13/365 Good Priest, Bad Priest

So I was thinking last night about priests I've known, ones I've known well enough to have stories about or eaten meals with--not just every Jesuit who taught me at SLU or the parish priest in Macon whose name escapes me. Ones I knew well enough to like or really not like...

And I think I've concluded that most of the priests I've known have been bad at their jobs. Not bad people, not EVIL in some major way, but just not very good. And I thought that I should probably write a bit about them just to demonstrate why it is that I (and many many other people) really like our pastor.

But not today. Because today is our pastor's birthday. So happy birthday to our Fr. Miguel and I'll have more to say coming soon. Maybe in a few days, I'll just reminisce. But today this is enough to say.

16/365 The list is long

So this week was Fr. Miguel's birthday and the anniversary of his ordination. I went up to church to look at flowers today and ran into Jack, who reads this blog, and mentioned that maybe he was getting tired of hearing how great Miguel was.

But we both agreed that, of course, he was, and this was due almost as much to past experiences with priests as it was due to something specifically about Miguel. To put it another way: many many priests we have known have been not so great. Not so great. In fact, some encounters have been absolutely miserable experiences. And I don't want to dwell on the negative, especially negatives from long ago that have no influence in my life, but I feel I need to give some of them a sentence or two.

Without going too far back--I don't remember any pastors before 3rd grade, for instance, well, except for the Redemptorists down in South County but they aren't on this list--here are a few bad priests. Here names are absolutely changed. Totally.

Fr. Fritz...an associate pastor who invited boys up to the rectory after school. It's like a miserable cliche. But when Fr. Fritz is one example of the priesthood...

Fr. Cuthbert...a former army chaplain, very charismatic, but thought that before we were confirmed, all the 9th graders needed rebaptism. This is directly opposed to Church teaching. Seriously. And where were the baptisms going to occur? In a friend's swimming pool. Obviously, I did not attend. And I wasn't confirmed. He also banned the use of real candles in church since they were a fire hazard. Real flowers? Forget that.

Fr. Anastasius...who, during a homily, doubted there was an afterlife. This was at a high school mass. He said, "I think that's probably just wishful thinking but you can believe what you want."

Fr. Isidore...was not very inspiring as a preacher but was adequate. His weird quirk is that he never greeted people after mass. The church was modern and there was a hallway connecting it to the rectory. He would disappear, still dressed for mass, down the hallway while we were singing the closing song. Sometimes the associate pastor would take his place. Sometimes not.

Fr. Bell...my boyfriend in high school called him that because he was obsessed with tardy students. My list of complaints about him is long but I look back and I think he was really depressed and out of his element as a principal. He had a definite eating disorder and often talked inappropriately about girls' anatomical features.

After high school, I attended a Jesuit university where, for the most part, the priests were just like the obstetrician I had when I was pregnant with Maeve. Excellent experts in their fields, confident in their abilities and knowledge, and zero bedside manner. Zip. Nada. For instance:

Fr. Newburg...a convert, once pointed to me during a homily in the dorm and said I was no Teresa of Avila. This was in context, but I had never made such a claim. He also didn't go in for all that "feminist mumbo jumbo" of inclusive language.

Fr. Cannoli...who could not keep from laughing when he made the announcement that they were closing one of the dorms and all the residents would be placed elsewhere the following year.

Fr. Howdy...who never really left the fraternity party of his youth and still attended them in his forties.

After graduation, Mike and I got married and started attending St. Henry/Immaculate Conception, a dying parish that has since bit the dust. We could barely drag ourselves there because every single homily dwelt on the topic of "things aren't like they used to be," mostly involving the sad (?) fact that no one in the parish was willing to participate in Eucharistic Adoration. Now, I was a young woman with my own mind and things to do. Nowadays I might like the silence for an hour or so in adoration. But then? Nope. And after a while, listening to someone talk about how the pews used to be filled and people used to come and wah wah wah--it makes you walk away too. I don't even remember his name--we belonged to the parish and he never learned our names either.

Other more recent mediocre priests I've known:
Fr. Jimbo...told me that if Mike and I had gone through marriage prep with him, he never would have allowed us to marry due to our fill-in-the-bubble test scores. He said it was the number one predictor for failed marriage and he bet me (he actually said that: "I bet you any money") that my marriage wasn't going to last.

Fr. Bud...the pastor where Jimbo was the associate, he once decimated a Sunday mass attendance by preaching heresy during the homily (in this case, the divinity of Christ: "Who knows? Maybe he wasn't divine!"). Turned out later, he was just drunk. The bright red flushed face should have been a clue.

Fr. Snore...used to be the pastor at my mother-in-law's parish. He would lose his place during mass. His homilies rivaled the St. Henry pastor's. In his defense, since I actually knew him through Mary Helen better than I knew many of these, he was an order priest living on his own in a tiny aging parish. I would place good money (perhaps "any money" would be stretching it) that he was depressed. He retired and spent some time in Africa although I think he's home again now.

Fr. Viktor...used to give homilies that were centered on depressing poetry. In February. I had several loud arguments with him in parking lots. He had no sense of humor. He didn't seem to understand human relationships very well. I knew him for a while, though, and so my opinions of him are colored by that, but I'm pretty sure getting drunk at a party and making references to things said in the confessional are right out regardless.

Fr. Symmachus...once told the parish that it was due to their lack of prayer for vocations that made him have to be brought there from Nigeria to be their pastor. He had his dying parish give him the funds (besides his salary) to fly home for vacation. There is so much here and I can't give it justice. Just to say that when I visit my inlaws? I don't go to church.

This leaves out the many visiting priests and deacons in training with simply bad speaking skills and limp handshakes. It leaves out priests I know only second-hand. And it leaves out the good ones. I'll talk about them tomorrow. But just to say. There's a reason we like our pastor.

17/365 The good ones

As promised, the good priests. This is leaving out Fr. Tom, my mother-in-law's brother who died this year, because I knew him as a relative and not as a priest. Considering what his memorial masses and funerals were like, though, I think he belongs on this list.

But others:
The Redemptorists. My parents and grandparents were amongst the first parishioners down at a new parish in South County run by this order. There were several priests and a brother (or maybe a deacon?) there. They baptized me and two of my siblings. My parents were married there (as I learned today, "married by them" is not exactly correct--it is better to say "their marriage was witnessed by them"). I never knew them well but it seems it was a good place to be. The first place I ever went to church. Who says first impressions don't matter?

Fr. Keith...was a friend of the family long before he became our pastor. He baptized Colleen, gave me my first communion, and vacationed with my aunt and uncle every summer. When it came time to get married, Mike didn't have any opinions either way about a priest--and his uncle would have stepped in without question--but I knew Keith was the one I wanted. By then he'd already had a heart transplant and the second heart was giving out. He died three or four years later, refusing to put his name on the transplant list again. His funeral fell on the feast of the Sacred Heart. He's one of those people that comes into your life, and when he leaves you walk around where he used to be, expecting him to be back any moment.

The Benedictines...it was a small abbey of fewer than 20 monks. My school was on the campus and so my first introduction to the Old Testament beyond children's stories was in the hands of Br. Bede. Br. John followed up with the New Testament, with flannel shirts under the black habit and running that classroom like an army captain. I remember him lifting a kid up by his shirt against the lockers in the hallway. I remember thinking it was well-deserved. Br. Bede and I kept correspondence for a long time after I left. He was a permanent brother--he wasn't on his way to the priesthood--so I suppose he doesn't count on this list. But others belong here: Frs. Jerome, Columba, Gregory, Maurus--Maurus gave lovingly crafted homilies to schoolchildren during the week and turned around and could do the same to a packed house of adults. And then when someone would compliment him, he'd tell them to blame the Holy Spirit. And not in a smarmy self-congratulating way. They were as they appeared, personal flaws and all.

Fr. Kip was probably diagnosably ADHD, but it didn't matter because you were along for the ride. His homilies were predominantly church and biblical history, but fascinating. You left there knowing far more than when you came in the doors. He was somewhat self-congratulating, but charismatic enough that you didn't notice until later. But what puts him on this list is that he was always honest and plain-spoken. He told you what he thought and you could pretty much guarantee that it was the truth and that if he changed his mind, he would let you know. He was a force to be dealt with.

Fr. Christian is on this list because he surprised me. I don't know him well but in the 2 hours I spent with him, I knew he was a good priest. When my aunt Maria died after many long years in a nursing home with Friedrich's Ataxia, we attended her funeral at the funeral home, because it was during the 2006 blackout and All Souls had no power. It wouldn't have worked. The priest walks in, in a bit of a frazzled hurry, and I sigh. He's from India. Couldn't they have found a priest from her younger days at All Souls? Wasn't there a family friend they could have turned to? His English at first hard to understand, by the time we got to the gospel, I could follow him pretty well. And then he talked to us about Maria and her faith. He was the chaplain at the nursing home. He'd met with her at least weekly for several years. They were friends. The words he had to say touched me. And chastised me for that old sin of mine of prejudgment. I don't know where he is or what he's doing now, but I have a feeling he's doing it well.

There are several other Benedictines from Conception Abbey that belong here. The priest who used to be at my mother-in-law's parish--actually, at three parishes down there--once you know him for ten minutes you realize you've found the man Diogenes was looking for. And the bishops--the auxiliary bishop in Houston who had a soft spot for my high school and used to talk about how much he regretting dropping out (the Navy saved him later and he entered the priesthood then). We gave him an honorary diploma in my graduating year. The bishop who came over to my mother-in-law's house after her dad died and was unassuming and nice. Nice. The bishop who kept my high school open because he'd made a promise to the order who turned it over to the diocese--kept a promise, imagine that--and of whom my brother talks about in host-eating contests: "That bishop could eat some host." That doesn't make him a good priest one way or another, but there's something to be said for plain speaking, word keeping, having a sense of humor, being pastoral, not being full of yourself.

It is possible to make my list--I don't even think it's that hard, really. What's sad is that it always seems like such a lovely surprise when it happens.

Tomorrow, back to where we are.

37/365 History: Our First Time

We sat in the back half of the church, to one side. We didn't know anyone in the room. I had talked with the pastor on the phone, briefly, long enough for him to convince me to give it a try. It was June.

We walked out the front door and found Fr. Bill on the steps. He's so much younger than I expected, I thought to myself. My grandmother made him out to be older. I know this is the guy, though. She couldn't have put it more clearly: Go there. Fr. Bill Richardson is there and he's so charismatic. I needed charismatic. After we left the Jesuits in college, we church-hopped. Fr. Stoker down at St. Cecilia's was not charismatic. The really really horribly old priest in residence at St. Henry's Immaculate Conception wasn't either. No, that isn't the real name of our former parish. I just like to pretend it was.

At the time, I was about to start teaching at another Catholic school run by very un-charismatic unapproachable alcoholic priests. I was 23. Catholic schools were comfortable even though they didn't pay for nothin'. We'd bought our house, though, on Mike's salary alone, so any additional was better than the assistant teacher's salary out in the ritzy private school in the county. To be honest, I sought out the parish partially because I needed something to fill a void in my life, but the biggest reason was so I could talk about a parish at school.

Seriously. I needed an experience that would match, closely enough, the experience of my team teacher or my assistant or the music teacher I would sit next to at lunch. Later in the year this would prove fruitful when my pastor was interviewed on TV about the Pope's upcoming visit. Mrs. Matusek turned to me in the faculty lunchroom while everyone was talking at once and said, "that pastor of yours! His face belongs on television!" She was always falling for inappropriate unavailable men.

But that would be later. At the moment, we stood on the front granite steps regarding each other.

"We'd like to join the parish," I announced.

After a duel of calendars, all three of us realized that right then was the best time. He showed us how to go downstairs for coffeeanddonuts and promised he'd be right behind. He was. Ten minutes later we were filling out the paperwork.

"I think I'll have Frank and Jessica call you," he said, staring out into the middle distance and clicking his pen. "Young couple like yourselves, energetic, welcoming. Just to help you make a connection."

We left without parting gifts. It's not like signing your child up for kindergarten or signing on the loan for a house or a car. All you do is say sure, I'll come here for mass. And we did.

God, we were young.

40/365 A Tweet from Fr. Miguel

The worst Mass at home is better than the best Mass most everyplace else. Good thing Jesus is in charge of all that and not me.

He's on a trip, or at a meeting or something. I've been gone from the parish for two weekends in a row so I'm out of the loop. But it made me happy when I read that.

45/365 Valentine's Day In Review

Today I ran Children's Liturgy and therefore missed what Mike called the "best homily I've heard in ages," brought to you by Fr. Lawrence while Miguel is in Haiti.

Wait. Yes--Miguel is in Haiti at a hospital working as a chaplain. His latest tweet (that would be "thing he posted on twitter") reads: I'm sleeping on a cot outside w a mosquito net. Brushed my teeth on the side of the "road". I am not a camper. I could have guessed that last line but frankly, I'm speechless when it comes to international mission trips of all sorts. It would be enough for me to say "I am not a missionary" in any statement I would make and that would be enough said. So I'm living vicariously through tweeted moments he sends into the ether and hoping he makes it back ok. I spent two years hoping that about Sophia's godparents when they were in Nicaragua.

But yes, Fr. Lawrence filled in. He's wordy, but I've been consistently pleased with what he's had to say. Today, Mike said, was no different.

"Best homily I've heard in ages" is not anything like what happened in Children's Liturgy. I prepared for the wrong year. How could I be so stupid? I realized sitting in the pew before mass began what I'd done and I quickly scanned the readings. So I went downstairs and faked it. I hate that. I hate not being prepared. But I read the readings and the gospel and did a tiny introduction to Lent. Then we reread Jesus' statements and put them into context as best we could. We went upstairs and the homily wasn't finished. Timed it bad on top of everything else. Jessica and I stood in back with the kids and showed them the statues and tried to explain why these were in our church. Then we released them. It was already almost a quarter to 11 and he was still talking.

I spent the rest of mass wrangling Maeve. She was impossible. My theory that sitting closer to the front would help is proving to be a failure. But I fear that if I give up and sit in the back, none of my children will have an inkling about what's going on. I could take her back to the new cry-room of sorts, in the Utah Vestibule, but it's become a baby ghetto. It's chock full of toddlers running amok and parents chatting. Not what I had hoped. It has separated the children, putting the gates up. I won't go back there anymore, alas, because it wouldn't be at all like being in church. Too bad--it was perfect with the rocking chairs and quiet lighting. The gates seemed like a good plan to me but now, well, I'll just say that it's not for me anymore.

So I wrangle her in the pew and whisper sweet nothings into her ear. Like: If you can't sit still we will not go downstairs for a donut. Or, everyone can hear you when you speak out loud, you must whisper, you are 5 years old. I want to add stronger threats but she's got my number. She's just the kind of kid to yell things like "don't hit me again Mommy!" and that would be just perfect.

At the end of mass, we're standing in that lag time between the prayer after communion and dismissal, when announcements happen. Fr. Lawrence announces that he has 4 announcements and a blessing for Valentine's Day. And then a trumpet starts playing. Somewhere. It isn't the trumpet player standing next to Bev at the piano. I'm too far up front; I never see who did it. So Lawrence blesses us first, which is always awkward for me in a way that other blessings are not. I detest holidays that are simply self-congratulatory events, like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and 4th of July. Yay, I have a good life--but not in a thanksgiving kind of way, you know? More like "yay I have a good life and you should praise me for it." But he blessed us and I never found out who the trumpeter was.

We walked out with Maeve throwing a silent tantrum because she didn't get to go down for a donut...just the start to a day of Maeve tantrums and fits and rages.

Maybe like that character in Flannery O'Connor, I need someone to bless me every damned day of my life.

59/365 History of a lunchtime

I may have been 25 but I was so young. Naive, really. I didn't think about the chances of miscarrying and so when it happened to me, I didn't have a back up plan. My doctor reassured me that this was the kind of miscarriage that you wanted to have. I got caught up on that sentence even though she explained what she meant. What it meant was that I could get pregnant. But what it meant to me was something different.

I ran through all my friends pretty fast. It's hard to continue to grieve with someone for very long. Everyone else was ready to move on and think about the future. I was caught in a loop. Some hard things were said to me, things I carried around a long time until I finally decided that it wasn't worth the hurt.

I called the rectory. Fr. Bill answered--he answered twice in the entire history of my calling the rectory. The first time was when I was looking to join the parish. This was the other time. I told him what had happened. It was summertime and so I wasn't at school and I frankly wasn't at church much. He asked me to go out to lunch.

I sat on the stoop waiting for him to pick me up. We went to a place a few blocks away. I had chicken salad. We talked about pain, but more than that, we sat in silence. He had a book for me to read. He was so sorry.

He dropped me off at my house, but as I was getting out of the car, he took my hand. "Don't isolate yourself. Call me if you need anything. You are very dear to me," he said emotionally, not at all strange.

"And you, to me," I replied awkwardly. I let go his hand and got out of the car.

I thought about that lunchtime a lot. How he didn't offer excuses, platitudes, or solutions. He listened and didn't gloss over my experience. Years later I look back at this as the best moment I ever had with him as pastor.

Because things would soon enough not be good moments. But that doesn't negate this one.

125/365 Oh, yeah.

So much of what we have is dependent upon who our pastor is at the time. Whatever he puts as a top priority becomes a priority for the parish, and the things that are not important fall by the wayside. I think about the past 11 years at the parish and how things changed when Miguel first came to us.

Right after the switch, there was a meeting of congregations way out in the county--congregations from all over, but in order to have us fit, we met in this mega-church out west. It was a political rally sponsored by a union of congregations (Catholic, other Christian, and Jewish) from the area. They'd invited candidates in an upcoming midterm election to come speak about their values and see if they would pledge to uphold our values. A rally. Everything had already been decided in advance. We weren't in on the planning stages but that was fine because, frankly, life is busy and that's not where my energies lie.

Our parish got a bus, a school bus, and we rode out there together. I sat next to Dolores and Mike had the girls behind me. In the middle of the light chatting on the way home, one of the nuns who gave lots of time to this organization suddenly asked, "Was Fr. Miguel there tonight?" The answer was no. There was a pause while she worked this out in her head.

"He'll figure it out," she said. "Some things he has to do."

And Dolores turned to me: "Do you know he has the audacity to put on his phone message that he takes Fridays off?" She laughed. "Like anyone can take a day off at our parish."

And while I wondered if Miguel, whom I barely knew, and only from parish council, would in fact figure it out, I thought I felt something, something imaginary and brief on the back of my neck. A realization. Things were changing.

This isn't to say that our parish isn't still active in social justice--of course we are. It just isn't the topic of every single homily. Social justice folks aren't gone. They just don't get 15 minutes after communion to read aloud their platform for change once a month.

I'm not a social justice person (I say that meaning "this is not where I sink all my energy" not meaning "I don't think we should work for social justice"). I'm a liturgy person. I'm not trained (thank you Lynn for reminding me) but this is what I like. This is why I stay. If it weren't for liturgy, our liturgy, the focus on liturgy at our parish now, if it weren't important to me, well, damn it, why wouldn't I just go sit with the Quakers at 10:30 on a Sunday morning and chuck all the baggage that goes with Catholicism?

So I know the world does not revolve around me, but it's a happy accident that Miguel arrived at our parish when he did. It was sort of a reawakening for me. Oh yeah, here we are now.

158/365 Sacred Heart

The depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus has never been one of my favorites, I will admit. It has always seemed a little over the top for me. But it brings to mind a quick story from my own life that has nothing to do with the parish but has to do with someone who means a great deal to me.

When my parents settled back in St. Louis for an extended engagement (that would be 3 1/2 years), we attended church at St. Bernadette's down at Jefferson Barracks. I went to school there for three years (I want to say "to no avail" for some reason) and my parents had a very nice, very drunk, group of friends. The parish priest was Fr. Jerry Keaty. He was a family friend, through my aunt Gracemarie, mostly.

A few years before our marriage, his heart gave out. Three days before I was supposed to do some pre-teaching at St. Margaret of Scotland's, where he was pastor, he was admitted to the hospital. This resulted in a heart transplant soon after and a long convalescence. He became a priest-in-residence out in west county and took it kind of easy. But he was never exactly ok after the transplant, and, for instance, after our wedding, he went home instead of going to the reception, where he would have been most welcome and would have known half the room anyway. He was just too tired.

He died 3 years later. Gracemarie told me that doctors had put him on the list for a another heart but he had declined to be on the list again and take a heart from someone else.

I wrote on the day of his funeral:

Fr. Keaty died on Monday. He married me and Mike, gave my first communion, and baptized my sister Colleen. He was loosely intertwined in my family's life since I was 7 years old. He was pastor, advisor, reference, and friend. I spent a couple of Thanksgivings with him, especially the one after his heart transplant in 1994. He was a good man, a good priest, a holy person.

Forty priests were at the funeral, some I knew. My grandmother was there, my Aunt Sarah, my aunt Gracemarie and her family. In a few minutes, I'm heading to lunch with my grandmother, and she'll probably tell me long boring stories about St. Louis in the old days and "this neighborhood really fell to shit in the seventies" and "can't believe you put up with traffic nowadays. When I was a girl..."

But something about this funeral, or funerals in general, makes me want to listen today. I want to sit and listen and sift through the stories for the forgotten lore of how to care for begonias or trim roses or know if your dirt is good dirt. Listen and glean information about family and acquaintances that my father would remember because he once went to History class or Navy League with them. I know my father won't remember them, and I won't care to hear their stories of divorces, birth traumas, diseases, and death, but I need to listen today.

It's hot in St. Louis. It's going to rain. Fr. Keaty has died, but I know that if there is any justice in this cosmos, he is well, wherever he is. I may have misheard, but I think the bishop said today was the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Sacred, sacred heart. Nice synchronicity there.

189/365 I wonder what else he said

So while I was caught talking to Missy, which wasn't as excruciating as all that, but did mean that I missed out on the first part of the conversation Mike was having with his family, I noticed that my father-in-law had gone to the back and said something to Fr. Miguel. It was brief and looked friendly and then I got caught up in trying to impress Missy (and failing), and then the debate over where we should go to lunch. But I wondered. My father-in-law is a man of few words except when it comes to stories about hunting, fishing, and work. He is not Catholic--he's not anything, really, just himself. But he's been soaked in Catholicism a long time married to my mother-in-law as he is.

Having decided on lunch, Mike asked his dad what he'd talked to Miguel about.

"Oh, I just told him I considered him one of the special priests," he explained. I may have the quote wrong. I'm hearing it from Mike, via his dad. When Mike told me this later, I pressed him for more details.

"That's all he said," Mike insisted. "I figure it just means Miguel is in a category with Fr. Stephen, you know, folks like that."

I knew what he meant.

253/365 Cool Guy in Shades

364/365 This is where I live

When I left the school, pregnant with Sophia but not ready to give up my current life for a new one, I couldn't see into the future. I had made the mistake of teaching where I went to church. As much as I loved teaching at the school, it was impossible to keep those two parts of my life separate and my faith life suffered for it. Plus I was incredibly immature and, truly, should have been reined in by a principal and put in my place--but our principal got winded walking up a flight of stairs so it was kind of every man for himself. Anyway, I've talked about this before and let it go ages ago. But I think back on it sometimes, the conversation I had with Mike that fall, as my faith drifted and I got busy being a mother.

We baptized Sophia the Sunday after September 11, 2001. I was still so angry at our pastor I couldn't make eye contact. And I said to Mike, "I'm going to outlast them. Sr. Fern's contract is up next year. She'll move on. Sr. Agneta will, too. And Fr. Bill. I will stand here, in my parish, and outlast them."

Agneta and Fern left at the same time--the school was only open that one last year before we merged with a neighboring parish school. Bill was there a long time. He baptized Maeve. I almost didn't have her baptized, and I almost had Mike's uncle do it down in Cairo. But I stood firm. This was my parish. Plus Mike wasn't going to let me not baptize her (I was on the edge, leaving for the Quakers, but still wanting to prove I belonged at my parish? I was in the throes of something, let me tell you).

So we baptized Maeve, but I didn't even invite Bill over afterward. Still pissed. Then that coming year I was nominated by a ridiculous number of people to be on parish council. That's what happens when you pray for guidance. So I sat at that table and took notes as secretary and didn't budge. This was my parish.

When Bill left, I wrote him a nice note. By that point, my edges were worn down some and it was obvious that I belonged here.

I can't even imagine having angry heated loud arguments with our pastor in the parking lot now.

Agneta, Fern, Bill...all left. Then Joey left. And Terri. And all those people. The parish now is not what it was then. I stood my ground. I stayed. Even Dolores is hardly ever there. All those crazy folks from back when I taught (there are new crazy folks, of course). I'm here, Astrid's here, Colleen O'Toole's here...but most everyone is gone. Their kids grew up and the parish was less a part of their lives. Sometimes I'll see a kid I taught--like Flora's sons, who are, like, as old as me now--and that always makes me happy. But all those crazy adults? Don't miss them a bit.