The rain has gone and left us with a damp, cloudy, chilly morning in the 60’s, but the sun might peek through later. The bird feeders need filling and the deck needs clearing. I’ll throw the fallen deck branches into the growing pile I made when I cleared the yard. The deck is covered in acorns. I was thinking maybe I’ll put a few in soil to grow my own oak trees. One can never have enough oak trees. I found a connection between eggs and acorns. If you put water into a bucket until it is about half full, you then put the eggs or the acorns into the water. Discard the ones which float.

My dance card is uke loaded this week. I have practice, a lesson and four concerts, including one on Saturday. I don’t know where I can fit in an afternoon nap.

I’ve always thought of Sunday as a wasted day. When I was a kid, every Sunday morning, I begrudgingly dressed in my church clothes, a skirt and a blouse, and usually walked to mass, the same walk I always took to school. The upstairs of the church is sort of grand. It has a vaulted ceiling, old wooden pews, and when I was a kid, a huge altar by the back wall. I remember the altar boys would go behind the altar and bring out stuff like cruets needed for mass. I wondered if there was a room or just shelves behind it. I never checked. A small altar is on each side of the big altar. I remember one early, dark Christmas morning when the mass was at a side altar. Five or six old ladies and my brother and I were the only people at that mass. In the annals of my mass going, it was my favorite mass, the perfect mass, short with no sermon and no collection. There wasn’t even an altar boy.

At every wedding and funeral in my church, a man called Chewy was in attendance. He probably didn’t know who died or who was getting married, but no one minded him being there. Everyone knew Chewy. My father always stopped to shake his hand and say hi. Chewy was intellectually disabled, what was referred to as retarded back then, but it wasn’t cruelly used to describe Chewy. It was just the language of the times. I remember Chewy usually wore a grey jacket and khaki pants. He waved at the people in the cars passing by the church. I didn’t know anything about Chewy, even his real name. I don’t know how long he was the official greeter.

This entry was posted on September 22, 2024 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.