Sudden Crash

Ever have a day go from sunny and busy to complete crisis disaster?

That would be today.

This morning, I dropped Sophia off at Christie's for the Friday field trip. Came home and met with Therese because I'm going to be her assistant for Atrium next year (the word got out somehow that I like talking about religion...). Warm, fuzzy meeting. She leaves and I call my sister Bevin. We go to Baisch and Skinner, the wholesale florist, to buy new plants for church (Easter lilies only last so long but Easter season is still in ful swing). Find some great plants. Maeve is relatively good--nothing too alarming, typical two year old behavior. Easy.

We get coffee. I drop Bevin off. Come home, chat with a neighbor about his 3rd floor project. Call Christie--I have plenty of time to take the plants to church and trade them for the ones that are going to the garden. Which is great because Eric is coming up this afternoon to move them. Perfect. Busy and planned and the whole day fits together like a puzzle. I love it when that happens.

Go up to church. Reorganize some plants, move some lilies to the back. La dee da. Scoot around, happy to be at church, in the quiet, with the plants, Maeve is doing ok, some of the new plants were cheaply on sale (spring bulbs just now flowering--they won't last forever but will be pretty for the wedding tomorrow, mass on Sunday, and then will go to the garden for Eric to use. Perfect!). Ah. I love it when those things work out. I was taking bows off the lilies to save for Sr. Dorothy Ann and her plant booth at the picnic, and my phone rang.

I thought it must be Christie telling me she was 20 minutes away (she said she'd call). I pick up my phone out of my purse and it's Bevin. Hmm.

"Bridgett, I've got some bad news."

Now, Bevin uses that word--bad--to describe everything. Her minor car wreck. Having to work late. The cat dying. You know? It's not that some things are "bummer news" and other things are "shockingly horrible news." So in my mind I'm thinking...she got fired? Her car broke down and she needs a ride? The house got broken into? Dennis Kucinich died? Global warming? You know? It could be anything.

"They let Steve Rios off on appeal."

Now. This. Is. Bad. News. I mean, for us personally, some of the worst. Shockingly horrible would have described it well.

As you know if you read this blog at all, Steve Rios killed Jesse Valencia. There is no doubt in my mind. Two years ago this May, I sat for a week in a Columbia, Missouri, courtroom and took dictation. It was a good trial, he was guilty as hell, and he got what he deserved. One witness, though, made statements about what Jesse had said before he died, and it gave Rios a motive. On the other hand, the photographs of Jesse's body and the famous clip knife were fine. Of all the things, I would think the clip knife dance would have been the appeal. Here's the current story for as long as the link lasts. Anyway. I'm totally in shock and had to leave church. I drove home, and then my phone rang again: Bevin.

"Bridgett, I am locked out of my car, on Grand, the car is running."

Think she's a little stressed out?

I went up to the post office on Grand, called a locksmith, ran to the ATM, had Kristin keep a look out for Sophia coming home from the field trip, gave Bevin my car keys and the van, and sat on Grand waiting for the locksmith, who came in a reasonable amount of time, was very nice, and told me at the end,

"I hope you have a better day."

Amen.

From Coffee & Donuts this past Sunday

Sophia, Ellie, Molly (all age 5 almost 6 kindergartners) sitting at a table eating Worlds Fair donuts and drinking milk. Ava (3rd grade) comes up with a donut.

Ellie: Ava, are you old enough to drink coffee?
Ava: You don't have to be a certain age to drink coffee. You just have to know you're ready.
Ellie: Do you drink coffee?
Ava: I don't like coffee.
Sophia and Ellie: Me neither.
Molly: I like coffee. I drink it a lot.

A prayer request

Please keep Tina in mind, in prayer, for the next two months. And her family. She is serving a 60 day prison term in Texas for crossing the line at Ft. Benning (the home of the School of the Americas, whatever it is being called now). She is the mom of one of Sophia's classmates at City Garden. Heartbreaking. If you're interested, her brief blog of the trial is here.

Geometric Success

Met with Mark and his mother today. He brought back my UCSMP Geometry book. He'd done every problem I assigned, showed hs work. He got it. We did the entire chapter 5 and half of chapter 7 today, for next week, and I assigned a lot of problems. He didn't complain. They both thanked me for the book change. There was great relief. We went through triangle congruence, all of it, today, along with parallel line review. Quadrilaterals. He answered my questions. He asked some. He was engaged. He then told his mom it was her fault if we had to go through to June, for getting him such a lousy book (twice!). Kind of a glimpse into homeschooling the teenager. At least the teenaged boy with very little intrinsic motivation. But I like him, I like her, we have a rapport (and one student I taught from Rosati Kain for two years never developed a rapport with me, so this is nice after only a couple months).

But on the way home, I was worried. Were we selling out by putting aside the formal, classical geometry book (although poorly worded and with lousy examples) in favor of the "new math" U of Chicago version of geometry?

But of course I was able to put this worry aside. Math is supposed to be taught concrete to abstract. You don't show a 2 year old his numbers before you teach him to count raisins. You don't show vertical subtraction to a 5 year old until you have her do some "taking away" with the groceries or blocks or snail shells. And you move from real snail shells to symbolic snail shells to hash marks representing snail shells to numbers.

In geometry, I would hazard a guess, concrete to abstract would start with ball fields and kites and pyramids, move through those to application problems involving kites and ball fields, and on to formal proofs. Beginning and ending with formal proofs, even simple ones, I realized, is a poor way to teach math.

SPV Blogging: A little perspective

So, like, I touched those double windows.

I do not give tours. I have learned enough of the secrets of St. Pius' infrastructure. It's time to go back down to the nave and get cozy with Emil Frei. Sit in pews polished and worn down by 90 years of overcoats and cordoroy pants and kids shoes and contemplate what the heck we're going to do with the carpet in the sanctuary.

One time, when I was 4, my parents took me to a church in Wisconsin and we climbed up into the bell tower. Open riser steps. I flipped out. My mother took me back to the bottom.

Lessons in Abject Terror

I have fears. Some are normal, parental fears. Things we all fear--unnamed things that aren't the topic at hand. But three of them fall into the "irrational fear" category. One of those is drowning. Totally logical: humans cannot breathe water. Water can be overpowering. Avoid water. It's bred into me--a familial memory I'm not even aware of. But I'm a strong swimmer and I'll be damned if my kids aren't, too. This isn't like ballet lessons. Swimming is a life skill more important than reading and math, and that's coming from someone who teaches math and used to teach reading (and technically, I still do teach reading. Oh, oh, Sally. Where is your cookie?)
The next one is edges. Also totally logical: edges imply depth, imply falling. Falling often kills and injures. Avoid edges. This one is less rational than the drowning-I go into rivers, oceans, pools, ponds (ick, but I have before). I have a healthy respect for water; I fear edges. And combine any edge with water--piers, for instance, and that just isn't a good day for Bridgett. But I'm also extraordinarily bad at edges combined with the next, totally irrational fear: old abandoned warehouses and industrial spaces.

Abject terror. I don't have some life-changing event to hearken back to. There is no reason. I have no clue why I fear this. Until moving to St. Louis, I never lived in an area with such places. I never witnessed anything terrible occuring in any such place. Maybe I've just watched too much Law & Order. Or maybe that's what is meant by "irrational fear." Edges and drowning: explainable. Fears like spiders, monkeys, shaking hands: irrational. A fear of warehouses?

And I'm not talking about big metal buildings filled with farm equipment, or working warehouses with forklifts. I'm not talking about storerooms in grocery stores. I'm talking about abandoned places. I'm talking about those photos of Pripyat. I'm talking about the art show I was in at the old Lemp brewery (with "soft" floors and a metal cage around our exhibit).

I'm talking about my second pregnancy, filled with nightmares about burning warehouses and bodies buried under the floor. Eerie green lighting and abandoned medical clinics with strange iconography implying--what, I don't know.

So there's a little glimpse into the psyche that opened the side door in the choir loft and saw the staircase with the grafitti, and, for reasons I cannot understand, thought that taking a little trek up would be a great plan.
It's a church, not an abandoned brewery or a scene from a nightmare. But there are elements--ropes down the center like an abandoned elevator shaft, support beams on the wall, a patina of pigeon droppings--that messed with my head. The daylight through frosted windows, the old wood, the fact that nobody knew I was up there--it all lent itself to a feeling of, oh, terror. In a good way, since I obviously didn't turn and run. This photo is of the side staircase into the crawlspace over the ceiling. I didn't go up that one. A hot breath was blowing out of it and that was enough for me (on my way back down, it was hard to pass by it--what is wrong with me?)

The stairs curved along the outside wall of the bell tower, just like the steps that lead to the choir loft, except instead of poured concrete, old unfinished wood. But my attic steps are similar, and it was sturdy. I reached a landing, where I thought I'd be able to see all the way up, but no, I was going to have to continue further if I wanted to see to the top.
I got to here and that fear of edges kicked in. I'm not prone to dizzy spells, I am able-bodied, I'm not nine months pregnant and teetering. I had sensible clothing on. No problem realistically, but I still took the steps two feet at a time. It's weird how your brain plays tricks on you.

But I'd made it that far, and I wanted to see it through. I wanted, for reasons I cannot explain, to document this. To tell this story. But it was when I turned this corner and saw the next little flight, the one that leaves the wall and just sort of suspends itself over the center of the tower, that I just kind of stopped.

I looked at all the old wood, probably the same as the studs in my house. Noted that I was going to have to scrub my hands till they bled to avoid whatever old pigeon droppings might carry (ick). I spent a lot of time there looking at the floating stairs, not looking down. Not ever looking back down, in fact. I was excellent at that.

The steps I was standing on had closed risers--you could look at your feet catch the next step without seeing air between the treads. Like steps in my house. But I turned and was along the wall with the windows, and the risers were not filled in. No more courtesy. My foot could slide into the space between the risers--and for some reason, that was enough climbing for me.
Plus I got a look at those floating steps. Not only would I have to cling to the flimsy banisters without the benefit of the false sense of security red brick offers (and then I started thinking: what if an earthquake happens. Right. Now. Because of course, I should be thinking about that). And I looked up at them, and noticed that the riser height increased dramatically. They became steep, empty, spooky, floating steps. Made of wood. From ninety years ago. I had enough. I took this picture to prove that really, I gave it my all, and turned--slooowly--and headed back down. But then I stopped and focused my zoom as high as it could go (and I took up close photos of waterfalls in California that were amazing). Up above the floaty nausea steps, the steps turn yet again. And again. And eventually come up to an opening, where I assume we have a couple bells. Three, I think is the number. and as much as I wanted to scare myself to death by going to see how those all worked, all I got was this photograph of some sort of curved metal mechanism. It probably would have looked industrial up close.
So I inched my way back down, passing the short steps that lead to the ceiling of my church, heading back down to the choir loft. Which used to scare me, when I'd go up there to clean or hang banners. Nope. Not now.

SPV Blogging: Grafitti

The choir loft is locked. For a long time I thought this was amusing--what, was someone going to steal the organ? A pipe at a time? But then I figured for safety reasons--who wants a nine year old going up there on a dare and pitching over the side? Nightmare. Then, I was taking the photos of the rose window and noted the door on the opposite side from the stairwell with Cecilia and Gabriel (yes, Gabriel). I mean, I had noticed the door before. It has a glass window in it, and it is obviously some creepy storeroom where also is found the ropes to pull to ring our church bells. It has a padlock on it. But no lock that day--just the catch for it. So I opened the door. It's a creepy little room, with stairs going up. And on the walls near the stairs, grafitti from 80 years of altar boys "discovering" the place just as I had and leaving their marks.

The darkroom at my high school was the same way. It was a tiny concrete room off a science lab. John Thomas and I had keys. There was grafitti all over the walls. We added quite an astounding amount.
Then Mr. Termuhlen found it all, made fun of us, and had the closet painted. I still have the key, though, on a rubberband keychain from the yearbook advisor attached to a pinback button that says "Pfui!" Ah, good times.

I taught Joe and Sam.

Funny how you become Mr. Termuhlen somewhere along the way. But I don't want to paint over it. Sophia will be an altar server (they let girls do that now, at least for the moment...) sometime and she'll find this hideaway.

SPV Blogging: Rose Window Close Up

On a window that was never meant to be examined in detail up close, they took the time to stain the glass that went into it. These people. They amaze me.

SPV Blogging: Rose Window in the Afternoon

This will not be the only picture of this window on this blog. It is simply the first--I will take one from the sanctuary when I come around down there again, and I have a close up of it coming next. But I was up in the loft looking at other things and caught the afternoon sun on Saturday.

Fr. Mike used to call this our Resurrection window.

Arlene, a long time parishioner, told me on Saturday that her mother was a student at the school when the church was built. The school children were the donors for this window. At Pius, as opposed to so many churches I've been to, there aren't a bunch of little plaques explaining who footed the bill. I've been to Catholic churches--St. Joseph's in Macon, GA, comes to mind--where the notation was part of the stained glass. Forever and ever, Mrs. and Mrs. Harold Franklin, say, are connected to the Francis of Assisi window. (Side note: St. Joseph's is breathtaking. Their church photos put mine to terrible shame. If you like church pictures, go look...I have much to learn, but it makes me happy that someone is documenting their church as well--they have similar style (Munich) windows, but done by the Mayer Studio in Bavaria).

Anyway, to not be completely distracted by other churches I have known, St. Pius doesn't have this feature, except on a couple of the statues, which I would guess were added later in the church, although I need to find that out for sure before I say it definitively. I kind of like that the windows are so anonymous. It becomes less of a historical tour of dead parishioners and more of, well, a church. Sr. Mary is probably right--there were probably meetings with the Freis, ideas, hopes, options, realities all put down on the table. Money was collected but nobody said "This is MY window, I want it done like this."

So I would have had no clue that the school children, probably symbolically, put their pennies and nickels in the collection basket in 1915 or 16, saw pictures of what they were collecting for, and throughout their lives had a sense of ownership at St. Pius. A sense of ownership is good. But it's nice that I didn't already know--I had to be told by someone who knew the story.

There is a lot of story at Pius about the building. Sr. Dorothy was freaking out that I haven't written it all down yet. I guess I'd better get on that. Maybe I'll just hire a nanny now...or maybe, it will happen when it can, bit by bit. Like history.

SPV Blogging: Pipes

From below, the pipe organ. Our organ is a "Kilgen organ of moderate size, in working playable condition", even though we don't play it very often. I've heard it at 10 a.m. mass perhaps 3 times. They may use it more at the other masses, but I'm thinking not. We have a shortage of piano players, much less organ players. But one of the teachers at St. Elizabeth's Academy told me that at their graduation this year, at St. Pius V, they will play the organ. So that's good to know.

The grate on the right hand side is on the ceiling--it's an air vent. The ceiling is curved, but the outside of the building is gabled. I remember Fr. Mike mentioning once that there's a crawlspace above the ceiling. Yeah. Let's go see.

SPV Blogging: Harp Window, Askew

This is the only way to take a photo of this window. Totally askew, from too tight an angle below, and to the side. It is hidden behind the pipe organ. The pipes end at a tightly slanted wall that meets the outer wall of the church, and that's where the harp is.

The harp is a symbol of David. But it's also a musical instrument, and thus, I think a cigar is just a cigar here. It's the choir loft. On the other hand, it is represented in a very similar way to the clerestory windows.

During the house tour, one of our guitarists, Paul, sat up in the choir loft and played guitar music. Not liturgical music--the Grateful Dead, for instance, some seventies super hits--and it rang out over the church beautifully. One of the recorder players, Dale, joined him for a while, and it just lilted through the air. I understand why churches use their choir lofts for their choirs. I also can guess why we don't--our choir sits up on the left hand side of the church, facing the congregation to the side. But I wonder why one is better than the other? Perhaps someone in choir who reads this blog could tell me. I am not attacking the decision to move away from the loft, at all. I was just curious about the justification.

Ok then, it's Gabriel

Don't know what my resistance to the whole idea is, anyway. I had emails and comments this morning, long before I was awake, stating without a doubt that this of course was Gabriel.

He still looks like he's rehearsing. Hey Mary. No. Howdy Mary. No. Hail Mary. Yeah, that sounds better. But Gabriel does other things. An exasperated sounding voice calls out in the book of Daniel: "Gabriel, explain the vision to this man." Gabriel doesn't tell Daniel not to be afraid, by the way. Gabriel stands before him and tells him the vision is about the end times. And then two centuries later he stands before Zechariah and tells him about Elizabeth expecting a son. Tells him not to be afraid. Of course, then he strikes him mute. And most famously, he is sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazereth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary.

So I can concede that although he looks nothing like the Gabriel in the large windows in the main part of church, even though he's not in the same house or wearing the same clothing (or wings), sure, it's Gabriel. Sr. Cathy said, "it's the steps to the bell tower. Of course it's Gabriel, proclaiming the Good News."

SPV Blogging: Yes, it's glass

One more before bedtime.

This is the angel's eye. The angel in the stairwell with the lily and scroll that may or may not be Gabriel but I'm thinking is just an angel. Just another pretty face. Up close, it loses its medium, just like a pure musical note loses the instrument it is played on and sounds like every other B flat or whatever. When I uploaded this, Mike said to me, "whose eye is that?" and he was incredulous when I flipped over to the stained glass window of the angel.

I noticed today that the Mary images in our windows are not all the same woman's face (as opposed to the characters in our Stations of the Cross, which are frighteningly the same throughout the 14 pieces). The early Mary at the Annunciation is not the same tired woman in the Flight into Egypt. And the Mary saying goodbye to Jesus is different, too. I don't know if this is purposeful--wisdom, age and grace--or if it's a change in artist's hand. There are a couple that seem to match--Nativity, Flight into Egypt, the Presentation. Her face is less realistic in those windows, less mature artistically. But the one of her and Jesus, it's like she could step out of the window and talk with us.

Looking at the window in this sort of detail, though, I'm struck by how much is left up to chance and whim and the materials. Note the tiny flaw in the glass on the right side. And it is tiny--I am millimeters away from the glass when I took this. I wonder, though, how many faces of angels and Marys and Simeons and so on didn't make the cut.

SPV Blogging: Lily

A close up of the lily in the angel window. Lilies show up when the artist wants to depict a chaste heart. St. Anthony has them. Joseph. Gertrude. Catherine of Siena. Albert of Trapani (ok, ok, I'm doing a google search to find some of these). Gabriel is often depicted with a lily--the next time I'm at the monastery (I am counting the days, trust me), I will try to get a photograph of the chapel's mosaics, including the one of the Annunciation, where Gabriel kneels in deference and hands Mary a lily. (Now I really want to go. Today I handed Sr. Mary a copy of the Gospel According to Dawn and said, before I really thought about it, "It's written by a sister at my monastery." She replied, "Isn't it nice to say 'my monastery'?" And it is).

I really took this picture, and the one coming up next, because this window is in a stairwell. Therefore, it is easily accessible with a macro lens. I could get very close to it (which is probably why it is damaged--anyone can get close to it). And I could show the detail in the stained glass--the stain part of the stained glass. This is what makes our windows what they are. Otherwise they would be art glass, pretty pieces that let the light shine in with pretty colors. The cross hatching on the pink, the yellow inside the white lily, the details on the leaves--it all sort of leaves me speechless after a while. Believe it or not.

Today, one of our recorder players was in church with his own camera and tripod. It made me happy.

SPV Blogging: Angel Window

I spent several hours trying to figure out who this was. My sister Bevin came with me one day to church, to help decipher the clerestory windows, and she had several things to say about the other little bits of symbolism in the windows. The book and scroll in the Temple window. The clover by Jesus' feet. What angels are what. And when she said something about angel, I said, oh, you have to see this angel in the stairwell. Because I don't know who it is.

I figured it was more than just cherubim, seraphim, etc. I thought for sure this was one of the named angels--Raphael, Gabriel, Michael (I know there are others, like Uriel, but I figured if we had a window of a specific angel, it was going to be one of those first three--also, is Uriel even mentioned by name anywhere? I know where the other three appear). Anyway, before I get into a debate over canonical books, Raphael shows up with fish, Michael of course has his flaming sword, and Gabriel is shown with a trumpet, a lily, a scroll.

This guy has a scroll. He has a lily. What the heck is he doing, though? Rehearsing? Bevin and I went back out into the main part of church to look at the window depicting the Annunciation (Coming Soon!). Not the same guy. Not the same room. Not the same scroll.

Could it be Gabriel? It might be. But to have him alone in a stairwell (although he is quite near St. Cecilia), away from the purpose he is best known for, seems terribly unlike the windows in our church. They are steeped in meaning. Dripping with symbol and (literally) illumination. I just can't say this is Gabriel. It doesn't make sense to me.

This is also the window in the most trouble at Pius. Our church sits right on Grand, between Gravois and Arsenal, in a neighborhood that has definitely fluxuated over time. The fact that our windows have survived this long--ninety years so far--without being ragged and broken and marred is a miracle. This little stairwell window, with all its lovely detail, is the one in most need of repair. That sunlight you can see above his halo--it's sunlight. There is a gap, the window bends away from the leading. Now, the outside is perfectly safe from the elements (plexiglas), and really, few people come this way any longer. But it's on my short list of things that need attention, the next time it comes up in a meeting. Now that I know where our windows are from and how we came about them, I can't see this one like this and think that's ok.

That's sort of the old Pius way of thinking. But today on the house tour, amusing as it is to someone who's cleaned that floor, someone commented to the bus tram driver that "you know, that church is almost a hundred years old. And it's so clean." We've been pulling up our shoulders and brushing off the dust for a couple of months now. But there's a bit of mending that needs to happen here, still.

SPV Blogging: House Tour

It was slow today with Pius on the house tour. It picked up about 2:30 or so, and we had busloads after that, but the first three hours were long. I did go to the book sale out on our parking lot, and I cleaned up the sacristy. So it was not time wasted. Plus, Cheryl had cookies from Missouri Baking Company and from Federhofers, so the Italians and the Germans were both represented. Those were tasty.

I was sitting at the center cross of the church--the nave is split down the middle by the aisle, and then sometime between 1923 and 1990 or so--probably in the 70s?--they took out an entire row of pews to make a crosswalk. Anyway, it's approximately at the center of church, it's where the gifts of bread and wine sit before the offertory. Most churches have this breathing space. I was sitting there, looking back towards the front doors, and this image caught my eye. The sides of the pews sticking up, the silhouette of the floral arrangement from Botanicals along the edge of the bright light shining in from the west. Looking out onto Utah Place, the Tower Grove Heights banner hanging from a lightpost in front of a big white pine.

Texas

Over my mother's spring break, we went down to Texas to visit my brother. I hadn't been in a couple of years--I think Maeve was 9 months old when last we visited. They live in Cypress, which is a suburb of Houston the same way that, oh, Warrenton is a suburb of St. Louis. It's pretty far away from Houston. It's actually closer to Hempstead, for those of you who know Texas at all. On the way to Brenham, which is of course the home of Blue Bell Ice Cream and you can't go wrong with that.

My niece Kennedy is 5 months younger than Sophia and the two of them played together really well. Maeve not so much (those who are surprised by this can go back through the archive of this blog as penance for being so clueless). Ian's working a lot these days--he works at a car dealership in Hempstead, training salesmen, increasing the sales percentage (person A walks into the dealership and buys a car; person B walks in and doesn't buy. His goal is to bring back more persons B to finish the deal). Ian, of course, could sell the proverbial ice to Eskimos, and is one of those untapped brilliant minds who learn everything there is to know about whateer it is that is important--he worked at Astroworld (Six Flags) and could quote statistics on the rides. He worked as a bartender and knew everything about alcohol, but not only that--also knew the history of the wood the bar was made of. Who had sat there in 1952. He worked as an oyster shucker and could tell you the evolution of bivalves. So now he sells cars. He knows everything.

There have been big changes in their life lately, over the past year or so. I think they are overwhelmingly positive changes, and they can take the long view and know that even though things are hard now, they will not be hard forever. It was a very different visit from two years ago. Last time, I was visiting a 16 year old and the woman who paid his bills and the kid who made them get married. This time, it was a 28 year old and his wife and daughter. Seriously. He is an adult now. In tiny imperceptible ways, ways that only I noticed (and there were other ways my mother noticed that I didn't), he is more present in his own life and in the lives of those around him. It was eye-opening.

But without dumping too much of my purse on the table about my family relationships and dysfunction, since, in the end, nobody wants to read that stuff, I want to complain a little bit about Texas.

Texas...is a great place to be from. I love talking about Texas, about my high school career, about big flat land and fire ants and the Gulf and all that. But it has been 15 years since I lived there full time, and the changes in myself in that time were made quite apparent on this visit.

So, 15 things (one for each year) that struck me about Houston and how I could never live there:

1. The closest library to Ian's house was 30 minutes away by car.
2. The closest grocery store was Walmart--probably only 5 minutes by car--and the next closest one, due to highway overpasses and one way streets, was almost 20 minutes away.
3. Nobody in Houston seems to do anything except drive and shop and eat out. There was traffic all the time, insane traffic, and the scenery was entirely low-slung suburban strip malls. Some very fancy and new, but all the same in the end.
4. It was impossible to walk form Ian's house to anywhere except the neighborhood pool and tennis court. There was no clear outlet into anything besides bedroom community.
5. Every church is a mega church. Ian and Ashley just joined the Catholic parish of 3800 families--that is TEN TIMES the size of St. Pius V. I'm uncertain how this leads to any sort of community life.
6. I saw the all-time most depressing name for a church while I was there. Granted, I am Catholic and partial to names of saints, but I'm happy with churches like "Gibson Heights Presbyterian" and "First Baptist Church of Richardson." Simple, obvious, direct. I am amused by church names like "The Way" and, frankly, our nearby non-denominational church, "The Journey." But all of those at least imply, well, a journey...and do not sound exclusive or self-congratulatory. But this one, this brand new congregation, is "Winners Circle Church: Where Champions Love to Gather."
7. Everything is suburbia. I know this isn't totally so--I know of lots of areas of Houston that are not. My ex-boyfriend lived in a very not-surburban area of Houston. But rings and rings and outer rings of suburbs are everywhere. It made St. Louis look tightly compact and earth friendly.
8. Everything was so big--not just the churches or the landscape, but the stores, the roads, the neighborhoods--that I could live all by myself and never make a connection with anyone, at all, by happenstance. I would probably never run into anyone I knew at the grocery store, for instance.
9. Because everything is so big, and so vastly spread out and suburban, everybody spends so much of their lives in their cars.
10. Due to that, everyone assumes that this is normal, and cars take on supreme importance--huge parking lots, 10 lane highways, 2 and 3 car garages on the fronts of houses, drive through gun and pawn stores.
11. Since a lot of the suburban areas are new, the houses are new, and the neighbors are all new--there is no history, there is no George down the street who has lived here for 40 years. This isn't a big deal, except that the neighborhoods are also segregated by price--and so everyone on your block makes about the same amount of money you do. And everybody has lived there about as long as you have. And there's nobody to welcome you and nobody to welcome and you shut your doors and live alone.
12. Everyone drives everywhere, everyone moves in insulated groups, nobody knows each other, and, related to that or not, road rage is at a stunning level. There is very little common decency in a state that prides itself on its friendliness.
13. So much time spent commuting, little time left over for meaningful pursuits. I would lose myself.
14. Partly due to it being a hurricane zone city, there is very little of anything of historic value, and yet everything also seems outdated. Odd.
15. Everything I used to hate about Texas is still there: good old boys, huge disparities between wealth and poverty, the heat and humidity, the pollution.

So there's my hugely slanted view.

SPV Blogging: St. Cecilia

St. Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians. Marita's first daughter is Cecilia. Mike and I were married at St. Cecilia's. Our pastoral associate at church, Sr. Mary (maybe you've heard me talk about her before...), is Mary Cecilia. Sophia was almost Cecilia (probably would have been Cecilia Grace, but that was early in the arguing). A lovely name.

St. Pius V Church has actual depictions (as opposed to symbols) of only 5 saints besides Mary in our stained glass windows: St. Joseph (with the Holy Family), St. Elizabeth (the Visitation), John the Baptist (in the old baptistry), St. Pius V (he has his own window). And St. Cecilia ranks in there with them. Not Peter or John or Thomas Aquinas or Bernard or Polycarp or Louis. Louis. You'd think Louis would get a window. But no, it's Cecilia. This window is in our stairwell to the choir loft, where, of course, our pipe organ resides.

Cecilia has a typical pre-Constantine story of martyrdom. Forced to marry against her will, she then converted her husband to Christianity and then her brother-in-law. The two men set about to properly bury Christian martyrs, and were then promptly martyred for their work. She buried them...and then was martyred as well, first by suffocation, and when that failed, beheading (which always seems to do the trick).

She looks like she's blind, not because the stained glass maker couldn't get a facial expression right, but because Cecilia means blind. Was she blind? About a third of the information I found on her says she was; the others ignore this connection. She is the patron saint of musicians because, as the story goes, at her wedding she did not listen to the profane pagan music--instead she sang a song in her heart to Jesus, her true spouse. Song in her heart led to the Music Academy in Rome to name her as patron, and the rest is history. She's depicted just as you see her here--possibly blind, with a pipe organ in front of her, roses all around. She may or may not have played the pipe organ--she could have, since it was invented 400 years before she was born. (I just learned that, too--I assumed it was a total anachronism until now). But, in the end, how nice to not wind up being the patron saint of, say, undertakers, considering what brought about her martyrdom. How nice to be the patron of music, musicians, liturgial musicians, poets, composers, and Omaha.

Yes, I still do a little teaching around here

I realized the other day that all I've been posting about is church. As easy as that is, it really isn't St. Pius V Blog. But then it took me a little while to even come up with anything else to say on any other topic. Lent and Triduum and Easter and whoa. I then remembered I never wrote about Texas (later), and haven't said anything about teaching lately. Mah jongg, tutoring, and homeschool teaching.

I'm teaching mah jongg now, at Janine's store on the corner. First and third Wednesdays. Anyone is welcome, 7-8:30 p.m. It's got a steep learning curve but if you play other complex rule games (chess, bridge) or even if you just think it would be interesting to come see, then come see. Last night my new student (and a couple other players), Janine's son, caught on in about a millisecond. It was amazing. I see slivers of my own childhood awkwardness with other children and relative ease with adults. It's too bad he has to, oh, go to high school, instead of just fast forwarding to when life will be so much easier socially.

Homeschooling? We have caterpillars in our dining room eating their nutrient goop in order to get ready to turn into butterflies. Sophia is still working on the reading. L-A-Z-Y is the biggest problem. She can sound out, guess from context, and has a group of sight words, but since it got warm, it's been like pulling teeth. She's now at City Garden 2 days, plus a field trip, so we eased up on a couple of things to accomodate that. Sign language has gone on the back burner for the spring, for instance. She has a small vocabulary and is highly interested in the alphabet. So we work on that but arne't doing much else with sign. Math is fabulous, just like Waldorf thinks it will be, and she yearns for more science that isn't nature based. We visit ponds; she wants to look at stars. So we're transitioning what we can to astronomy. She's playing T-ball and just started gymnastics. So did Maeve. That's hilarious.

And tutoring. I still work with Ann's daughter, in 8th grade, and I've taken on Marc, a 17 year old homeschooled kid, struggling with geometry. I may have mentioned this before. Anyway, he used Bob Jones Geometry (like the university) last semester, learned nothing. Nothing. Then they got Abeka's Plane Geometry and spent two months wrestling with the first chapter. More nothing. He and mom butt heads a bit; she doesn't understand the math at all.

It's all formal proofs. Every single problem in that book is a formal proof. He is taking this course to have geometry under his belt for the SAT/ACT, which, I presume, doesn't have you write out a formal proof longhand.

So we've worked for about 6 weeks at this. I don't like the book, but I say nothing about it. Try to work within its framework (I don't like the book Ann's daughter uses, either, but we have to use that book, her school does). I go through proof after proof. I demonstrate other ways the theorems and corollaries could apply. He nods. She smiles (she sits through every sessoin, which is a bit nervewrecking but I'm handling it). They say "great!" at the end. Then they come back the next week and nobody has understood a single word.

At first, I thought it was a difference in teacher. Then I thought it was just me. That idea of knowing what you know. (The first step of learning: you don't know what you don't know. Then you know what you don't know, and you seek to learn it. Then you reach a point of knowing what you know, which is the step at which you are best at teaching a topic. AFter that, you have unconscious knowledge. You know things, you use them, you are expert. But you aren't necessarily very good at giving that knowledge to others, which is why it is best to step down a level to knowingly knowing, so you can recall how it is you learned it in the first place). I already understand this stuff, I find it to be elegant and amusing. I was starting to think I was leaving that optimum tutoring area, and tried to work my brain around that.

But even after doing that, after laying down the law about always constructing an example, after having mom sit and give him immediate feedback, nothing was working.

I've been carrying around in my bag this whole time the University of Chicago School Math Project (UCSMP) Geometry book. It's written in the early 90s, and the books that come before, Transition Math and Algebra, are just what math books need to be. I loved teaching from them at St. Pius and I think my students learned something. I have yet to find a high school math book that equals them, although Saxon comes dangerously close.

I plop it down on the table and defend it to mom, who has a big fear of change. There are no formal proof problems in this book. There are applications only. Each lesson follows the same pattern, each problem set asks the same sort of questions (on the new topic, obviously). We work through 4 lessons on circles. Marc actually seemed ok for the first time. I sent the book home. On Wednesday, I guess I'll find out if it worked.

So, yeah. Still doing something besides floral arranging and photography and stained glass phone calls.

SPV Blogging: Emil Frei

So the other day, feeling brave, I called Emil Frei Art Glass Company. They are the stained glass firm that supposedly did St. Pius V's windows--but there is no proof anywhere, due to a fire in the rectory in the 50s and scant records. I was thinking that maybe, actually probably, a company with such a broad sweep of liturgical windows across the nation probably kept records. I also thought that these windows were probably Frei's, since they are eerily similar to St. Anthony de Padua's--Anthony's has more fuss around them than ours (larger windows, fancier decoration), but the faces are the same detail and emotional presence.

I called and Stephen Frei answered the phone. Best I know, there's an Emil Frei Sr., a Jr., a Robert, and then Robert's sons Stephen and David. This is from their website. I told him I had some questions about history--I was writing up this tour for our church, on the house tour this weekend, and wanted to be sure we had Emil Frei windows before stating that as fact. He asked me the parish's name, looked it up in a database. No record.

The thing was, their South Grand studio had a fire. Records were lost. His father had gone around to different churches and taken slide photographs over the intervening years, when he was asked to do repairs, churches he knew were his grandfather's, etc.

"Where is your church?"

"It's on South Grand."

"When was it built?"

"Between 1906 and 1923."

"Well, we sort of had a corner on the market then." He told me that if they were pictorial--they are--and they didn't use opalescent (milky) glass, it was either Emil Frei, Sr., or it was Austrian, German, etc. If they were made in America, they were Frei windows. We both decided it wouldn't make sense for St. Pius, on South Grand, to commission with a German artist (it's not like it was a German parish hoping to support folks in the old country) when Emil Frei was 20 blocks south.

He looked in his slide book, and noted that, yes, St. Pius Church in St. Louis City had had repairs done. There were slides. As much of a confirmation as he could give, he gave me. He pointed me towards the website, where I found some breathtaking examples of their modern work. And the story of Emil Frei, St., and why our windows are they way they are.

Quickly, Emil and Emma came over from Germany and settled in San Francisco. Totally unhappy there, Emma decided it was time to move back home. So they took the train across the US, stopping in St. Louis to meet some friends before departing. South St. Louis. Oh my was it German. (My great-grandfather, Theo Wibbenmeyer, in fact, learned English as a second language at the age of 16). Emma felt like she'd found a second home. They settled in St. Louis, and started a little art glass company on South Grand. Did the windows for College Church, St. Anthony's, Francis de Sales. And a couple of cathedrals nationwide. Including, later, one in the National Cathedral. Oh, and with a German colleague, designed the mosaics for the New Cathedral. While they were at it, some time around 1920, they put a couple of a windows in St. Pius V.

Learning all this is like being on Antiques Roadshow and learning that the vase your grandmother gave you, which you adore, of course, but never really thought much about, is worth 50 grand. And I don't mean that I'm amazed that now suddenly our windows are fabulous--they always have been. I just never realized how it was that all those little moments in a nineteenth century German couple's life, unhappiness in California, one last visit to friends in Missouri, led up to this. How I can sit and look up at the window of the Visitation and wonder whose face I'm really looking at. Knowing this makes our windows even more lovely. Poignant, somehow.

Here's hoping our visitors see that same glimpse this weekend.

Oh To Move Like These Two

Just the other day I mentioned to Mike that I was ready to learn how to dance. Of course, that's only half true. I know how to dance. It's just that the way I know how to dance requires things that I am not likely to find in St. Louis, in the circles I find myself traveling. It would require, of course, to start, an ice house. An ice house that smells like beer and sweaty construction workers. And exhaust fumes from the trucks outside. Skinny men in too-tight jeans. Girls with big hair who can't seem to get it through their heads that those men are no good for or to them. Staying out too late and Megan losing an earring. Searching the parking lot with her. Witnessing her boyfriend beat up some Mexican guy. Watching the Mexican guy bring back his ten thousand friends to get even. Tires squealing as we leave the gravel parking lot onto Telephone Road. Laughing, mostly because we're so damned glad nobody got killed. Winding up at Whataburger at 2 in the morning. Flypaper on the walls of the kitchen. Smell of raw beef everywhere. Jason and John and Matt and Louis (not that Louis) playing stupid practical jokes on each other. Going home in Megan's car because the Mexican guys followed us there and slashed John's tires. He's mad and I'm not interested. Police are on their way, and Megan and I duck out. Vow on the way home to find better boyfriends. Totally renig on that promise the next week after the football game when Tom says how he'd like to go dancing. Megan and Michelle and Ann and her boy Wenzel and Jennifer and Jennifer and Jennifer and Jason and John and what the hell. Might as well. Staring down at the football field for just a moment, trying to catch the other Louis' eye, thinking there must be something better for me to do tonight. But I'm seventeen (and he's 27) and Jason has offered to drive and gotta love that jeep on the big monster truck tires and so I say ok, knowing in my heart when we get to Spanky's or Beer Here or Miguelito's or wherever that I am not spending one more minute in Texas than I am required to do so by law.



But man, can those two dance. Makes you want to again.

SPV Blogging: Infrastructure

Not the most glamorous part of St. Pius. The stairwell to the choir loft. Unfortunately, unlike the vestibule we were using as a storage closet, or the vestibule full of outdated pamphlets and faded photographs, we can't really do much to help this stairwell. Those big ladders have to go somewhere (we are almost at the top of the stairwell in this picture--those are the tops of the huge ladders). I guess we could keep it cleaner, but, let's face it, church cleaning itself is a big enough task. Of course, the last time we met to clean church, Sue, Debbie, Julie, Alice, and I--and Joe--there wasn't much to do. Instead of in March, when we were there for 4 hours, we were done in about an hour. Straightened pews, dusted, Alice cleaned the statues. Vacuumed the ugly rust-colored carpet in the sanctuary. Broom-swept the floor. With nobody tracking in salt and ice, it just didn't need much more. Interesting how, if you set a standard for clean, it's easier to keep that up, than if you let things get grungy and then tread water. For ten years.

That's Sophia's little hand on the right side of that picture. She loves the choir loft. It would have been a place I'd have loved as a kid, too. The parishes we attended...weren't like Pius. Mary, Mother of the Church was built the year I was born (I was the third child baptized there). Couldn't tell you a thing about the churches in Milwaukee, Palm Springs, or Broken Arrow. St. Bernadette's, I've heard it said, was the old theater for the barracks down at the national cemetery. Very plain. Our Lady of Lourdes in Columbia, MO, was very orange--a lot like Mary, Mother, actually--exposed brick walls, orange carpet, chunky stained glass. It had monks' stalls up behind the altar, which were unique. And a choir loft, but it's not the same when it doesn't have a gigantic pipe organ.

Holy Cross down in Dallas was a gymnasium; St. Joseph's in Macon had history but we never really attached ourselves to anything in Macon. And the two churches I spent time in down in Houston--Our Lady of Mt. Carmel on the 55 Acres of Joy (that would be the term applied to the campus containing my high school, the grade school, and the church--it is meant to be said ironically), and Mary, Queen down in Friendswood were like everything in Houston. Relatively new, yet outdated.

So College Church was kind of, umm, an eye-opener, when I came up to go to SLU. And Pius, it holds its own. Fr. John, when we were decorating for Easter, looked around at one point and reminded us that Pius is just so beautiful, it doesn't need much more than what is already there. Sometimes, when you're there every week, it's easy to forget how visually stunning it is. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain....then there is.

Bushel Bush

Sophia, singing to my mother Thursday morning, when mom went to pick her up from Atrium because Maeve was sick. Or not sick. Or sick. Who knows? Anyway:

This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine,
let it shine, let it shine, let it shine

Won't hide it under a bushel bush, NO
I'm gonna let it shine
Won't hide it under a bushel bush, NO
I'm gonna let it shine
Won't hide it under a bushel bush, NO
I'm gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine

Bushel bush. I love when kids come up with things like that.

In other, only loosely related, news, St. Pius V is on the South Grand House Tour this year. I was telling my neighbors about how it's different to prepare a church than a house for the tour--what to write in the booklet about the house is a whole different story. You don't write about who lives there, for instance, I say off-handedly. And Brent, home sick with the same crud that got me and Maeve this week, said, but you could do some interesting things with that...house of God and all.

You know, it's been a long time of hiding under that bushel bush. Whatever the heck that is. ;^) (Yes, I realize she's hearing it wrong: it's a bushel basket). It's been a long time of fearing the idea of sharing faith. Dare I say that my Protestant neighbors make me a better Catholic? If they were of a different sort, that would probably really irk them to hear it (of course, if they were of a different sort...they would then be of the sort that wouldn't change me at all).

Lastly, you know what doesn't make me a better Catholic? The idea of joining Ecclesia Domestica. The Catholic Homeschool support group here in town, especially approved by the archbishop as a public association of the faithful. Someone recently handed me their newsletter. Holy pre-vatican II submit your will to the archbishop and talk in Latin to your children, Batman! This same person told me that she could never send her children to the Atrium because it was not such a "public association of the faithful," and was used by such radical folks as Episcopalians and Methodists. Funny, that's part of what attracted me--the Christian focus of the whole program. Yes, it is very Catholic, but it is completely adaptable. Sophia comes home singing, ruminates on the Kingdom of God, brings home little pictures of the woman with three measures of flour that she's copied from the light table. She does "works" with lambs and shepherds and "pastings" of altars ready for mass. It's a lovely, tender program. Nothing stuffy, nothing you have to translate from "the Latin" (ecclesia domestica, which may be obvious, means church in the home/domestic church). The ecclesia woman I know is satisfied where she is--suffice to say, I'll stick with Atrium and the bushel bush.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
(from the Desiderata by Max Ehrmann)

SPV Blogging: What They Found

This window sits below the Ascension window at the back of the south side of Pius. Each of the large windows, save the ones that sit above confessionals, have a smaller window below that opens. Each of these has some sort of symbol or picture that relates to the larger window above. Below the window where Jesus says goodbye to his mother, there is a depiction of a road leading to a city. Below the Ascension, is the empty tomb. The stone is rolled to the side. Nothing is inside.

I can't get over the artistry in these windows--this is not a large one--and having done that beginner class at Preston, it just amazes me, the tiny precise bits of glass, the color, the art they made.

Here's the art we made.


Think back to how empty the sanctuary was just a few days before. This photo was taken Easter Monday, in the evening, after my daisy girl scout meeting in the school basement. Sophia and I went over to water (and why were the mums already dying? What is wrong with them? These things bug me--is it too warm in church? Did the florist forget something? Hmm) and I took some pictures. Again with the bad lighting and no tripod.

Then of course, I got a stomach bug that was something to contend with. But that's a story nobody wants to hear so I'll leave it at that--I was down for the count for 36 hours but I think I'm ok now.

SPV Blogging: Holy Thursday Sanctuary

Holy Thursday is the Mass of the Lord's Supper. During that mass, we do things that we only do once a year--in fact, throughout the Triduum are events that happen only once a year. Fr. John's homily that night, oh my, I think everyone in that church was crying by the end of it. I will not do it justice. But it had to do with what would you do if you knew you were about to die-like tomorrow, or in 6 months, something like that. And what did Jesus do? He gave us certain gifts--bread and wine, and the pitcher and towel. He had dinner with his disciples, and he washed their feet. They are intertwined--the Eucharist is empty without service, and service is hollow if it does not come from faith. We then have a footwashing ceremony, the mandatum, which lasts forever this year--for some reason, this was the biggest attendance at a Holy Thursday mass I'd ever seen, that Ann had ever seen (and she sings at them every year).

Of course, throughout this, I was about to shake apart from jitters about dressing the altar, which somehow I became in charge of (although I handed off the de facto responsibility to Sr. Cathy that evening). Cathy, Katie, Sue, and I were to bring up the altar cloth (one that I made, that I am liking more and more all the time--when it was ready for Christmas, sigh, I didn't like it much at all, but now it has become sort of our everyday altar cloth and it seems right) and those gifts--bread and wine. I hadn't had a chance to practice, or have Sue and Katie practice, and I'm sure this was obvious to those in the know. But the congregation at large, I'm realizing, just likes things to be lovely and reverent.

More importantly, though, after mass, we were to strip the sanctuary. Holy Thursday is a mass that does not end in the usual way--there is no concluding prayers or rites like at other times. Instead, the priest processes away from the altar with the Eucharist, usually processing through the church several times, and then coming to a chapel altar away from the main part of church, sometimes in another building entirely. Then everybody leaves in silence.

So Sue and I go up to the altar when it's time for this procession, because the flowers behind the altar are part of this--they go to the altar of repose along with candles and incense. Altar servers, holding insense and candles, the deacon, Fr. Joseph visiting from Nigeria, then Sue and I holding floral arrangements, and then Fr. John with the Blessed Sacrament.

We were heading to the old baptistry, which is our Utah Vestibule (opens onto Utah St.). It had been used as a storeroom for as long as I've been at Pius, only recently having the huge St. ann and Sacred Heart statues moved and the walls painted a clean gray that makes the marble stand out. This is where we'd set up this altar of repose. Usually we took everything down to the chapel in the basement of the rectory. But at the last worship commission meeting this was a suggestion, and it was an amazing transformation. We took chairs from the choir loft, one of the beautiful wood tables we keep in back, a clean white cloth for an altar cloth, the tabernacle from the chapel, and put together a room that seemed like it had always been there. Like this is what it was meant to be. Above the altar is a stained glass window of Jesus' baptism. The room is close and quiet and formal.

By the time Sue and I got in there, arranged the flowers on either side of the altar, and stepped aside for Fr. John, the room was filled with incense. I had never been in a procession like this, even as a server back when I lived in a couple of places that let girls serve. Never was at a formal enough church setting or served on the right days. I stood in the back, taking in this moment, this smoky silent moment, listening to the echoes of the congregation singing the Pange Lingua, thinking to myself how much I do not belong in this room right then, for this, sort of a queasy feeling like I've witnessed something I wasn't supposed to see. But not necessarily in a bad way. Oh, it's hard to put into words.

So the servers leave after the singing ends--I hear kneelers going up, folks quietly gathering their coats (it was flipping crazy talk kind of cold that week--Lent is over, I can say that now) to leave. Sue and I go up to the sanctuary, Katie, Cathy, Marie, and Julie join us. I turn down the lights. We methodically strip the altar and the sanctuary of, essentially, everything that moves. The altar cloth, pitchers, tables, chairs, plant stands, microphones, books, candles--everything goes into the priests' sacristy. We had never practiced this, but listening to Sr. Mary's admonitions for weeks (don't chat, don't carry your purse, don't have your windbreaker on, don't look clueless), we did it right. We met at the center and walked away together. There were still many people watching. I went over to where I'd been sitting, and Rose, who is part of our choir (ok, that's an understatement), tells me how amazing it was to watch that. Mary and Cathy are there and point out how many people are still sitting in the congregation. I look up at the altar, and it really strikes me how empty it is now.

Then I promptly burst into tears. Of course.



This I took on Good Friday, when I came to church to empty the holy water fonts and straighten up pews. I apologize for the graininess--the light was all wrong for either flash or still, and I didn't have my tripod. I was a little...busy.

I *Heart* Rocks

A much belated update on the heart rock collection. These are all from Rock Eddy Bluff, where we spent the first weekend in March. In fact, the third one from the left was under my foot as I opened the van door when we arrived.

Each time I find one, it's like a little love letter from the earth. Is that too hokey? Probably. But it brings me joy.

SPV Blogging: South Side Hall

Here is the second-last SPV blog entry for the south side wall of the church. These are two shots, each of the same aisle, down the south side of the pews. Narrow, tiled, arched above, look one way back towards St. Anthony, the other way out into the south vestibule. Starting next week, I'll head through that vestibule and then up the stairs to the choir loft.

But before that, one last stained glass window from the south side. It sits right below the ascension window. It's what Mary and her friends found when they went back to the tomb they'd marked in their minds as the one where Jesus' body was placed before the start of the Sabbath.

I'm heading out to church. Tonight or tomorrow or sometime soon I'll tell about Thursday's Mass. It was a big deal, and I didn't see it coming. God is closer than you think.

SPV Blogging: Christ Encounters the Women of Jerusalem

The thing that keeps going through my mind when I see this station is how I could never take my young children to an execution. I know this is done in other places, other times. I just think I would be far away. That probably says something about me that isn't the best thing to admit. But I think I would have ran with the apostles. Or at the very least, left my kids at home with my sister or husband. But here--this woman presents her son to Jesus. Jesus, the biblical account tells us, says not to weep for him--to weep for herself and her children. The words he says in Luke are foreboding: At that time people will say to the mountains, 'Fall upon us!' and to the hills, 'Cover us!' for if these things are done when the wood is green what will happen when it is dry?

Eh.

SPV Blogging: Jesus Falls the Third Time

Good Friday. I went to stations of the cross today and I feel, this year, like I'm Catholic for the first time. Seriously. I was talking with Srs. Cathy and Mary last night, talking about the comparison between Holy Thursday mass this year and past years...and even though I have attended before (not often, perhaps twice at Pius), I couldn't recall anything about the previous Holy Thursdays. I can't remember much in detail about anything we used to do. Which is good for my brain, actually, because I would sit and compare everything to what it was before, obsess and worry.

Our parish uses a variety of stations of the cross booklets--reflections on the way of the cross from various perspectives. Today we used a collection that parishioners wrote. 14 people each chose a station, ruminated, reflected, prayed, and wrote a couple of paragraphs about it. They are all so different, so beautiful. George Fortier wrote about Jesus nailed to the cross--and hearkened back to Jesus' days working in Joseph's carpenter workshop, how well he must have understood nails and wood. It is so well written that I'm overcome with emotion every time I hear it. Some of these stations were written several years ago, and a few were filled in recently. I wrote about Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus, the fourteenth station.

But here, Jesus falls for the third time. Look at those soldiers pulling him back up. How many crucifixions had they been to? How often? Was this a typical one? That soldier pulling on Jesus' arm--he has such a viscious look on his face throughout our stations.

This first photograph was taken from an angle--I was trying to show the three-dimensional appearance of our stations.

This second photograph was a mistake--I take a lot of pictures when I'm at church, and then save or delete them once I'm at home. When I saw this one, I knew I couldn't delete it. Jesus falls.

Crazy Story My Mother Just Shared

In light of the little weather we've been having...

So my grandmother Edith was a small girl, the youngest of 8 or 9--I think 8 (O., John, Jim, Roy, Archie, Emily, Harold, Edith) but I think I always forget one of the boys--and she, her mother, and a few brothers were heading home to their farm out near Vichy, Missouri (in Maries County, not far from where we spend so much time out at Rock Eddy). The spring storms were coming up and they found themselves looking up at a funnel cloud moving their way, quickly. So Edith's mother Maizie jumped into one ditch, Edith into the next with brothers spread around in both. As the winds picked up, Edith was terrified and started climbing over the little hill to get into the ditch with her mother. She didn't make it over the hill, though, since the tornado went right over them. Her brothers held onto her ankle to keep her from being blown away.

And Mary, you're right--she spent the rest of her life examining every building for where she might head in time of storm.

This all makes so many things make more sense. So much of her life was reaction--your brother drowns, so your kids don't learn to swim. You get caught in a tornado, and your reaction to storms borders on the freakish (don't run any water, unplug every appliance when not in use, turn off the lights and wait).

Dear Oak Trees: What Did I Do To You?

I love oak trees. Anyone who spends any time near me while also outside knows this. I argue about what kind of oaks are on my street; I collect oak leaves on trips to the country and draw them in my notebook. I worry about sudden oak death crossing the sierra nevada mountains and creeping this way. Oaks are fascinating--they produce hybrids that are fertile, and so they can quickly move away from standard. The one we share with Steve and Jerry (in their yard, but it shades our front door) is at least part black oak--but Kristin & Paul's in the front yard are also at least part black oak. I examine acorns and (really unnecessarily) correct people when they talk to me about them. I like them.

And now I'm allergic to them. The pollen, that is. I'd had this hunch for a while--I knew I get some contact dermatitis when I cut the grass in the summertime, no big deal. But my spring allergies have gotten worse the longer I've lived on Halliday (not exactly--I had my tonsils out in 1998, and had no problems at all that following spring. It started to slowly decline after that). It wasn't mold--a moldy basement will make my nose twitch, but never gives me those other allergy symptoms, like itchy eyes, itchy mouth, dark circles under my eyes. And exhaustion. I keep thinking it's a cold, or the flu. But it isn't. And it magically started on Friday. That's when the oak pollen jumped from "low" to "very high." Oak trees all over my block. Oak trees in the park. Oak, oak, oak.

I slept sitting up last night on the couch; Sunday during the day, well, I didn't see much of the day because I was sleeping sitting up on the couch. Loser. And this spring has the added bonus of giving me eczema on my hands. And because my whole system is going nuts over oak (ha), everything else is driving me crazy as well. Dust in the closet. Chrysanthemums in the flower garland for church. The soap in my shower. Everything is driving my skin crazy. I want to peel off the top layer of the backs of my hands. Bleeding would be preferable. But I'm using eucerin instead.

And then, to add insult to injury, this morning I woke up with a spider bite on my leg. Only I had this vague memory of this happening before, and it not being a spider bite, but some chigger or curious rye eating insect. A quick google search produced the name; pyemotes, and a lovely picture of what I hope is a man's torso, covered in pyemotes bites. I only have one, and I don't have that much hair, but that's what my bite looks like. Great. Since I was up...I read more of the article. Guess where they incubate their little pyemotes eggs. In pin oak leaf galls.

SPV Blogging: St. James the Greater

a traveling bag--a knapsack, if you will. A hiking stick. Two scallop shells, the symbols of baptism. How refreshing to be remembered for something besides how you die. But how odd to be remembered for something you didn't even have anything to do with. Just like James the Lesser and his windmill, James the Greater didn't have anything in particular to do with baptisms or traveling. He died, the first apostle to be martyred, in 44 AD at the hands of Herod, after forgiving the soldier who accused him of being a follower of Jesus (the soldier, begging forgiveness from James, was killed soon after by Herod as well).

The symbols of pilgrimage grew out of legend. His body was claimed to have been found in Compostela, Spain--transported there by boat from Jerusalem. This became a site of pilgrimage. The things people will believe against all proof to the contrary. Throughout history. The Way of St. James became, during medieval times, one of the three pilgrimages that, if taken, could forgive all sins (the other two being Rome and Jerusalem). It seems odd to have this one held so high--the other two make at least logical sense.

The scallop shell came out of an apocryphal tale about James healing a knight covered in scallops, on the edge of death. The scallop became the marker of the way to Compostela, and even today the path is marked with a stylized scallop shaped symbol. It is more of a hiking/biking trail these days.

Compostela either means "field of stars" or "burial ground' depending on whether you like the notion that the people who took the body to Spain buried James under a specific star...or if he was simply buried there.

Someone is buried there. Some people hold that it is actually the body of a fourth century ascetic heretic named Priscillian, one of the first heretics to be executed. That would be ironic. But I'm speaking as someone who doesn't hold much faith in pilgimages, indulgences, relics, and the like. God is closer than that--I don't have to go to Jerusalem to find God. I don't even have to go to Clyde Monastery--though I am going again, in May. Can't wait.

Minor Tornado (like Minor Surgery)

So there was a minor tornado in south St. Louis on Saturday afternoon.

We took a bike ride (before this), down at Grant's Trail, our longest of the season thus far--15 miles. Mike has an odometer/speedometer on his bike now and we have a better idea (meaning any idea at all) of how far we travel, and how fast. It was a nice ride, but windy, and the last 20 minutes were getting a little stressful. I had the trailer, I was trying to beat these forboding looking clouds...

We beat them. We got home and it still wasn't raining. I took a shower--I was going out with friends that evening--and was ready to go at about a quarter to 6. My mom was going to have Sophia over to practice piano and then pick up Maeve and give the girls dinner, and so I chatted with her for a moment and decided we'd just walk to the end of the street and pass Sophia off from me to her.

It was starting to rain--not big or scary, just steady and cold. So each of us grabbed an umbrella and headed down the street. We got to the bottom of Halliday and turned the corner--there was my mom. As Sophia ran over to her, I called to my mom that Mike would be at home--but she couldn't hear me. We were probably 12 feet apart.

Behind her was this wave. Rain and wind, coming up north on Grand. Like a sheet. Now, in Texas, I have seen storms move down the street, across the field, etc. Here, it isn't so open wide, and so I haven't seen that. Since I have that memory of watching afternoon thunderstorms sweep quickly across, I wasn't alarmed. I realized I was going to get wet, though, and so as my mom and Sophia ducked into Janine's storefront doorway, I ran to Janine's front door.

Janine doesn't have a porch. She has one step, about 8 inches of depth at the doorway. Enough space to hang a mailbox in (a city one, not one of those country ones with a door that comes down). I duck in, since her door faces north and the storm was coming from the south. It swept past me, and it was freaky, but nothing but a little cold rain, right?

Then I realized that traffic had totally stopped on Grand. Everyone stopped dead in their lanes. I couldn't see the trees across Grand in the park. I heard a cracking sound. I shifted from one side of the doorway to the other, watching the winds and the sheets of rain and starting to feel the wind. The amazing wind. I couldn't believe it whipped around Janine's house so completely. Then I noticed that in front of me, in the street proper, the winds were beginning to circle, becoming slightly, well, cyclonic. And while I knew in my head this was just a reaction to having a side eddy (Halliday) to dip into, I also thought that an 8 inch recess in a building was not going to keep me safe enough. I consider ducking betwen the buildings, into the 3 foot wide gangway. Then I rethought that (this all happened in mere seconds, by the way), thinking that if anything were to blow down that gangway, I'd be totally trapped. So, watching the winds circle at the base of Halliday, the rains completely blinding me, and listening to the frightening noise the wind was making, I ran up to Larry's house and stood on his covered porch for a few minutes.

And as quickly as it began, it was over. It changed to steady rain, and then cleared entirely. I called my dad on my cell phone--Mom and Sophia weren't home yet, but concrete board on the second story roof of his house was picked up, carried over the 3rd story roof (half the house has 3 stories, half has only two) and into the street. I walked back up to my house, Mary and Heidi came in, and Mike surveyed the damage in the front hall and Sophia's room (the windows were open--Alex was inside, closed the front door, Mike ran in and closed Sophia's window. Not much went wrong, but it was wet).

I changed. We looked at the radar. We went to dinner. Sophia's umbrella was totally blown apart, my mom told me on the phone, and she was drenched, but since there was no thunder or lightning, she wasn't scared at all. Good.

Then today, I got an email and a phone call within minutes of each other. Seems there was a minor tornado (link to article here, for as long as it stays up) in south city on Saturday. Seems that it officially touched down on Flora Place--only a few blocks north--and headed north from there.

I don't know nothin about no meteorology, but I have this creepy feeling that while I clung like a rat to the side of Janine's house, I was watching the wind get up enough speed to cyclone around into a minor tornado.

Minor tornado. What a lovely contradiction. And, just for the record, holy crap.