Love Me Read Online Free

the Sacred Harmonic Convergence of the Blessed Are the Meek, and now in a packed hall in Cleveland we sing the St. Matthew Passion, and there are tears glittering in the front row, noses are blown, stunned faces, and again in Syracuse—just as Bruno Phillips has told us, “We are going to sing so that they will remember this for the rest of their lives. There is no other reason to do it, folks, none”—and two nights later, at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Central Park West in New York City. Oh, my God. Our driver missed the exit on the Thruway and wound up on the New Jersey Turnpike and then it took two hours to turn around and come through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Manhattan, Bruno Phillips sitting tall and composed behind the driver, and in the anxiety of arriving late, we forgot to be nervous about our New York debut, we just hustled off the bus and peed and combed our hair, and filed onto the stage twenty minutes late and the audience gave us a standing ovation. There were standees in back, people sitting in the aisles. We sang the best St. Matthew of our lives and those New Yorkers wept openly—old Broadway actresses, crooked financiers, admen, Jewish socialists, atheists, fingers stained yellow from tobacco, breath redolent of gin and vermouth—they were transformed into angels by J. S. Bach’s faith in Christ’s sacrifice and they rose to their feet and drenched us in applause and shouts and we stood and soaked in it. People shouting “Thank you” and “God bless you.” (A Minneapolis audience would’ve turned and walked out and gotten in their cars and driven home and turned on the news, but never mind.) So we sang “Children of the Heavenly Father” for an encore. And then the “Hallelujah Amen.” The applause wore us out. We walked off in a daze and Iris and I wandered into Central Park in the dark, into the Sheep Meadow and stood holding hands and I asked her to marry me. “Tonight?” she said. No, I said, when we get home. “Sounds good to me,” she said.
    Let us not to the marriage of people who know what they want
Admit impediments. Love doesn’t vary
Like you might change your hair style from pixie to bouffant
Or throw away your swimsuit in January.
Oh no, it is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It laughs at death and gooses statues in the park
And loves a cheeseburger with extra bacon.
Love’s not time’s fool though rosy lips and cheeks
Get all wrinkly and veiny and saggy and gnarly.
Love alters not with its brief hours and weeks
So don’t give up on it, Charley.
If this be a big mistake and we wind up hissing and snarling
There is nobody I’d rather be wrong with than you, my darling.
    I knew so little about her. She was a good person, a good alto. A true-blue feminist and Democrat out to save the world like her heroes Dorothea Dix and Jane Addams and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and also a Golden Gophers hockey fan who leaped to her feet when the team scored and whooped and yelled and sang “Minnesota, Hats Off to Thee” and shouted out the Rah rah rah for Ski-u-Mah. Her father was a Lutheran minister from Wisconsin, so she knew the power of principled blockheads to drive you nuts, and her maternal grandfather led the plumbers out on strike in 1915 crying, “If they won’t pay a living wage, let them shit in the streets!” so she also knew the power of united action to bring about change. She got her degree in social work and was hired by Lutheran Social Services as a caseworker and discovered her calling in life, which was to rescue old people from the ravages of longevity. She became the Susan B. An thony of demented geezerdom. She was a great woman. She went out one day to track down somebody’s lost grandpa, and found him living in filth in a plywood shack near the Dayton’s Bluff freight yard. He’d been a mover and shaker in the Republican party, a federal judge for twenty-five years, a patron of the arts, a man who once dined with Ike at