monster month, oh yeah



Normally I love October, lovely golden October, but this October sucks and I just need it to be history. The first week I am in traffic court because some vigilante school bus driver says I zoomed through his flashing red lights, liar liar pants on fire.  Later I have a date with my gastroenterologist who wants to shove a two foot tube up my pachookas and chop off parts of my colon for whatever his reason.  But those incidents will rate as strolls through the rose garden compared to what I did last weekend.  Big Dave wanted me to accompany him to the 50th anniversary of his eighth grade graduation from Sacred Heart Elementary School.

They herd us into church for the obligatory Mass followed by a meal in the basement and the menu is cardboard slabs of beef and chicken wrapped in deli ham sprayed with cheese, and corn, there's always that corn but this is Iowa and there is lots of it.

Sister Lucien sat next to me and she was one of the nuns who taught these people so how old would she be. She at first pooh-poohed Dave's offer of a Bud Lite but then she says maybe just half, we could share, all right give me one. Soon after that she finished the can and was moving Dave's beer closer to her own glass. After our cooler went dry she moved to a table with numerous wine cooler bottles and I could hear her telling off color Irish priest jokes.

 A woman is standing at the front of the room holding a stack of index cards full of necessary information for us and I think some of it was supposed to be humorous. She talked about nuns whacking students' fingers with rulers and the classmates were screaming with laughter but then Catholics, all of them, have warped senses of humor and perhaps you know this from your own personal experience.  This woman looks directly at my husband and says, "I just want everyone to know I have had a crush on Dave since the fifth grade." I realize now why her own husband did not attend. I keep waiting for her to add another joke, maybe wink in my direction and acknowledge me somehow in this little skit but no such relief is forthcoming. She leaves this thought hanging in the air for all of us to contemplate and sits down.

 I felt the evening had provided me with more than enough entertainment for my buck and I had to sit and stare at paintings of men in red velvet skirts for almost three hours so I should be allowed to exit gracefully. Usually I stay away from all things Catholic because I can't trust an establishment that refuses to place women in upper management positions. And then there's all those other reasons, too.