Palm Sunday

This is a heavy day for me for several reasons. First is the nature of the day itself, which commemorates Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem in the days leading up to his crucifixion and death. The day was triumphant, with blessings and shouts of hosanna...but we know what happens five days later.

Then there's the date itself. Ten years ago today, 29 coal miners were killed in Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine. Subsequent investigations, like this one written by my then co-worker Beth Spence, found a deliberate pattern at the company of evading mine safety regulations. The company no longer exists and its CEO spent a year in federal prison, although that's cold comfort to the friends and families of those who died.

I was literally on the far side of the world attending a karate seminar in Okinawa when I got the word. It felt so strange to be that far away at such a time, not that I could have done anything about it.

Finally, the holy day if not the date marks another sad loss for West Virginia and the world. It was on Palm Sunday in 1979, (April 8th to be exact, Easter being a movable feast) that Breece Pancake, in my opinion the state's greatest writer killed himself in Charlottesville.

He was from my home town of Milton and we had some family connections. At the time, I was working at the town library with his mother Helen. I remember going to work to pretend to clean the library that Sunday and finding main librarian Toney Reese there, visibly upset.

I'd work with Helen every Tuesday night and every other Saturday for the next six years and we grew very close over that time. It was sad but still a privilege watching his book of short stories come together and take off. It hasn't landed yet.

If nothing else, this day is a reminder of how quickly and drastically things can change...although we probably didn't need to be reminded of that today.

Palm Sunday

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Palm Sunday is probably the most ambiguous holy day in the Christian calendar. It marks the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, where the throngs said "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."

But it's also less than a week away from Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the days that mark his agony in the garden, arrest, scourging and crucifixion.

Even for the non-religious, this holy day can speak of the changeability of human affairs, of the human heart, and especially of human crowds. It doesn't take long for cries of "Hosanna!" to turn into shouts of "Crucify!"

This Palm Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the death of one of West Virginia's finest authors, Breece Pancake of Milton. To be exact, since Palm Sunday is a movable feast, the actual anniversary of his death is April 8th, but I'll stick to the religious calendar.

Pancake began publishing stories in The Atlantic and literary journals in the late 1970s when he was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. His stories, for the most part set in a fictionalized Milton he called Rock Camp, were often dark but strongly compelling.

For reasons nobody will know, Pancake shot himself on Palm Sunday. A convert to Catholicism, he had attended Mass earlier that day. I have the feeling that it was brought on by a sudden rush of panic rather than any kind of premeditation.

A volume of his was posthumously published as The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake in 1983 and is still in print and has been translated into several languages.

For me, the holy day and the sad anniversary will always be associated. If you haven't taken a look at his work, I'd highly recommend it.