The Pope and a Wedding

To fill the hours of drivel on the Pope’s death the newscasters reach far and wide. Seeing my old neighborhood on television brought a pang of homesickness not knowing when and if I will ever walk there again. The connection was the sexual abuse by the priests scandal.

At one point in the hours of broadcasting wasteland I half expected a five-minute interview with a primitive tribesman rounded up in the African bush where it took two days to reach via non existent roads who said something like, “Pope? Pope…I think I heard something about a Pope,” as Richard Quest waxed poetic about the only people in the world who didn’t know the Pope had died.

CNN hit a new level of bizarre when they interviewed a couple who had been married yesterday in St. Peters as people filed by the casket of the Pope. Their talk about spirituality and history against the backdrop of a wedding video with the bride in her white dress made me feel as if I had wandered into the theatre of the absurd instead of coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel.

Of course the cliché about the happiest day of life was uttered. I always hated that phrase because it meant a woman who married at 18 and lived to be 86 and three months spent most of her life moving downward on the happiness scale, which makes me why anyone would marry only to reduce the quality of life forever and ever. But when the "happiest day" in a woman’s life was juxtaposed against a funeral of a world leader, it simply boggled my mind. I clicked the off button on my remote.