Here is a picture of my new holy water font. Isn’t it nice?
Actually, “new” is not quite accurate. Scott gave me this last Christmas, but we only got it up on the wall a few weeks back. Since having kids, eight and a half months is how long it takes me to attend to any household task that is not absolutely necessary to sustain life.
To be honest, when I first saw the gift, part of me was slightly hesitant. A holy water font? In my house? I had never considered myself a domestic holy water kind of gal. Holy water font people are people who go to Mass daily and can recall saints’ feast days from memory. They are not people who occasionally drop four-letter words or who watch “The Bachelor,” both of which I have done do.
But a gift is meant to be used, isn’t it ? So I am using it. And, more than that, I’m really getting into it.
At this point, you no doubt have a few questions for me.
Where do you get the holy water?
It comes from my husband’s office. This is one of the perks of having a spouse who works at a church. (Having four priests concelebrate your wedding is another.)
Where do you keep the extra holy water?
In our kitchen, in an Arrowhead bottle.
As you can see above, I have marked the bottle with large, hard-to-miss penmanship. Without the label, it would only be a matter of hours before I accidentally took a swig.
What was it like the first time you blessed yourself in your own home?
Kind of weird, honestly. I was on my way out for a jog, and dipped in my fingers and made the sign of the cross, and it felt utterly bizarre and out of context — but also quite nice. Then I forgot to do it for a few days. The next time I took a dip, all the water had evaporated.
So now that you’ve had it a few weeks, what do you think of it?
Honesty, I’m totally into it, and here’s why. It’s so hard to maintain a strong spiritual routine when you have kids. I have little time in which to sit and pray (and when I do try to sit and pray, I invariably fall asleep). So I’m finding that I pray quickly, on the go — I think of God at random moments and say Hi and then go on with my day. It’s like I am working spirituality into the fabric of my daily routine, in little subtle ways.
And the holy water font helps with that. Evey time I head out the door, I can pause for a second, dip my fingers, and get a little blessing. It takes almost no time at all but it is so concrete, so about the senses, that it is pretty powerful; it gets through to me in a way that a verbal prayer can’t. And it makes the least holy of moments — dashing out the door in the morning, wishing I’d left five minutes earlier — into a very tangible chance to remember God. It’s a chance to remember my baptism, and to recall that I belong to a big and messy but ultimately wonderful faith. It is a reminder to try to reflect the best aspects of that faith to the people I encounter in the course of my day. It makes the mundane holy … and that’s pretty amazing.
So who knew? I’m a holy water font kind of gal after all.
Today in class, I was telling the students about one of my colleagues, who has amassed a fabulous collection of slides from his trips to England over the years. Then a belated awareness of my audience crept in.
“How many of you have ever seen a slide projector?” I asked.
In my class of 26 freshmen and sophomores, about four hands went up.
It was one of those moments when I felt like an absolute fossil. These kids have probably never seen a slide show, never used a phone with a cord, never listened to a record. It makes me wonder if certain references — like calling someone a “broken record” — will end up getting phased out of our speech. I sure hope not, because it’ s just too good an expression to give up. ( It’s also the metaphor at the heart of my latest column, which is all about the one sentence that I say over and over to my kids … and when I say “over and over,” believe me, that doesn’t even come close to expressing it.)
Somehow, calling myself a “scratched CD” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
Years ago, my mom told me a story. It was the late 1950s, and she and her church teen group were taking a trip cross-country to attend a youth conference. When they got to a certain state (I can’t recall which one), and stopped at the hotel, all the kids couldn’t wait to jump into the pool.
My mom recalls that the only black guy in her youth group was sitting off to the side, watching everyone else splash and play in the pool. ”Don’t you want to swim, too?” she asked him.
“I’m not allowed to,” he said quietly.
For my mom, this was her first experience with segregation. She was a Southern California girl, and while racism was found there too, she had never before seen institutionalized segregation of this kind. It made a big impression on her, and when I first heard that story, it left a mark on me as well.
I think it’s easy for me to underestimate the legacy of Dr. King. I was a child of the 1970s, so any experience of Whites Only drinking fountains and Jim Crow is what I read from books or see on TV. But I hear a story like that, and I realize that I should never take for granted what Dr. King did.
And it makes me reflect on the fact that, as a white woman, I will probably never really “get” the pain of racism. If I go to a store and people give me terrible service or ignore me, I never — never — stop and wonder if it’s because of my race. That is a luxury — that’s not quite the right word, but close enough — that I only get because I happen to be white. To truly understand racism, it means listening to the stories of people who experience it. It means listening with humility and not interrupting or glossing it over.
When my boys are old enough to really learn about Dr. King’s legacy, and to learn about Jim Crow and segregation and Rosa Parks, I hope they will be shocked. I hope they will think it’s totally crazy and absurd that black people ever had to sit in the back of a bus. But I also want to teach them that we haven’t entirely achieved Dr. King’s dream yet. And I want to teach them — hopefully by example, as well as by word — that one way to reach that dream is by having humility in the face of other people’s experiences, even — or especially if — they are different from our own.
Previously on this blog, I disclosed the fact that I dislike vacuuming. I rarely do it, frankly. Call it my dirty little secret.
But I have finally come to appreciate the value of a good Hoover.
Several weeks ago, I was pushing our heavy blue upright around the living room (guests were coming over, so I had no choice), when all of a sudden I heard a loud and muffled “POOF!” A cloud of dust suddenly exploded out of the vacuum cleaner and then settled all around it, in the manner of Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. I also smelled burning. Very gingerly, I unplugged the vacuum and moved it out to the garage, far away from anything remotely flammable.
“When was the last time you changed the bag?” Scott asked later that evening, when I showed him the vacuum in exile.
“Ah. Well, never,” I admitted.
Scott, showing incredible fortitude, withheld comment. After eight years of marriage, he knows that 1) I have many skills and 2) navigating household appliances is not one of them.
So we were sans vaccuum for several weeks, just long enough for me to long for one again. (Really. A broom only does so much.) Scott did some research and asked me how I’d feel about welcoming a cordless upright into our family.
“Does it involve changing bags?” I asked.
No, it does not. And it is silvery and sleek and has a nifty little rechargeable battery pack. It is so light that I don’t have to bark my shins hauling it from room to room. The cordless feature is pretty sweet, too; no longer do I have to stop, back up, unplug, and find an outlet closer to whichever dust mountain I am leveling at the moment. Might this change my attitude toward vacuuming? Very possibly.
Even if it doesn’t, though, I’m good, because Matthew loves the thing. “Can I use the vacuum?” he will ask eagerly, much as he might ask to watch a cartoon on TV. He pushes it around the house enthusiastically, with a confident dexterity that belies his almost-four years. To be honest, in the two weeks we’ve had it, he has used it far more than I.
This morning, on the commute, I put on the soundtrack to the Cole Porter musical “Kiss Me, Kate.” As I trundled along, getting myself psyched for Day One of a new year, it occurred to me that the first song on the soundtrack was pretty much THE PERFECT song for a teacher on the first day of school.
The overture is about to start
You cross your fingers and hold your heart
It’s curtain time and away we go
Another op’nin of another show!
If you don’t know the song, here it is, sung by the Muppets. I do not know if they have had any formal vocal training, but they do a darn good job.
And now for a rapid change of tone: could I ask for a few prayers for my grandmother? She tripped and fell this morning and broke several bones in her ankle. Surgery went well, but it will be several weeks before she is back on her feet. She is a plucky lady who has given so much — SO much, way more than I can say here — to her family over the years. She never asks for anything for herself, so I’m going to ask on her behalf. If you can ping a prayer up to heaven for her, I’d be so grateful. Thanks.
One of the best parts of being a teacher on summer vacation is that you get to totally bypass the Sunday Evening Blues. For an entire two months, you don’t have to deal with that flat, slightly depressed feeling that inevitably comes at the end of the weekend.
Alas, I’m now back singing the blues.
In moments like these, I always find it helpful to think of things that make me happy. Call me Pollyanna, but a little shot of positive thinking can do a lot to salvage a Sunday evening. So here, in no particular order, are Things that Bring Me Joy.
1. My roses. I never get tired of them. Never.
2. Morning coffee the way Scott makes it: very earthy and full-bodied and yum.
3. When my boys start doing things — chasing each other, pretending to fall, etc. — that make them both scream with laughter. There is no better sound than that.
4. Warm summer weather — which we now have, at long last.
5. The smell of a new book: the cedar-y paper, the dark delicious ink. They should make that into a perfume, don’t you think? (And I just created a rhyme. Yay for accidental poetry!)
6. Starting off the day with Father Judge’s prayer. I don’t do it every morning (I often forget), but when I do, I find that the day is palpably more mindful and spiritual.
7. The feel of crisp new sheets on a bed. It’s especially fabulous on a warm night like this one.
So today is my last day of summer vacation. Sigh. It was great while it lasted.
I really love teaching; don’t get me wrong. But it’s hard to trade the leisurely pace of summer for the early morning alarm, the daily commute, the chronic grading. I don’t think this is just a teacher thing, either; if you have school-age kids, you are probably feeling the same way.
But I do have a few tips to make the transition less painful. You can find them in my latest column. I hope they help you make the start of the school year a good one for you & yours.
P.S. As predicted, it’s finally getting warm around here.
It’s a nice saying, but it sure doesn’t apply to my house.
Things just migrate around here. I try to keep some semblance of order, but with an almost-four-year-old and an almost-two-year-old, it’s a losing battle. Toys and clothes appear in the strangest places. Matthew’s blankie often shows up in the bathroom basket where we keep bar soap. I got into bed a few weeks ago and found a Matchbox car in the sheets. That, I should add, was preferable to encountering a plastic frog in the same place (call me a sissy, but I actually screamed at that one).
But the prize for odd object/location pairing has to go to this:
When I rack my brain trying to figure out where Luke has put his missing sandal, somehow I never think to look next to the Panko breadcrumbs.
So today is the Feast of the Assumption — one of those “big Mary days.” Since my brain is still fried from our neighborhood block party (which was super fun — and one shot of my neighbor’s delicious homemade limoncello covered my alcohol consumption for the entire week ), I will exercise the blogger’s privilege of linking back to something I wrote about the Assumption two years ago. It still says exactly what I feel.
And if you are not entirely sure you know what the Assumption is all about, you are in good company. BustedHalo’s Father Jack took to the streets of New York to find out what people know (or don’t know!) about this feast day. Check it out:
I'm a formerly lapsed Catholic who likes to write about faith, real life, and how the two intersect. Oh, and I love Mary -- check out my book Mary and Me below!
