Sunday – time to get religion

Some people attend religious services only on major holidays of the church year. I’m like that. I attend church when my parents are in town. They have been here all week post Henry birth, but have been staying with Sandy and then Vicki, first to help with the baby and second because Vick has good parking for their motor home. Today I am meeting them at a church that they want me to join. Since I am now Michael and Abby’s Godfather they feel compelled to get me some churching up.

I actually like some things about church; I like the old belt um out battle hymns of the Lutheran psychosis: culturally Lutheran. Today would be a high church holiday as well; reformation Sunday celebrating, you guessed it, the reformation. Ah, blood baths of ideological invention faltering into class warfare, how shall we celebrate and honor your murderous devisiveness? I have it! Cover over the Pagan festival and the catholic veneration of saints, with a “here’s why we left” jamboree in honor of Luther’s ninety-five theses tacked to the door at Wittenberg. Cue the battle hymns of the republic!

Here’s one for the record book. I walk into the upstairs of Vick’s house yesterday. My father and my nephew are cleaning the basement. Vick and Camilla have gone to the St. Louis Zoo for an international students festival. My mother has her black and white cow spot cardboard journal open and she is writing what’s happened and what’ on her mind. My mother was always a prolific letter writer and now I discover by accident that she has also been journaling much of her life.

So we had a long talk about it and she confessed that she didn’t know why she did it and she couldn’t imagine any of her children or her children’s children wanting to read what she written. “They all be too busy and just throw them in the fire when I’m gone.” Her seventy-third birthday is tomorrow and I am buying her a very nice journal. I also promised her that if she left her journals to me I would read them, preserve them, and insure that they were available to her children’s children. She used that as a way into needling me about not having a good Christian wife and children. She wants to meet my kids before she passes. Which is not going to be anytime soon. She and my father are both ridiculously healthy and just bought a new convertible.

I’d write more about the weekend, but I don’t want to be late to somewhere I’ve never been before.

Missing stories –
Friday night “got fired” party with my family followed by
Costumes at Erica’s 26th birthday
Saturday night – poker with some of the gang – Carlo cashed in at 67$