It Was The 14th Day Of April

Ruination Day, a made-up holiday about disaster that I would very much like to invite you to celebrate with me

I went to two different Memorial Services this past weekend—in Minnesota and Maryland. They were both for Aunts— one each on my and my wife’s side of the family. Both women were the first of their generation to pass away. Both were much beloved.

In the Presbyterian Church in Minnesota, I sat in a sanctuary hall full of kind-faced nurses and listened to stories about my wife’s Aunt Mary. I hadn’t known that she had grown up on the same street as the Shriners Hall in Minneapolis. I hadn’t known that every year, when it came time for rehearsals, she and her brother were treated to their own private Shriners Parade. The whole parade! Just for them! The clowns even threw out candy just for the two children standing and waving on their front porch. I hadn’t known any of that, but I did know that Mary had gifted my children their favorite stuffed animals and was always particularly skilled at delighting in their artwork, even those pieces that were hastily scrawled and immediately forgotten by the artist. She was a preternaturally generous person, Aunt Mary, so it’s not surprising that she was once the beneficiary of a particularly magical display of kindness.

In the Methodist Church in Maryland, everybody, it seemed, had a story about my Aunt Betsy: Old friends from the Peace Corps or her early days as a young mom in Arizona; neighbors from Maryland; people who actually weren’t quite sure how Betsy had come into their lives but who loved her deeply. They all talked about how indefatigably friendly she was, about vacations where she’d get lost in one Spanish-speaking city or another only to emerge hours later with a dozen new best friends. Her kids remembered how, as teenagers, they'd often come home from school or work or practice and find their own friends already there, talking to their mom over a plate of food. I didn’t know those stories, but I had expected them. I couldn’t keep up with Aunt Betsy either; I hadn’t responded to her last email asking to find a time to speak Spanish with my kids.

I loved both of these women, but I wasn’t unusually close with either of them— they were both good Aunts and I loved them as you love good Aunts in a large family full of lots of lovely family members. Attending a Memorial Service for an extended family member isn’t unusual. Attending two in a weekend sounds daunting, though, particularly when you throw in the Thursday night drive with children to Minnesota and the late-Friday-night-solo flight to Maryland and then the early morning return on Sunday morning.

The thing is, it wasn’t daunting. It was actually quite beautiful to have an entire weekend devoted solely to grief and gathering and worries about what not one but two widowed uncles will do now that the house is empty. I was more helpful at the second memorial because I had an extremely recent reminder that children at a funeral will want to mourn and be sad, but will eventually become very bored and very tired of wearing fancy clothes. I knew that the individually-wrapped sugar cookies at a post-service reception wouldn’t be sufficient to stave off that boredom, and that it would be nice if a grown-up offered to have staring contests and go exploring in the church lobby. Thanks to two events back-to-back, I was ready for a heavy presence of Upper Midwestern White People (Swedes! Germans! My people!) at both gatherings. I knew that meant that we likely wouldn’t talk about our feelings. Thanks to the repetition, though, one event after the other, my ears were better trained to be surprised when a stray honest emotion crept out.

You know how there is a time and a season for everything? That’s true, but only if we actually give everything the full right to have a time and season. We aren’t good at that, usually. Or, I’m not, at least.

My favorite holiday is today, April 14th. It’s a made-up holiday, but all holidays are made-up, I suppose. Unlike many other made-up holidays, though, I don’t have any evidence that many other people actually commemorate it. I’m not even sure if its erstwhile creator celebrates it.

I’m talking about Ruination Day, a commemoration of tragedies piled on top of one another. It was discovered (I think that’s the right term) by Gillian Welch, the much-acclaimed Americana songwriter. Welch devoted a couple of songs on her 2001 album Time: (The Revelator) to April 14th. She did so because she had discovered, largely through other, older songs (by Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie Johnson) that a lot of iconically tragic events had all taken place on that same date. Lincoln’s assassination. The sinking of the Titanic. Black Sunday in 1935, when one of the Dust Bowl’s most Biblically foreboding storms raged across the Southern Plains.

It’s hard for me to explain why I’m so fascinated by Ruination Day—why April 14th means anything more for me than a neat fact to tuck away in case it ever comes up at team trivia. I’m not one to naturally fixate on the gothic or macabre. I’m not a die-hard Gillian Welch super fan (she’s great! I mostly listen to that one album though!). I don’t even think I’m unusually interested in the Titanic or Lincoln’s assassination as stand-alone events.¹

Some of it, no doubt, has to do with the fact that Welch’s songs are excellent. “April the 14th, Part I,” especially floors me, specifically because of the way that Welch intersperses references to the Big Iconic Tragedies with a recounting of a smaller, more intimate sadness—how one time, outside of a music venue in Oregon, she saw a broke, hungry punk band hanging around their dirty van and she felt really sorry for them.

They looked sick and stoned

And strangely dressed

No one showed

From the local press

That’s just an absolute powerhouse of a couplet. But no, it’s not just that, nor is the fact that Ruination Day is so fun to say.

The part of me that likes to indulge in magical thinking no doubt gravitates towards Ruination Day because I wish that one day could serve as a sin-eater for all the pain of the world. I would love to believe that, if so many bad things could just be consolidated in one day, perhaps we could have 364 days of peace and prosperity and tranquility.

I know that’s not true, though. A few scattered tragedies does not a sin-eating day make. The world contains far more than 24 hours worth of sorrow. I suppose what I love most about Ruination Day, then, is the idea that all that tragedy is worth pausing for, that it’s worth acknowledging. It’s not unlike the Catholic ritual of memento mori, where believers intentionally take a moment each day to remember their own mortality. I love the idea of discovering the hope on the other side of tragedy by facing your fear of it head-on. And I love that the moment to do so might occur in the spring, right around the time when, in many calendar years, all three Abrahamic religions are also pausing to remember that the world is full of both suffering and hope. I love that it happens when the leaves haven’t returned yet, but there’s a very real chance that they might tomorrow.

There may secretly be thousands of other Ruination Day observers out there, but so far, my half-hearted Googling has only turned up one other person who shares my interest in the whole affair—an artist from Philadelphia named Melinda Steffy. I don’t know Steffy, but she sounds like she’s talented and thoughtful and I’d very much like to own one of her paintings. A few years back, she put on a multimedia exhibition about Ruination Day. It featured not only her own work but also live musical performances. Lovely. Absolutely lovely. And if that were not enough, Steffy also makes a really important point about the three iconic tragedies that form Ruination Day’s cornerstone. It’s easy to think of them as bursts of metaphysical randomness, but doing so actually obscures the real lesson embedded in all three events.

“The political tension of the Civil War, the lack of regulation that led to the Titanic sinking, and the environmental practices that caused the dust storms. They are still happening,” she said. “We still live in moments where we allow catastrophes to happen. They are not distant history. We still have this repetition.”

Sometimes, bad things just happen. Much more frequently, though, there is a pattern to our world’s tragedies. Whenever we fetishize the making of money and the hardening of hierarchies, we plant a set of seeds that will eventually bear rotten fruit. We tell a bunch of people that they’re White and that therefore they deserve to be on top of the world. We pretend that a corporation’s bottom line is more important than human life or the land that provides for us. We Manifest Destiny our way across continents and embark on victory cruises to commemorate our individual triumph over the world. And of course, when we do so, we bear the fruit of assassins’ bullets and sinking ships and an Earth that heaves in revolt at its mistreatment. Most of this, sadly, isn’t random. Most of it is on us. And that’s awful.

And yet!

There’s a song I grew up singing in the Methodist churches of Western Montana. It’s called “Harvest Time.” Montana Methodists sing it because most of their churches were founded by a circuit riding preacher named Brother Van. It’s a song about how there’s tragedy in the classic “you reap what you sow” truism, but how there’s something else there as well.

Here’s the chorus.

And the tears of the sower

And the songs of the reaper

Shall mingle together with joy

By and by

I lied a bit up above. I do know why I celebrate this silly made-up holiday. It’s not to wallow in gothy, dark coincidence for its own sake. It’s because, as was the case with my recent weekend of Too Many Memorial Services, there’s a lesson to be discovered in giving grief and tragedy an intentional, set-apart time for recognition. It is intensely dispiriting, of course, that it is our greed and avarice and addiction to power over others that so often poisons the world there. But goodness if there isn’t hope in that too—the hope that if human failure creates tragedy, then its human beauty and connection that can build a better one. It’s impossible to find that hope, though, if you’re just passively allowing waves of bad, depressing news to passively wash over you day-in, day-out.

The next line in Welch’s April the 14th Part I— the one right after she describes that sad, broke punk band—is so perfect.

But I watched them walk

Through the bottom land

And I wished I played

In a rock and roll band

In the same way that I don’t fully appreciate the gift of my family without a set-apart weekend of mourning and love, so too can I become easily bogged down by daily stress and ignore daily opportunities to connect and build with others. I can look at yet another organizing training in my calendar with fatigue rather than excitement, especially if my kids woke me up early and I had to spend too much money getting the car fixed.

And that’s why I love Ruination Day, because when I intentionally pause to think about a world full of grief and despair rather than just distractedly adding one more bad news story to a half-processed pile of accumulating angst in my brain, I realize what I actually need right now. Just like the way that a loved-one's death draws mourners together for a memorial service, Ruination Day clarifies how desperately I want to run closer to, not further away from, others. I really do want to build. I really want to connect. Suddenly I’m no longer merely tolerating the next phone call or training. I’m craving them. I have no presuppositions that the kids in that van with the Idaho plates are miserable a whole lot of the time, but like Gillian Welch, I still want to play in a rock and roll band.

End notes: You’ll notice, no doubt, that I got to the end of all this and I never told you how I celebrate Ruination Day. As it turns out, I don’t really do anything. I mean, I listen to Gillian Welch and Blind Willie Johnson and Woody Guthrie, of course, but that’s about as far as I’ve ever gotten. Last year, I was super busy and I didn’t eat a large enough dinner and so, at 10:00 PM, while on an emergency trip to Target for some essential-but-forgotten household item, I purchased and drank a cherry red Icee from one of those machines at the front of the store. It was not an effective dinner substitute and it looked ridiculous, but it was also pretty tasty and somehow all that felt fitting. I am extremely open to suggestions for better celebration ideas.

As for this week’s songs… no surprises! “April the 14th, Part I” and “Ruination Day, Part II” by Gillian Welch, “Dust Storm Disaster” by Woody Guthrie and “God Moves On The Water” by Blind Willie Johnson

1. I am very, very interested in The Dust Bowl, as my people used to live in Northeast South Dakota and that was a hard time in those parts, but it’s not as if I think about the Dust Bowl every single day.