fun in threes, sometimes fours
It is now officially autumn for some three or so weeks. The temperature hasn’t dropped so much, but it’s been a dreary week as far as the weather goes, and we’re all tired.
There’s nothing better than some hot tea and a game of Monopoly on such an evening. Well, the Monopoly — not so much.
“Do you want to play, Mama?” E asks.
“Not really, but I will.”
I give the same answer. But we both give in and play occasionally — it’s what family does.
One sign that you’re growing older is when a young lady comes to visit you with her boyfriend — just the two of them. No parents.
And you recall that the first time you met the young lady, she was a toddler climbing about on your living room furniture, acting completely and joyously wild.
The Boy loves such visits because he gets an audience for his performances.
Surely no one is surprised today to see the Catholic church yet again shown to be the exact opposite of everything it claims to be. Over 200,000 victims of sexual abuse in the French Catholic church and the "Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, the head of France's Conference of Bishops, said Tuesday that the scale of abuse outlined in the report was 'more than we ever could have imagined,' and asked forgiveness to 'those who were victims of such acts'" (CNN) Asked forgiveness? How could this asshole have not known it was going on? How are we to believe that the upper echelons of the church wouldn't know about this? Hell, the Boston Globe broke the story of Cardinal Law and the widespread sexual abuse in the Boston diocese almost twenty years ago. That was huge and it should have been the spark that engulfs all these pedophiles and assholes who cover them up, but every few years, it happens again. Next we'll hear about Italy. Then Spain. Then Poland. And it should all be common knowledge now. These jerks should have all been behind bars for a decade now.
The film Spotlight detailing the Boston crime is six years old, and it ends with these words:
The scandalous crimes have been surfacing now literally for decades and they're still not all out in the open.
There is only one way the church can regain any moral credibility: each and every priest, monk, nun, and non-religious employee must be fully and completely investigated at the cost of the individual diocese. The church must make the results of the investigations that turn up anything public and turn them over to the police. It will bankrupt many dioceses, but that is the price they must pay for the coverup that apparently has been going on for centuries and is continuing.
And if the people in the pews had any sense of -- I don't even know what -- they would refuse to donate any money until that is done.
From Saturday --
the Boy went to a birthday party at a line park.
It’s gradually cooling off, which means we might be spending more time around our fire pit.
We cooked dinner over it two nights in a row now, and I’m already thinking about what to cook next weekend.
I knew taking the picture might break the spell: an at-risk student who, of her own accord without any prompting or suggestion, chose to read a book during free time after lunch might not be thrilled about having her picture taken. But on the other hand, it’s a picture of success, and when it’s a kid you’ve already grown to love in a way, a kid you’re already pulling your hair out over and cheering on and fussing at with a smile — you go ahead and take that chance.
Sure enough — “Mr. S! Don’t!” And the spell was broken. But unlike many magical moments, this one has evidence to back it.
I was looking at the photographs of British/Polish photographer Chris Niedenthal when I saw an image of PKO Rotunda in Warsaw. Suddenly, I was back in Poland in 1996, experiencing the country for the first time, with a vivid memory of the first time I saw the building.
A friend took several of us to see Warsaw for the first time, and as we walked out of Warszawa Centralna and long Jerusalem Avenue, the impressively Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science on our left, we approached a most peculiar building.
"That's where we're headed," said A as we descended the stairs to pass under Marszałkowska. We weren't headed to the round bank building itself, though. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I never even entered the building.
It was, in fact, the building just behind the PKO Rotunda that interested us: "There's a Taco Bell there," our guide explained. "It's okay if you like cabbage on your tacos instead of lettuce."
It was one of the signs of the growing Westernization of Poland that, in 1996, was still relatively new. We were all interested in the Taco Bell for that reason: not because we were necessarily craving substandard "Mexican" fast food but because we wanted to see what Polish Taco Bell looked like, tasted like -- to get the local spin on one of the restaurants that provided us with cheap eats during college. With everything so new and unknown, it was fascinating to see things I'd always known in that setting.
Recently, developers demolished the original building and replaced it with a nearly-identical building.
The same spirit, but a different building.
So many of those old, communist-era buildings have been demolished or so completely remodeled as to be unrecognizable in the last twenty years. It's understandable, I guess: only from a sentimental point of view are those buildings of any aesthetic value at all, and for many, there's no question of sentimentality about the oppressive past they represent. For me, the sentimentality arises strictly from the novelty of such buildings when I first lived in Poland twenty-five years ago.