Spanish Mass: Corpus Christi, Cuerpo de Cristo

My Gaeilge speaking grandmother's family was permanently at war with the village priest.  Who knows when and how it started.   My Aunt Kathleen was the smartest girl in the village.  By the time she was old enough, the feud became so spiteful the priest denied her a scholarship to go to college.   When Uncle Ned joined the Irish Republican Army and the Easter Rebellion,  the priest denied my great-grandfather Michael absolution for refusing to turn Ned in to the British.   Michael didn't know where Ned was, but he'd be damned before he'd tell the priest that.
"You're damned, Michael Lafferty!"
"See you in Hell, Priest!"

First Communion: ad maiorem Dei gloriam

Still, the family said the rosary every day.   For the rest of her life my grandmother kept the tradition.   When we asked her why she prayed so much, she said:  "Every act of your life is a prayer."   We never figured out what that had to do with lying in bed in the late afternoon working through the beads, repeating the prayers of the Rosary over and over again:

The Sign of the Cross
The Apostle's Creed
Three Hail Marys
Glory be to the Father
The First through Fifth Mysteries, each:  1 Our Father, 10 Hail Marys  and 1 Glory be to the Father.

My son's the one who drags us to mass every Sunday.  He never met his Gaeilge speaking ancestors, the remnants of an ancient culture that once encompassed western Europe from Spain to the British Isles and reached as far as Italy and Turkey.  The Emperor Marcus Aurelius died on March 17 at a Celtic village on the Danube that became Vienna.   Maybe many my son takes after his Hispanic-Italian grandmother who goes to mass everyday when she can.

Sometimes we ended up going to the late Spanish mass to meet his devotional demands.  My mother would have invoked Regan's Roman Catholic rules, the Travelers' Dispensation and skipped mass on a Sunday when the boy's baseball tournament ran late.  My son wouldn't hear of it.  Faced with his baseball game on Saturday afternoon and an airplane flight on Sunday morning, we had to find a Saturday Vigil Mass to satisfy his requirements.  The last Vigil Mass in Phoenix was a Spanish mass at Most Holy Trinity Church at 7 pm.  

I was mildly taken aback when the deacon said the "Body of Christ"  to me when I received Holy Communion.  It was a Spanish mass why would I want or need him to speak English.  I grew up with the Latin mass.  A Spanish mass is more comfortable for me than an English one.  I can't stand the insipid folk-rock songs they sing at the English mass.   Regardless of whether someone says "Corpus Christi" or "Cuerpo de Cristo",  I know what it means... but there are few alive today who know that "Comhlacht ar Críost" is a better way to say it.

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Saint Francis Xavier has a 1 pm Spanish mass that is also convenient.  Like when my son's baseball schedule takes up the rest of the weekend.  Its 1 pm mass is the only one I've seen where people move into the central aisle during the "Our Father" so that they can hold hands with people in the adjacent row of pews.

Crash: Welcome to America

Black eye and bloody nose.  That was the welcome for a family from India that moved in down the street from us.   Their boy adapted to playing touch football, but not Little League.  Sometime during 8th grade he made the mistake of sitting at a desk that a Mexican kid had staked out as his territory.  How was an Indian kid supposed to know there were property rights in public schools in America... and consequences if you violated them.  The Mexican kid shows up for class, walks over to the desk, puts his hand on the back of the Indian kid's head, and slams the kid's face into the desk top.   Black eye and bloody nose.

The Indian kid's dad was out of town working on a software project.   His mother didn't speak English, didn't drive, and didn't know what to do besides be frightened and appalled.  My son demanded that I do something to protect his buddy.  Why do kid's always think dad is superman?  At the parent council meeting a day or two later, I confronted the principal.  The staff's first reaction was to say we couldn't disclose anything about a student, then the principal relented, explained that they were aware of the situation and would deal with it.  Eventually, after more transgressions the student was expelled and became someone else's problem.

After 8th grade the Indian family sent their child to a charter high school. 

Sorry, I Don't Speak Japanese

Took my family to the Grand Canyon one summer a couple of years back.  There were lots of tourists, speaking lots of different languages.   The Germans speaking German next to stopped and spotted some prey nearby to flex their language skills.   One of the Germans goes over to a Japanese-looking guy and starts speaking Japanese.   As far as I could tell the German was pretty fluent and clearly pleased with himself.   The Japanese guy looked bewildered.   There was a pause, then the Japanese guy said, "I'm sorry.  I don't understand a word you said.  I don't speak Japanese.   I'm from Hawai'i."

The Divine Comedy

“Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.” 
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Not long after the Orpheum reopened,  my wife and I went to see a night of comedy performances.   The Orpheum wasn't trying to bring big-name entertainment to Phoenix.  It was giving local talent a chance and giving audiences something different than touring Broadway shows that headlined at the Gammage Auditorium at ASU.   You might even say the Orpheum was giving the old folks performances they could hear.   Between the spectacular sound mixing acoustics Frank Lloyd Wright designed for symphony performances (not Broadway shows) and the bad voices of touring companies,  the voices at Gammage are almost unintelligible. 

That night at the Orpheum the first comedians got a few laughs.   Then it was a local Mexican's turn.   He got about five minutes into his act, which was all "white" people jokes, and wasn't getting any laughs.  Just silence.   You could see the air go out of him as he realized that he was telling nasty "white" people jokes to a room full of "white" people.

Some of the audience may have been thinking is this what the Mexicans think of us?  Is this what the Mexicans think is funny?   I was an old management consultant.  I was thinking: hmmm, the same principles that apply to consulting apply to comedy.   Know your audience.  Never bad mouth the customers or tell a joke at the customers' expense.   They have a sixth sense that picks up on it even when you do it behind their backs.

Delivering bad news is an art.   It takes a great artist to move an audience.   Sometimes it's ritual "suicide" preparing the way for the next act the gods planned all along.   

You People Can Sit with Us Now

He was a good man ... and still is.  I don't know if he's coaching Little League anymore, but he still was at 70.   Getting enough kids to play ball is always a problem when they get older.  Too many other things to do:  TV, girls, video games... smoking funny cigarettes.   Some kids drop out because the competition gets tough and the field gets bigger.   Some can't throw the ball all the way across the big field to first base.   Fewer can throw it 60 feet for a strike.   The ones that can throw strikes throw hard and that intimidates some of the kids... who drop out. 

The local league called my son hoping he'd fill out he roster.   He was a year too old for the Juniors team, but they said he could play as long as he didn't pitch.  He was fine with that.   The Juniors played during the week and his more competitive club team played on the weekends.

Coach Ron, the old timer, was happy to have him.   Show them the how game's played, Jimmy.  There were all shapes, colors and sizes on the team.  Didn't matter to Ron.  They were all just kids to him. 

Ron pretty much said whatever came into his mind.  His team's black parents always sat far down the third baseline by themselves.   One day Ron decided to chat, walks out of the coach's box and over to where the black parents are sitting.  He points at the white parent sitting in the stands near home plate and tells the black parents:  "Hey, you know you people can sit with us now."   The black parents smiled politely.  Then grandma, who was as old as Ron, cracked up and couldn't stop laughing for quite some time.

IN-N-OUT BURGER: Mother's Day

My son is 18 and can now drive himself around.  He is taking his mom to IN-N-BURGER for Mother's Day.

Das Boot

The U-boats were so brazen they'd anchor near Connecticut and Long Island villages and send English-speaking sailors into town to pick up fresh vegetables and milk.

It was a horrific battle few remember today.   My mother helped run it.  She was a watch commander for the communication center responsible for the western end of the U-boat-convoy war in the North Atlantic.  She recalled the bodies of sailors washed up on the beaches after their ships had been sunk just outside Boston and New York harbors.  Sailors whose ships she'd sent messages that ordered them to their doom.  Boston was so edgy that Mother was given a choice when she carried secret messages between buildings:  learn how shoot a .45 pistol and wear it on your rounds, or be escorted by an armed sailor or marine.   She chose the man with a gun.

When the war started my mother was teaching grammar school.  Substitute teaching actually.  When she had work she'd often end the day in tears, frustrated by boys more interested day dreaming about Captain America than long division.  Some would be just old enough or lie about their ages to make it into the fight at Bastogne or Iwo Jima.  Instead of breaking a leg jumping off  a roof like Captain America, they got blown to smithereens trying to avenge Robert Taylor and George Murphy who died defending the bridge on Bataan.

When I worked in Houston over thirty years ago, I went to see Das Boot's premiere.  The movie told the story of the war from the perspective a U-boat captain and his crew.  Its opening caption said 40,000 German sailors went off to the U-boat war and never came back.  You might have thought that would have evoked an appalled sympathy from the audience, or at least silence.   All was not forgotten or forgiven.   The Texans broke out into wild applause.   There are reports that the caption got the same reaction in other American movie theatres.

Long before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had done everything he could to keep England from surrendering to the Nazis.  This included giving scores of Navy ships to the British to keep their lifeline to America open.  Hitler wasn't happy about this, but he tolerated it since he wanted to keep the Americans at least tacitly on the sidelines.   After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler decided to declare war too and go after the soft defenses of America's East Coast.  They were really soft with all the aircraft and ships turned over to the British.

And so it came to pass that my father's cousin Charlie joined the Navy, was given command of a small, lightly armed patrol boat and told to go patrol the waters of Long Island Sound.  "If you see a U-boat, radio for help and run away as fast as you can.  We'll sent out a bomber or big destroyer, if any are available (which they pretty much weren't, most being sent to save the British)."

Early one morning Charlie and his tiny crew sailed off into the fog of Long Island Sound.  They'd been out for awhile, but not long enough for the sun to warm things up and burn off the fog.  Out of the fog slips a U-boat and it sails right up to the startled Charlie and his tiny crew.  Before they can even raise their hands to surrender, the U-boat pulls alongside and its captain growls:  "Are you regular Navy or reserve."  Charlie hesitates and then says "reserve."  (God, I hope that's the right answer.)  The German captain growls back: "lucky for you."   Then the Germans all start laughing and the U-boat slipped away into the fog and was gone.