Matching Tracksuits

Day: November 26, 2016

Fresh Starts

Saturday 26 November 2016

All things come to an end, and more often than not, that end is itself a beginning. Our summer’s adventures in remodeling have finally come to a complete and total end. Well, almost — there are still pictures to hang on the walls, but we’re 99.97% finished now. And so as we prepared our yearbook, we finally took the time to unclutter the kitchen and take some “After” shots to complete our “Before” shots.

Our parish is in a similar situation: a two-year building project came to completion tonight with the dedication of our new Our Lady of the Rosary church. Like with our kitchen, there are still a few things the Father Dwight said we need to do, like completing an enclosure around the whole campus to ensure safety for the parish school — can never be too careful these days.

Father Dwight warned, so to speak, the parish that the liturgy for the dedication of a new church is long. “Really long,” he stressed. We dropped the Boy off at Nana’s and Papa’s as a result, because we really didn’t know what “really long” might mean. K comes from a country where most churches’ age is measured in centuries, and so the idea of attending a Mass to dedicate a new church was completely new to her. But Father did say “really long,” so we decided not to take a chance — the Boy can handle only so much sitting still.

“Really long” turned out to be just shy of three hours. Having grown up in a church were every week’s service was at least two hours long, I would say two hours and forty-five minutes make a long service, but not a really long service.

The liturgy was lovely, and it’s fitting that Fr. Dwight be the pastor of the parish: it’s a uniquely Catholic-looking structure, and Fr. Dwight is a uniquely un-common Catholic priest. Raised a Protestant, he converted to Anglicanism and moved to England where he married, started a family, and had a lovely parish. Then trouble struck, so to speak, and he and his family converted to Catholicism, which meant the loss of his vocation. Or so it would seem. It turns out, several dozen married Anglican priests have converted to Catholicism and then been re-ordained as Catholic priests with the discipline of celibacy being waived for them. So he posed with the bishop and his wife and four children after Mass, making it an odd sight in an oddly traditional church.

The real stars of the evening, though, were the members of the choir, including L. She’s been singing in the children’s choir for several months now, and she spent more time in the church today than she’d spent in a month of Masses — over five hours.

The results, though, were stunning. A Catholic church that looked, smelled, and sounded like a Catholic church.

During the entire liturgy, I smiled occasionally as I thought, “This is not just some lovely church we’re visiting while passing through here or there. This is where we will go to Mass every Sunday now.”

Four Changes

Saturday 26 November 2016

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One

“You always use that one.” The Girl was downstairs as K worked on our yearly photo calendar and putting finishing touches on the yearbook I create and she polishes (which is not to say she was Polishing it — it remains untranslated this year). Since I was upstairs, I really don’t know what the conversation concerned other than the selection of this or that picture. It occurred to me that she is becoming a vocal and thoughtful member of our family cognitively. Her tastes and her views are no longer merely childish, and entertaining them is no longer simply a matter of being a good and patient parent that encourages a child by simply listening to her. We’ve been through that; we’re going through that with E. Now, she has her own opinions that are not based entirely on childhood fancy.

For instance, she selected the granite that completes our kitchen. It wasn’t just a matter of, “Ooh, this is pink and pretty!” like she might have as a younger child. (The granite is not pink of course.) It was a thoughtful choice that, as I recall, she made with K as they held the sample of the cabinets we’d chosen.

Two

This afternoon I caught a glimpse of another kind of change. We took the kids to see Disney on Ice after lunch, and it was the second time for L. The first time, she was so into Disney and princesses and pink and blue. She sat in rapt attention, almost in awe. There was Peter Pan and the Simba and everyone else she’d watched at Nana’s and Papa’s. Today, the show ended with the inevitable: a long-ish re-telling of Frozen. A couple of years ago, she was obsessed with that, with that music. She marched around Fort Pulaski singing that song, performing it for any passers-by who took the time to stand and watch — and a few did. As the song approached, I was curious what she might do. “Here it comes!” I whispered as Elsa retreated to her winter hideaway. “Here it comes!” And she smiled at me. A polite smile. The song began. I looked over at her again. “Aren’t you going to sing along?” The same polite smile, head cocked a little bit, as if to say, “Daddy, do you think I’m so childish or something?” The thing is, she can still be surprisingly childish, but at that moment, she was fourteen or more.

The Boy’s take on Disney this afternoon can be summed up in three things he said:

  1. “I just don’t like pretty things.”
  2. “I like vehicles. There were no vehicles.”
  3. [Spreading his arms out as far as they could go] “Disney on ice was this long.”

Three

As I’ve spent the last several evenings putting together our annual yearbook, pulling pictures from our photo collection and occasionally taking a bit of text from here — every year, it’s the same: I swear I’m going to make it as the year goes along and then never even begin re-gathering the pictures (and I say re-gathering because I reuse many from here) until late October — I had a conversation with K in whispers as the kids were up having their baths.

“Do you realize that almost all the pictures from this year seem to be of E?”

She nodded in sympathetic agreement. “Well, he is the youngest.” But it just seemed like some kind of favoritism. We agreed that she’d actually been kind of avoiding pictures, not showing the least bit of excitement when the camera came out, even frowning at it occasionally. Foreshadowing the soon-coming day that she actually chides me for putting pictures on the internet. “My friends might find that picture!”

Four

Before the show, we made the requisite restroom stops, and I stood outside the ladies’ room to the side waiting for them. (The Boy still occasionally chooses to go with K — only a little longer before that’s really no longer appropriate. But that’s a different story.) L was the first to emerge, and for a moment, she didn’t see me and merely walked toward my general location. There was a little bounce in her step that made her gait appear a little older, and her hair was lying on her shoulders in that casual way that older girls probably only dream of getting their hair to do — slightly unplanned, slightly messy (perhaps pouting might be the better term), yet certainly not unkempt, just casual — I could see her at fourteen, at fifteen, at twenty.