On Monday, your body is still recovering from whatever flavor of debauchery you chose to overindulge in Friday night,
Saturday and Sunday; hence, your body never really wakes up to the fact that it's back at work, doing the usual bump-and-grind. By Tuesday, though, body and mind have not only recovered enough from the weekend to realize that the weekend has, in fact, ended, but that the next weekend is little more than a speck on the horizon, no more than a pinpoint of light at the end of an seemingly interminable tunnel.
I feel the same way about April. For the first quarter of the year, a slight hangover from the holidays, in concert with the numbness of winter, prevails. By April, though, the holidays have worn off, there's enough of a hint of warmth in the air to fool you into thinking that winter is finally, completely, entirely over (ha), and the passage of time becomes alarmingly apparent: "What the fuck do you mean it's fucking April al-fucking-ready?"
April is a lot of things--most of them bad.
It's when one day warms up to 70, only to drop to 40 the next day (as it did the morning of the day I'm writing this). It's when when the trees begin to bud and the green grass tries to force its way through the brown (and as dry as this past winter was, there's plenty of brown to go around). It's when what's left of the "too, too sallied" mounds snow at the edges of parking lots have melted, leaving the residue of dark gray behind as a reminder of the least pleasant memories of months--not days or merely weeks, but months--now past.
April is the month that my own personal childhood cat--a medium-sized gray girl forever known as "Gray Cat" because she was certified by a competent veteranarian as a male and named "Smokey Junior" (after Smokey, a handsome Russian Blue and the finest rat catcher I've ever known, though I wish he hadn't been so proficient because he loved bringing, er, "trophies" home to show his appreciation and affection for us) until she went into heat and the testicles the vet thought she'd seen turned out to be tiny twin mirages--finally had to be put to sleep.
Gray Cat lived to be 20--an amazing span of time for a feline, to be sure, spanning from elementary school through college and into my so-called "adult" life. And most of that 20 years was spent in remarkably good health, except for a bout with a burst blood vessel in her left ear, which looked more like a potato chip than an ear for her remaining years.
But seven years ago (was it really that long ago? Damn...) in the middle of April, she started having trouble walking, then started staggering, then...you know where this is going, don't you? Gray Cat lived with Mom after I moved out of the house (since Mom and my brother were home more than I was and could take better care of her), and one April day Mom called me at work to say that she'd made "the appointment" with the vet--Gray Cat had tipped over over in the litter pan and couldn't stand back up again. The time had come.
As "work" at that point was a evil publishing company in one of Chicago's northern suburbs, getting to Mom's in time to go with Gray Cat seemed an impossibility shy of a sudden genetic mutation that would cause arms to fall off and allow wings to grow in their place.
But then, a coworker volunteered to drive me down to Mom's (said coworker had endured a similar situation with her beloved dog and felt I should be there for he old girl) and our department head, a pet owner herself, gave her blessing.
I made it.
When I came into the living room, Gray Cat rose with effort and tried to cross the couch to come to me one last time. I caught her before she fell, held her against my chest and whispered over and over that it was all right, everything was all right. I held her the whole way to the vet, through the procedure (tearfully apologizing to her the whole time for having to do what had to be done) and all the way back to Mom's house, where she was laid to rest in the backyard and had a yellow rose bush planted over the spot--a yellow rose bush that blooms every spring, sometimes even in April.
(Side note: Yes, she should have had a more formal, more fitting name than "Gray Cat," but I freely admit to having no talent whatsoever for naming pets: our first family dog, a female black lab, was, I'm told, named "Hey, You!" because I continually yelled this at the poor animal and each time I did, she came to me. So the name stuck. Poor old pup. Good thing Lottie and Ms. Christopher were already named when they came to me.)
April is when baseball season begins in earnest. And when the pain begins in Chicago.
April is when Christ was crucified. (Okay, he came back from the dead a couple of days later, but still...)
And this April will be the first full month of the current war in Iraq. And yes, I think it'll last through the month, making April more literally cruel than usual, and it may last for many months to come.
I don't suppose we could just skip April altogether and head straight into May, could we?
