Okay, this
choice of skin restores the missing title and subtitle; I'm not greatly
fond of the overall layout, but I'll tinker with it a bit and see what I can do
about that.
This
evening, I got together with Shelly, my older daughter, plus my younger brother
Richard and his younger daughter, my older sister and her husband and two kids,
and my mother; we met at a local sports-themed restaurant, and proceeded to
have the kind of loud, raucous (and occasionally off-color) good time this
family can have, especially if that sister or/and my older daughter is
involved. (I may post a picture later.) The occasion, of course, was my
daughter's birthday… somehow, while growing no older than five or six in my
heart, she's now twenty-four.
It may not
be a coincidence that "Twenty-Four" is the name of her current
favorite TV series… and if I'd taken the time to think about it a bit further,
I would have tried to give our hooraw that very theme.
Presents
included a gift card to a store that late last year gave her PTSD; also a
refrigerator magnet, and two rolls of cookie dough. Yes, this is a strange
family.
We dispersed
again after a couple hours; my brother followed me and my mother back to our
house. He went sans daughter, who went off with my birthday-girl Shelly to my
sister's house to practice a design for a tattoo Shelly wants on her ankle and
foot. Daughter's thinking of underwriting the cost by giving each member of my
generation (five of us, plus two spouses) and hers (five more for now, not
counting her) the opportunity to buy a color for part of the design – e.g., ten
or twenty dollars would allow you to color a star, or the crescent moon.
My brother
says he wants a tattoo on the back of his neck to look like a wall socket, and
possibly also a bar code. Our mother's modesty was shocked at this suggestion.
"You don't want to do something you're going to regret when you're
eighty!"
"But I want
something to regret!" my brother countered.
Before he
left, he told us a joke, after assessing whether we'd be offended. Oh, it's
irreverent, but we didn't find it offensive at the least – after thoroughly
berating him earlier for even suggesting we sometime see "The Last
Temptation of Christ". That is offensive.
His joke
wasn't, though… but I've still edited it for the, uh, masses:
An old,
devout Catholic widower brings his new, little-old-lady widow-friend – who's
even older, nearsighted, and has never been in a Catholic church – to Mass one
Sunday. It turns out that this is one of the holiest feast days of the year, so
there a grand procession of altarboys and -girls carrying the lectionary, a
huge crozier, and many tall, blazing candles. The priests are in the middle of
the procession, all decked up in resplendent robes of gold and violet. And the
bishop who is to lead the Mass is walking with a censer, swinging it back and
forth to fill the grand interior of the church with great clouds of rich
incense as the procession makes its way up to the altar.
The little
old lady has been delighted and transfixed by the decorations, the paintings
and statues, the gold, the organ music, and the thunder of voices singing
together. She's standing at the end of her pew, right at the aisle, so she's
able now to lightly grab the bishop by his beautifully embroidered robe.
"Look, dear", she says softly, "that's a lovely frock –
but your purse is on fire!"
No comments:
Post a Comment