people die, a hero is made, and all are ignored by the president. In April, a man who threatened the White House and had his guns taken away and given to his father who gave them back to him, that man brought his guns to Tennessee.
Meanwhile, the Tennessee House of Representatives just passed a bill reducing the penalties for carrying a gun without a permit — $250 for the first offense, a police officer may confiscate the ammunition, but not necessarily the gun after the second offense. Tennesseans are already allow to carry guns in cars without a permit. And, of course, in Tennessee, you can bring a gun into a restaurant (with a permit).
I don’t know what your experiences with Waffle Houses are, but I have been there late, I have been there early, I have been there on Christmas. At all times, the WH has been a safe haven from travel or snow or a tornado or a power outtage. It is a place for either a bleary-eyed stupor or an intimate conversation. Life, I might even argue, is like a Waffle House — you don’t necessarily start out going to one, but you often end up there. Safe and reliable, you think. Maybe not the best, but you always know what you are going to get. Until you don’t.
And now that Waffle House is yet another victim in our national slaughter, an order of scrambled eggs with cheese, raisin toast, hash browns, bacon and coffee isn’t the first thing I think of when I see one.
April, T.S. Eliot reminds us, “is the cruelest month” because life and growth and hope are all so fragile.
FOR YOUR PLAYLIST: “Blue Sky” is as rocking as Patti Griffin has ever gotten, and, oh, what a pleasure that is for all of us.
IDEAL LISTENING: When you want to surprise someone with a terrific song.