The Most Holy Solemnity of the Body & Blood of Christ

What an awesome, wonderful feast day today is. In February 2002, my life was changed by reading about the Body and Blood of Christ in the sixth chapter of St. John's gospel. I'll probably wonder for the rest of my life why the Holy Spirit chose to illuminate my understanding on that day; I'd been a Christian for a long time, but there were certainly those who were more faithful; definitely those who were better Bible scholars. There were -- are -- others I know who are more deserving, yet He chose me.

"Lord, I am not worthy for you to enter under my roof, but only say the word and I will be healed..."

Have a look at this silent YouTube.com video of the Corpus Christi procession at the St. Louis Cathedral on July 18, 2006. It is a really beautiful procession, with a group of priests carrying the Blessed Sacrament under the canopy, followed by the Knights of Columbus with their sabers and their feathery hats. followed by the biggest number of altar boys I have ever seen in one place. And none of them appear to be poking their neighbors or deliberately stepping on one another's vestment hems. The priests, Knights and altar boys are followed by the entire congregation, which is big enough to slow down traffic on the city streets.

Our parish is still very young, so our Corpus Christi procession last year went around the parking lot and out into the grass, where all the ladies tried very hard not to turn their ankles on the bumpy lawn while wearing shoes unsuitable for processing. If we had taken to the streets, we would have attracted the attention of bored cows and probably have come near to being run down by a tractor.

I included the Mass readings in this post because they are so beautiful in their celebration of Jesus in the Eucharist, the Source and summit of our faith.

Reading 1
Genesis 14:18-20

In those days, Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine,
and being a priest of God Most High,
he blessed Abram with these words:
"Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
the creator of heaven and earth;
and blessed be God Most High,
who delivered your foes into your hand."
Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 110:1,2,3,4

R. (4b) You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.

The LORD said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand
till I make your enemies your footstool."

R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.

The scepter of your power the LORD will stretch forth from Zion:
"Rule in the midst of your enemies."

R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.

"Yours is princely power in the day of your birth, in holy splendor;
before the daystar, like the dew, I have begotten you."

R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.

The LORD has sworn, and he will not repent:
"You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek."

R. You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek.

Reading 2
1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Brothers and sisters:
I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,
that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over,
took bread, and, after he had given thanks,
broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me."
In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying,
"This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.

Gospel
Luke 9:11b-17

Jesus spoke to the crowds about the kingdom of God,
and he healed those who needed to be cured.
As the day was drawing to a close,
the Twelve approached him and said,
"Dismiss the crowd
so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms
and find lodging and provisions;
for we are in a deserted place here."
He said to them, "Give them some food yourselves."
They replied, "Five loaves and two fish are all we have,
unless we ourselves go and buy food for all these people."
Now the men there numbered about five thousand.
Then he said to his disciples,
"Have them sit down in groups of about fifty."
They did so and made them all sit down.
Then taking the five loaves and the two fish,
and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing over them, broke them,
and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd.
They all ate and were satisfied.
And when the leftover fragments were picked up,
they filled twelve wicker baskets.

Poor baby

Yesterday was our sixteenth wedding anniversary and for the first time in all those years, my husband reluctantly handed me the car keys and said, "You drive."

And to think that some people say there are no more miracles! You don't get any more miracle-y that than, let me tell you.

I'm not sure why this is, because I have had my driver's license for a lot longer than my husband has had his: I got my license when I was sixteen and his parents didn't let him get his until he was eighteen. So I have much more experience behind the wheel, as you can see.

My husband and I have both totaled cars due to stupid driving and/or Bon Jovi playing on the car radio, or maybe both. We were both around twenty-one years old (this was way before we met). He totaled his on an interstate and probably backed up traffic. I totaled mine on a twisty country road. This seems to point out that both of us have had our share of dumb moments, although he cites my two-month hospital stay and the fact that I once backed a car out of my parents' garage and took the clothes dryer with me as signs of his superiority.

The reason why I had to drive us to the restaurant where we were eating dinner was because my poor husband is currently experiencing a severe allergic reaction to some weeds he pulled the other day. His eyes are puffed up into narrow, reddened slits and if I saw him in a 7-Eleven at night buying Doritos and chocolate milk, I'd think he'd been taking a few too many hits on the bong.

He is really miserable, so it touched me even more than usual that he bought a beautiful card for me, plus sent me off to a local garden center to buy some perennials for the tiny space we fondly refer to as a "yard." He also took me out to the aforementioned dinner which was probably a test of endurance, considering how itchy and grainy his eyes feel. I tried to get him to just stay home, but he wanted a steak and said that if he was going to feel bad anyway, he might as well feel bad with a 12-ounce filet nestled comfortably in his stomach. I couldn't agree more.

"You know those ball washers at the golf course?" he asked while we were waiting for our salads. "I'd like to put my eyes in one of those."

My husband is not the usual type of husband who complains as if each common cold is some rare, incurable disease. I have a hard time getting him to complain at all about the way he feels. Somewhere around Year 10, he broke his hand and toughed it out for about five days before I was able to convince him to call the doctor. The only way I even knew it was broken was when I noticed that it looked bruised and swollen and said, "Oh, honey! Did you hurt your hand?"

He looked at it briefly, considering his answer thoroughly before committing himself to a response. "Yeah," he said.

I remind him frequently that with the amount of money subtracted from his paychecks to pay off those grafters who provide our health insurance, we should be going to the doctor for every single fallen eyelash and hangnail we experience. He just says stubbornly that that isn't his way.

After sixteen years of marriage, I am so grateful to him that one thing that is his way is his insistence that the girls and I have a happy, fulfilling life, doing what we want to be doing, which is homeschooling. If the girls were being traditionally schooled and if I were teaching in a public or private school, our finances would be a lot better off. He wouldn't have to work as hard. And we wouldn't have to play that interesting grocery game where I hopefully say, "Center-cut pork chops?" and he says, "I was thinking macaroni and cheese."

He has given me such a happy life and he's such a good father to Meelyn and Aisling. I couldn't have asked for a better man. He is agreeable to watching Shakespeare on DVD and going to the symphony, two activities which were beyond his sports-loving, man's man ken before we married. He managed to summon the inner strength to hug Meelyn and congratulate her when she was so excited over starting her first period (He wanted to sink through the floor, but rose valiantly to the occasion in a way that would have made John Wayne proud.) He survives our girlish household with fortitude and the occasional window-rattling belch. It makes me happy to think that our girls are likely to choose men like him to marry.

The only thing I would change about him is that I would have him like popcorn. And that's pretty good for sixteen years.

So you think you can cry like a fish?

The girls and I just finished watching the Top Twenty Results for our favorite show, So You Think You Can Dance? which we TiVo'd last night. And I swear, I thought I would melt into a puddle on the floor.

I'm not sure why this show affects all of us so strongly, even my husband, if truth be told. But when it came down to the final two young men and Hok and Twitch were standing there bathed in a spot of cool light on the stage in front of the judges and the judges chose....oh, wait. No spoilers. But anyway, I just lost it. I'd already been sitting there sniffling, but Hok and Twitch made me burst into tears. When Hok said in his sweet accent, "My mind just cahn't proh-cess this," I wanted to cuddle him up in my arms and sob, "Oh, honey, I know! I can't either!"

At any rate, it is an incredible show and we grow to love these contestants and we cry when they get sent home and we say "Yesssssssss!!!!" when they get moved on in the competition. You should watch it, unless you feel that the only kind of dance that really means anything is classical ballet, in which case you are not going to like this show. Hip-hop (in all its permutations), ballroom and lyrical dance in many different styles are represented, and although I don't exactly like all of them, I find them very interesting, much the same way that I can appreciate art by both Michelangelo and Kandinsky: Michelangelo is okay, but Kandinsky is off the hook.

I can't believe I have to wait a whole week before seeing more.

What's your song?

Everybody has a song that immediately produces a happy adrenaline rush. Sometimes it's a song that's associated with a person, a place or an event. Sometimes it's just a song with a beat that is so irresistable, lyrics that are so meaning-full, that it can't be denied.

I think it's very possible to have several such songs, maybe to match different moods or experiences. I have a friend who shamefacedly admitted that her song is "Saturday Night" by the Bay City Rollers. You know, the one where you spell "S-A-TUR-DAY...NIGHT!" with great enthusiasm. I remember another friend from college named Dan who wore black horn rimmed glasses and claimed that his song was "Oh Boy" by Buddy Holly, which I felt was perfectly understandable. Jordin Sparks, the recent winner of American Idol, revealed that her song is Hanson's "Mmmbop," which kind of makes me cringe a little bit, but then, songs are a very personal thing and "Mmmbop" is just fine, as long as she doesn't expect me to listen to it with her. And I feel pretty confident that she won't.

My song is "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" by Paul Simon.

The mama pajama rolled out of bed
and she ran to the police station
When the papa found out he began to shout
and he started the investigation

It's against the law
It was against the law
What the mama saw
It was against the law

The mama looks down and spits on the ground
every time my name gets mentioned
The papa said oy if I get that boy
I'm gonna stick him in the house of detention

Well, I'm on my way
I don't know where I'm going
I'm on my way
I'm taking my time
But I don't know where
Goodbye to Rosie, the Queen of Corona

See you, me and Julio
down by the schoolyard
See you, me and Julio
down by the schoolyard
Me and Julio down by the schoolyard

In a couple of days
they come and take me away
but the press let the story leak
And when the radical priest
come to get me released
we was all on the cover of Newsweek

And I'm on my way
I don't know where I'm going
I'm on my way
I'm taking my time
but I don't know where
Goodbye to Rosie, the Queen of Corona

See you, me and Julio
down by the schoolyard
See you, me and Julio
down by the schoolyard
See you, me and Julio
down by the schoolyard

Whenever I hear it, I have to sing it, even if I'm in the grocery store or Target or somewhere where singing along with the piped-in music is generally frowned upon. I'm not one off those people who bellows out the words, trying to call attention to myself, no matter what my brother might think. I just kind of whisper and hum along, in spite of the fact that the lyrics are incomprehensible and Paul Simon himself has never explained them, including the nature of the crime that made Mama Pajama rat out her own son to the police.

Just for the heck of it, I typed "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" into Google and was really tickled when my search produced a number of hits, all leading to different essays written by people speculating on what the protagonist and Julio were doing. There was a lot available, considering that this song, for all its cheerful, catchy tune with the Latin beat, only made it as far as number 22 on the US pop charts in 1972, which is when I was either nine years old or minus three, depending upon my mood when you ask me.

Most people think that Mama Pajama saw her son and Julio doing drugs or possibly doing a deal. This is what I prefer to believe, especially when considering Paul's lyric in the song "Late in the Evening":

Then I learned to play some lead guitar
I was underage in this funky bar
and I stepped outside to smoke myself a J

I have to say that I find the idea of Paul -- a man with his level of musical genius -- deliberately destroying his brain cells with THC preferable to the alternative meaning also posited among the scholars on the internet who believe that what Mama saw was something sexual happening. Something sexual and illegal. I know! My mind doesn't want to go there either! But let's face it - we have the unnamed protagonist (Paul himself?), Julio, and then a hinted-at third party, the "you" who sneaks in with "me and Julio" and as I said, I prefer the drugs. It does worry me, though, that whatever it was was bad enough that Mama spat on the ground, probably between her index and middle fingers held in a V and likely said forever after, "That one, he is dead to me."

Yikes.

The mysterious "you" doesn't seem to be Rosie, thank goodness, because anyone who
was cool enough to get herself unofficially named the Queen of Corona, which is a neighborhood in Queens, just shouldn't be a bawdy slut. That's not what queens do and I think Rosie knew that. When I was a little kid (or merely a gleam in my father's eye, depending upon my mood when you ask me), I used to sing along with this song whenever I heard it and think wistfully how wonderful it would have been if Paul Simon had sung, "Goodbye to Shelley, the Queen of ..." I don't know. East-central Indiana, I guess.

A few people think that the song may be talking about anti-war protests, referring to a couple of Jesuit priests who were involved in demonstrations, but since neither of those priests ever appeared on the cover of Newsweek, we're kind of back to where we started.

Which is with a good little song with a great beat that makes me sing every time I hear it.

What's your song?

Thursday's List

READING: still reading Angry Men and the Women Who Love Them: Breaking the Cycle of Physical and Emotional Abuse by Paul Hegstrom, Ph.D. for my mom, who is thinking about putting it in her church's library. I didn't take it with me to CousinFest for obvious reasons, but I'm plugging away.

POOLSIDE READING: I finished Verbena by Nanci Kincaid over the weekend, and you know my rule about books having a happy ending? If you share that feeling, be sure to give this one a miss. I read another thriller about a serial killer by a Christian writer in a couple days - it was okay. That's another one from my mother's church's library. Right now, I'm reading Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner and I usually like her books a lot.

LISTENING TO: delicious, delectable silence - the girls are at the swim club

THINKING ABOUT: how weird the first few days of summer break are, when I'm still not used to having no schoolwork to assign, when I suddenly jump a little in my seat and gaspingly think, "We haven't done math!!!!"

FAVORITE NEW FIND: Pepperidge Farm SUGAR FREE Mint Milano cookies. They are really, really good.

FAVORITE THING TODAY: My favorite thing today is my anticipation of tomorrow's events, wherein my brother will be stopping by to pick up Meelyn and Aisling on his way home from work and taking them home to Aunt Angie and the kids to spend the evening while my husband and I go out to dinner to celebrate -- drum roll, please -- our SIXTEENTH wedding anniversary. Woooooot!!!

WISH I HAD: another free weekend to spend with Lily, Carol and Susie. I miss them.

SCRAPBOOK PAGES THIS WEEK: three, but they're not all finished.

PRAYING FOR: a lot of different things, a lot of different people

Big Bird's World - Street of the Living Dead

I was just never all that crazy about Sesame Street, so Meelyn and Aisling never watched it. It drove me absolutely batty, all that constant jumping around from counting to reading to placating Oscar (shouldn't he be in a landfill in New Jersey by now?) to singing songs about being a little airplane...it wore me out and gave me a slight migraine. My mom told me about her friend whose daughter learned to count to infinity in Spanish when she was only ten minutes old by watching Sesame Street, but I just didn't care. It was too hyper for me.

So imagine my delight when Meelyn and Aisling told me yesterday that my oldest nephew, 12-year-old Kieren, had had a nightmare several years ago, featuring all the characters of Sesame Street turning evil and becoming zombies and chasing him all over the place until he finally woke up in a cold sweat. Can you picture Zoe and Elmo with blank, dead eyes, shuffling along with their puppety arms held out in front of them grunting, "Bwains...bwains..we must eat bwains"? And the formerly cheerful Big Bird with a red cast to his eye, hypnotizing little children into paralysis and then pecking them to death with his great big beak?

Is it any wonder that I love that kid?

Happy birthday, dear Michelle

My friend Michelle and I are a lot alike on the inside. We think similar thoughts about life, have similar ideas about child-rearing and homeschooling. On the outside, we couldn't be more different, considering that she is willow-slim and swishy-haired and I'm not. But that might be a good thing, because if both of us looked like her, people would fall down before us, blinded by the sheer, atom-splitting force of our mutual beauty.

Michelle is one of the nicest and most genuine people I have ever known, one of those ones where the click between the two of you is almost audible. She's one of those people that feel like I can be myself with and she won't be shocked and disapproving if I mention that sometimes I want to lock myself in the bathroom to get away from my kids. She is the kind of friend who will listen to me talk about a problem I'm having and have something smart and real to say, not just laying a hand on my arm and saying (the bane of all Christians everywhere), "I'll pray for you."

For instance, last school year, when I needed to find a venue to house the Shakespeare Workshop I was going to be teaching to middle school and high school aged students in our homeschool group, I was kind of worried. I needed a place that was relatively easy for all the driving mothers on the four sides of Indianapolis to get to. I needed a place that was big enough to comfortably accommodate around twenty students. I needed a place with a good-sized television and a DVD player. Above all, I needed a place that was free. I considered and rejected a couple of places, but then Michelle stepped up and said, "Do you want to hold the class in our playroom?"

I gratefully jumped at the chance and it was perfect. Her oldest daughter, who is Aisling's age, even served willingly as my tech staff, inserting DVDs into the proper slots and manipulating a number of remotes with great skill.

Michelle also knows how to throw one heck of a party. Last year, she organized an Epiphany party for the homeschool group, complete with three joke-cracking "wise men," our youth choir, and an adult spelling bee. It was a huge success, but Michelle just smiled as people thanked her and said, "Thank you for coming!" Most of them, including me, probably didn't know the huge amount of work she put in, pulling together a real extravaganza in just a few short weeks, including, I have heard, renting a piano so that the choir director could accompanying our singing children. Now, see, I would have just saved the money and asked the choir director if she'd mind picking out the tunes on the Little Tykes xylophone-style keyboard we have stuffed in a closet somewhere, and then I would have forgotten to bring it with me on the night of the party, but that's not the way Michelle does things.

Her current project is gathering information and statistics on the poor state of catechesis in our Catholic youth. It probably isn't a surprise to any Catholic reading here that the last forty years have been an abysmal time in the United States, as far as learning and then knowing the Catholic faith are concerned. And even more, there's that pressing issue of not only knowing it with one's head, but actually practicing it in one's life. She has a shining determination that the kids in our parish won't grow up as pitifully untaught as a forty-something person that my husband encountered in a Lenten Bible study in a former parish who said scornfully, "Purgatory? Oh, that's something my grandma believes in. I'm glad we Catholics are past that kind of superstitious stuff now."

When it was pointed out to him that belief in Purgatory is supported in the Bible and is not just some arcane belief that was dreamed up by the apostles, he merely raised an eyebrow and said, "And...?" I'll tell you, it takes a very special lack of learning to be able to diss the Bible while taking part in a Bible study.

If Michelle has her way, that won't happen to her kids or my kids or any of the other kids in our church. And because she is such an incredible friend, I'll not only pray for her in her endeavor, but also lend a hand to help her. That's what real friends do, which is something I learned from my friend Michelle.

Happy birthday, girlfriend. ILYLAS!

Miss Susie's Wild Ride

Let me explain the family relationship we have: my grandma, whose name was Mary, was the older sister of Lily and Susie's mother, whose name is Margaret and Carol's mother, whose name was Madeline. I know what you're thinking: All those names and I still had to convert to Catholicism. Although Carol's family is Catholic and we went to Mass together on Saturday evening, but just let me tell you - if you ever go to Mass with Carol and the priest asks if there are any visitors, don't expect her to raise her hand and say where she's from. Expect her to smirk wickedly as you raise your hand. I know she did that to pay me back for dunking one of her Barbie dolls in the toilet when I was four.

So anyway, we're cousins. On Saturday morning, we all met for breakfast and made ourselves look presentable and whiled away the morning until Susie took us to the club for lunch. The staff at the club was busy setting up for a wedding that was going to be taking place later in the afternoon and we all felt bad for the poor bride because here we've had no rain for weeks, and on the day of her wedding, the sky is scudding with grey clouds.

We had a very good lunch. Susie ordered a chicken sandwich; Carol and Lily ordered fried tilapia and I had prime rib on a roll. Carol, Lily and I were introduced to a purely Southern appetizer: deep-fried dill pickle spears. I know. It sounds awful, doesn't it? Southerners have the reputation for deep-frying everything, but let me tell you, deep-fried dill pickle spears are really, really tasty. So it's probably a good thing that I live in a place where dill pickle spears are served naked and shivering next to your turkey club sandwich.

After lunch, Susie took us on a tour of the golf course, which is just one of the things you do when you've got our blood coursing through your veins. It's like we're drawn there by some mysterious force. We got a big gasoline-powered golf cart from the pro shop and chugged off.

This golf course was unlike any other I've been on, mostly because the golf courses I am acquainted with are in Indiana, which is pretty flat compared to southern Kentucky. At one point on the front nine, Susie said, "Now, y'all just take a look at this!" and I did, because I was sitting in the front seat beside her, but there was nothing to look at. We were going over a blind hill, and when we got to the top, there was no comforting spread of neatly manicured grass stretching out before us. There was nothing but air, because we were going straight down.

Lily and Carol were spared the worst of it because they were looking at the backs of our heads, but I got the full view of an extremely twisty and narrow cart path, complete with at least three tight switchbacks. And let me add that Susie, who may or may not have been still feeling the effects of the previous night's margaritas, was not slowing the cart down one little bit.

We hurtled towards the first switchback, Susie cackling with laughter, me screaming for a priest and clutching my purse to my chest (it's one of those dumb kind that has no zipper or other closure that could have prevented me from littering the golf course with lipsticks, grocery receipts, loose change and the occasional tampon), and Carol and Lily carrying on on talking as if it were a normal occurrence in their lives to go around a hairpin turn on a golf course so fast that two of the cart's wheels were lifted off the ground.

By the time we got to the bottom, I thought I was going to need a defibrillator. Susie thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard and showed me a marked lack of sympathy that I felt was disrespectful of my position as the baby of the group.

[I can't be wrong in thinking that I'm the only person who's freaked out by riding in vehicles that are open to the outside, like golf carts and shuttle buses and UPS trucks, can I?]

Whatever goes down must go back up, so it wasn't long before the cart path started to climb. On one rather steep hill, our cart was laboring heavily, sounding less like The Little Engine That Could and more like The Little Engine That Was Prepared to Stall Out and Allow Its Passengers to Roll Straight Back Down a Hill Towards a Pond. Which is, of course, what it did.

This turn of events alerted even the stoic Lily and Carol, who expressed sounds of mild dismay while I shrieked, "Suuuuuuuuu-sieeeeeeeeeee! Let me out! I'll just walk up the hill!" Because I am not only the Baby Cousin, but also the Biggest Cousin. And I didn't want to have our untimely death from drowning, smashed into the silt at the bottom of a little water hazard by the weight of a golf cart, on my conscience. That's just the kind of person I am, always thinking more about others and less about how I might make a break for it and go back to the club house for a Jack & Coke.

"Oh, it'll be okay," said Susie airily and jammed her foot down on the accelerator. The golf cart grudgingly put-putted its way to the top of the hill with the four of us speaking soothingly and patting it on its fiberglass sides, the way one would talk to a nervous thoroughbred. A green lawn tractor carrying a couple of attractive college-age groundskeepers passed by, eyeing us curiously. That just made everything better.

[Continued from earlier...]

We went home after the golf course tour and had a grand time sitting around in the awesomely frigid air conditioning. Lily did quilt stitching for some place mats she and Carol and I were supposed to be making for Susie as a hostess gift, but Carol and I were lazy little buttheads and just sat there lounging on the comfy furniture instead of sewing, which caused Lily to gently take us to task. We guiltily murmured about our need to go to church, so Susie drove us to the nearest parish, leaving Doug and Lily at home to watch HGTV.

Liquid ice

Today was a banner day. Today was our first day back at the swim club, the same swim club we pined for last winter when the snow lay just over two feet deep on the ground and the wind on our faces felt like the blades on Struwwelpeter's hands, only sharper. And colder.

I took the girls today, even though I knew that the water in the enormous pool at the club would feel like Struwwelpeter had been stirring it with his knifey fingers. I armed myself with a notebook, a pen, several books and a pile of homeschool curriculum catalogs and remained firmly arrayed in my street clothes. The girls decked themselves out in bathing suits, sunglasses and a sticky layer of sunscreen that smelled strongly of bananas. We looked like we weren't going to the same place.

Bananas might protect you from the sun, but they do nothing to counteract cardiac arrest. Unless the person administering CPR is also wearing banana-scented sunscreen. And I've never known anything more likely to induce heart-stoppage than diving into a pool that has been filled with the stuff they chipped off the berg that sank the Titanic.


Heinrich Hoffman's Stuwwelpeter. I wonder what he'd look like in a
Speedo? Eeeek....

Meelyn and Aisling are made of sterner stuff. They flung down their towels and their swim bags and headed for the water; I adjusted the back of my deck chair to a more comfortable angle, took out my book and sighed contentedly, looking at the turquoise blue water and listening to the happy, high-pitched voices of the children. The local oldies station played "Band on the Run," which made me want to either laugh or sigh, I'm not sure which. I was going into seventh grade the summer Paul McCartney and Wings had a hit with that song and it feels really weird when the songs you heard in your youth are now considered vintage. Elvis, the Supremes and Buddy Holly -- now those are the oldies.

The girls and I celebrated our return to the pool by getting faux-fruit slushies (for them) and a large Diet Coke (for me), plus nachos. It is the essence of summer to sit on the edges of our chairs, eating the nacho chips with sauce smearing on our chins, slurping our drinks and trying to keep the napkins from blowing away into the pool.

It's the essence of summer to see one child jump heedlessly into the pool and come gasping to the surface with eyes like dinner plates to call meanly to his companion, "J-jump on in!...It's...n-not...c-cold!" and then to hear the friend jeer, "You big LIAR!!!!"

It's the essence of summer to see people I haven't seen since last August (or if I have, I haven't recognized them, seeing as how they were probably dressed and all) to walk to a chair saying, "Hi! How was your...year? Back-to-school, trick-or-treat, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the doldrums of winter, spring break, Easter, spring, finals? How was all of it, for you and your family, since the last time we saw each other?

We were most affected by the sight of one particular person, one young man known as T.J. He's the one who had a major crush on Aisling last year and followed her around, begging her to come play with him. Last summer, Aisling was not-quite-eleven and T.J. was ten, a fact that made my husband tease Aisling unmercifully by saying, "Teeeeeeeeeejaaaaaaaaaay....woo!!! T. J. is likin' the laaaay-dies! The older ladies!"

T.J. made the critical error of addressing Aisling as "hot stuff" once last year when she wanted to get out of the pool and he didn't. Aisling was outraged and drew herself up to her full height, which isn't very tall, and stalked offendedly to my side, saying with her teeth clenched, "That....that....person called me a terrible name."

I put down my book, concerned. I mean, you just never know these days. "What did he call you?"

Aisling's lips curled in disdain. "'Hot stuff,'" she said fiercely. "Hot stuff! What made him think he could do something like that?" I pondered this, thinking that it was a good thing that he'd caught her off guard because knowing Aisling, she might have held his head under the water until he repented and agreed to always address her as 'your royal highness' in the future.

Anyway, T.J. saw Aisling as we were schlepping all our gear into the ladies' locker room and she reported that he was wearing a smile that stretched from ear to ear when their eyes met. This year, she didn't seem quite as repulsed by his presence as she was last year. Hmm.

Meelyn was keeping a sharp eye out for cute boys, mostly because she's in last year's bathing suit, which she feels is now too low cut. And I completely agree with her; there have been some...developments this year. "I don't want to put on a show," she said nervously. "One false move in this rag and I am toast."

"We'll get something for you this weekend, honey," I promised.

The radio switched to playing "If I Can't Have You" by Yvonne Elliman, which is either a passionate love song or the ravings of a psycho stalker, depending perhaps on how old you are. The girls splashed and laughed in the water and I blissfully let the late afternoon sun sink into my bones as I turned the pages of my book.

It is so good to be back at the pool. Maybe in a couple of weeks the water will have warmed up enough that I'll actually be willing to get in.

Sometimes, you just want to spit

I was in my main kitchen cupboard just now, the one where I keep the food that comes in boxes and cans and jars of herbs and spices that are too tall to fit into the drawer where I keep all the other ones (organized alphabetically, of course, because what is the use of having sleeping problems if you're not going to be awake solving problems like world peace and how to find the dried basil at a single touch?)

Anyway, I was looking for the garlic powder, which seems to always get shoved to the back. I was moving around various boxes when I picked up a box of taco shells and it was empty.

We had tacos and refried beans last night for dinner. I know this because I was the one who opened that box and arranged the shells into my 9x13 pan. And, well, I also ate them. When the girls came into the kitchen to clean up, instead of walking ten blasted feet and putting that empty box into the kitchen wastebasket, whichever one of those little creeps washed the counters elected to take the easy road and just put the box - empty! - back into the cabinet. Presumably so that I could find it later and say, "Omigosh! How funny! I thought I was buying a box of ten taco shells and it was empty! Ha ha! Boy, that grocery store really fooled me! I bet they sold me 24 empty cans of Diet Coke and an empty bread wrapper, too!"

It's times like this that just make you want to take the money you were going to spend on your children's birthday presents and hire the freakin' Merry Maids to come in and undo the senseless carnage that kids can perpetrate on an otherwise reasonable home and mother.

Misty margarita-colored memories

(Just kidding, Mom!)

In all truth, I have talked some pretty big talk about the drunken bacchanal that was CousinFest '07, but in reality, we are really four middle-aged ladies (although we are smokin' hot) and our idea of some wild partying this past weekend was sedately drinking some margaritas with our dinner and then sitting in Susie's pool, keeping ourselves afloat with Funnoodles hitched up under our arms. That is not exactly the kind of behavior that makes the neighbors call the cops.

Our drives to and from CousinFest were wonderful, as always. Lily and Carol and I talk so much and so deep that the miles just fly, sometimes laughing and sometimes getting teary and sometimes stopping to replenish the snack inventory.

This year's CousinFest in Kentucky and Susie's new house was marked by the fact that I had a nice, plump roll of bills to take down with me. We didn't really plan to do any shopping, because being together is just enough. But still. A girl always feels better with a little spending money in her purse. That's what I've heard anyway, because I left all my money in my van, tidily rolled up and stuck in the console. (It turned out that my cell phone was there too, but I didn't know that until Sunday.)

Lily and I reached Carol's house in fine style; all our luggage was loaded into Carol's SUV; we kissed our uncle, Carol's dad, goodbye and went off, waving and giddy.

Thirty minutes later, as we were all murmuring about lunch, I yelped, "OHHH NOOOO!!!!!"

"What? What?" Carol and Lily shrieked, wide-eyed. (We're all wound a little tight in our family.) Their voices and expressions indicated that I'd just noticed that we'd run over a tangle of barbed-wire fencing lying in the road, or that possibly I'd seen that hook-handed man that figures so largely in stories about unwary travelers.

"My money!" I wailed. "I left my money in the van!"

Carol was quick to whip out her cash and to tell me that she also had her debit card, so I was comforted, but still wanted to kick myself.

We got to Susie's city easily, and turned into her neighborhood, which is built around the biggest, ritziest golf course I've ever seen, and kept whispering, "Wow. Look at that place!...Omigosh, look at that place!"

Susie's house reminded me that Marie Antoinette, before that unfortunate business with her head, had a "little" "farmhouse" she called le petit hameau built on the grounds of the palace of Versailles so that she could go there whenever she was feeling "domestic" and "milk the cows" and "bake some bread" and pretend that she was the wife of a "humble French peasant" instead of Louis, who had a few Issues. Of course, the real French peasants always were there well beforehand to bathe the cows and shine their hooves and polish their udders and tie blue silk ribbons around their tails and madame la reine would sit down on a three-legged stool with a velvet cushion to milk la vache into a solid gold pail, but whatever.

Susie's beautiful house has that same sort of air about it, although she herself is nothing like Marie Antoinette, I promise. Because if she were? I would so hit her with a teacup. She came out to the door with her sweetie pie golden retriever, Summer, and we all hugged and kissed and cried and then got down to carrying in the luggage, primarily so that we could unearth the booze, which had been securely cushioned between all the suitcases.

Lily, Carol and I got the grand tour, which was so amazing that I kept blacking out and having to be revived with cool, wet face cloths scented with almond. I have hopes of what heaven will be like and one of them now is that I will be met at the pearly gates by an angel proferring a cool, almond scented face cloth. My private guest room with the en suite bath was so elegant that when I quietly burped later on after putting on my pajamas, I hung my head in shame and whispered "Please excuse me" to the furniture.

Susie fixed us a wonderful, cool dinner because Kentucky is hotter than the first layer of hell, a fact which I got straight from Dante's Inferno. She made chicken salad, fruit ambrosia, veggies and dip and about a million other delicious things and she lit little citronella candles all over her gorgeous brick patio and we ate outside to the music of Earth, Wind and Fire (I told you we were middle-aged), who had to compete with the companionable croaking of the bullfrogs and Carol's unchained symphony on the blender as she mixed the margaritas, long on lime, short on tequila.

One of the greatest pleasures of the evening was finally getting to meet Susie's husband, Doug. Lily, Carol and I had never met him because they've been all over the country and the world in the few years since they've been married. They have to keep traveling to Maui and Paris and exotic destinations like those because they just don't realize how fun it is to be landlocked in Indiana. One day they'll figure that out; until then, all we can do is pray for them, I suppose.

Anyway, Doug is a pure southern gentleman with an accent that sounds like equal parts fresh butter and clover honey sliding off a hot biscuit. He could make the phone book sound like a sonnet. He could say, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and you'd still want to just swoon on the verandah. And not only does he have That Voice, he also did all the dishes both nights so that we ladies could all sit on the covered back porch and screech and giggle like adolescents. Now, I ask you, did Susie pick a winner, or what?

The first night, I went to bed at about 2:00 a.m. basking in the delight of having an entire suite to myself, where I could hog all the pillows and the covers and sample the many Arbonne products that Susie left sitting temptingly around the bathroom. I was deeply intimidated by the Kohler toilet, initially wondering if I was supposed to pee in it or admire it as an objet d'art. For the first time, I felt I truly understood those "The Bathroom as Still Life" magazine advertisements I've been seeing for years.

The nicest thing about the accommodations was that there was a little wet bar right outside my bedroom door, with a coffee maker built into the wall and a pull out refrigerator stocked with every kind of soda pop, fruit juice and bottled water known to this world and maybe even the next. Darling Susie even remembered to get soy milk for Lily and half-and-half for me and Coke for Carol and the next morning, when I stepped outside my room to press the On button, sniffing the aroma of early coffee a few minutes later, I was filled with bliss. Bliss!

More tomorrow about Miss Susie's Wild Ride (golf course tour) and the filet mignon so beautiful, so tender that I wasn't sure whether I should eat it or marry it.

Flowers I have grown

I am in the process of putting out all the flowers around our house and it is one of my favorite things to do, ever. I am only limited by the fact that I can kill just about any type of flora with the touch of my hand, like Rappaccini's Daughter.

I can grow:

1) petunias

2) geraniums

3) marigolds

4) vinca

5) hostas

6) mint

I cannot grow:

1) everything else

I even managed to kill day lilies once, which are so mean and hardy that Hoosiers often wearily refer to them as "ditch lilies" and run them down with bush hogs to keep them out of the corn. My mother once nearly disowned me for killing three young peony bushes she had nurtured for me. I tried to blame it on the heating and air-conditioning guy who came to put in the new condenser, but she knew the truth and she scorned me in the knowing.

Petunias, geraniums, marigolds, vinca, hostas and mint all have a special trait in common, and that is that they will put up with any amount of withered-thumb abuse from the likes of me. Except for the fact that petunias must be pinched back and the spent geranium heads have to be broken off, you pretty much couldn't kill any of those six plants with a meat axe. That's what I like in a plant, other than plastic.

The girls and I went to the garden center tonight and bought the flowers (and the mulch) for the front bed where our little Mary shrine is. (I told my husband that I thought it would be very nice to have a shrine made out of an old claw-foot tub buried halfway in the ground, with a statue of the Blessed Mother set inside to simulate a grotto, but he just gave me that one-raised-eyebrow look and bought me a cement one instead.) The theme of our front flowers this year is pink and red with yellow-gold accents. We bought two tall grassy-looking things for the rear sides of the shrine, two big pink geraniums and two red geraniums and two yellow marigolds. I'm sure the grassy-things will probably die, but I'm always full of such wistful hope when I walk through a greenhouse.


A "bathtub Madonna" from Josh Michtom's Madonna Project. Josh spent a
couple of years photographing the religious shrines in Somerville , Massa-
chusetts, which included some really nice bathtub-type shrines, which I find
adorable. Photo credit: Copyright (c) Josh Michtom 2005 All rights reserved.

When we got home, it was absolutely pouring down rain, but we hauled everything out of the van, spread the mulch with a rake and then set the new plants around the statue of Mary in an approximation of how we'd like them to look when we plant them tomorrow. It isn't all that imaginative, but it is very pretty and cheerful.


[For more on Josh's project, visit him at his website.