81/365 Jesus' Laundry

Ethel called. Hildegard said she would.

So you'll do the third Sunday, she tells me. They were down to just Ethel at this point and needed to increase numbers or else the laundry would never be done. I thought about Faustina shaking her head at me when I asked if she'd be willing to take care of altar linens: "My husband told me I have too much to take care of with my family's laundry, I can't do Jesus' laundry too."

But even though my ironing board is a permanent fixture right now in my library, and we hide baskets of clothes in the basement laundry room to momentarily get the house clean, I'm going to be doing Jesus' laundry once a month.

Mostly purificators, Ethel says. Rinse them in plain water and discard the water someplace in the ground--she waters her plants with it. Then wash them like anything you want to keep pure white and happens to be covered in wine stains. I'm thinking oxyclean myself. This summer will find the backyard line covered in little white linen cloths.

I plan to iron them and return them to the sacristy in individual plastic bags--produce bags that I've washed and dried for reuse, of course--all with notes pinned on them marked "purificator".

Miguel will love that. The little old lady I'm replacing was exact about things. I have standards to meet.

83/365 Servers Sacristy

I think the room makes you crazy. I cleaned that place out when I inherited the job from Dolores. Set things up how I thought it would work best--we used to have to trip over crap to get to what we needed. But it isn't my room. I'm not the only one there. I would put candle boxes away but would find them back out. I'd put them away again and find them in disarray the next week. Then I found a note from Wilma telling me to leave things alone. Block letters. I think she meant it. But I still would try to tidy--Hildegard too. Things just pile up. Don't know where to put it? Stick it in the servers sacristy and we'll work it out later. It just seems to happen that way. Post-Christmas, we're all so tired. Post-Easter, we're all so tired. Then busy.

So we met Tuesday--Hildegard, Jack, Miguel, and me--to clean the place out. I sorted through skeezy fabric while Jack took things out to the dumpster. Vacuuming, discarding, sorting. We took the doors off one of the closets--they didn't work anyway--and tossed a bunch of stuff we were saving, you know, just in case.

Leo played with toys on the carpet for a while, but grew tired of being alone. I sorted fabric while he stood next to me, holding on. I wonder sometimes how my children will view this stage of our lives. The stage when I spent so much time at church. Growing up, we were never more than churchgoers, except when I was in 8th grade. We were a little more involved then. (We were often involved in parish schools, but not in churches as much). I never entertained myself in a pew while my mother ironed altar cloths or discussed plans for flowers at Easter. I wonder if it will instill in them a desire to do the same. Or if this is something that just winds up skipping generations.

However it works out, they're stuck for now. At lunchtime, we broke up for the day and the place looked, well, usable. Not like a sad abandoned storage closet.

Collective parish memory is one thing. Collective parish saved junk is another. It does continue to improve as time goes by.

113/365 Chasuble

Torn seam fixed.
It needed cleaning. My sewing room? Sacristy? Something.
Done. Hope it works.

138/365 Jesus' Laundry

"What are you doing at this mass?" Jack asked as I passed him in the aisle after the Saturday vigil.

"I had Jesus' laundry," I point at the sacristy. "I'm late this week--I should have had it back yesterday."

------

Earlier in the day, I referred to it as such as I carried the basket of clean but unironed whites through the kitchen on the way to the ironing board.

"I have to get this up to church this afternoon," I said to Mike, hurrying by.

"Why? He got a date tonight?"

"4:30, and I'm going to be late."

196/365 Altar Guild Part One

I was headed to my in-laws, but I needed to go to this meeting first. Basement of the rectory with Sr. Hildegard and a few other folks she'd emailed to see if they'd be interested in helping out at church. Behind the scenes stuff, the stuff nobody notices until it doesn't happen. Laundry, dishes, polishing, candles.

I drove over to the rectory thinking of the Benedictine passage about tools of the monastery. All tools of the monastery are to be treated as the sacred vessels of the altar are treated, for all tools are in fact sacred. Jobs done well, with focus and purpose, are all part of a path toward God.

And I knew that I was heading into the lion's den of meetings. I was going to leave that meeting with more to do, officially, than I had before. But I was ok with that. Kids are older, I have more time come the fall. I can take on a bit more, at least what I had going on before Leo was born.

Right?

197/365 Altar Guild: History

I used to be a part of art and environment. I was one of three people on the committee. We met in the daylight, probably before dinner, in the rectory dining room. I sat on one side of the table with Dolores, and Roxanne sat across from us. Sometimes Fr. Bill with be there, antsy and already thinking about the next thing on his agenda. I can't for the life of me tell you how I came to be there.

We'd sit. I would say very little. Dolores would tell us what to do. Roxanne would wax philosophical about stupid things. Fr. Bill would get into annoying tense discussions of dead plants. And I'd wait to see if I was handed a job. I never was.

A newcomer joined our meeting a few times, a woman named Kimberly who had a passion for stained glass. She found out that Dolores was cleaning it with windex and sort of freaked out. She called the stained glass company that had installed our windows so many decades before. On the side, without consulting the committee, she had them come out and inspect the windows. Got their word, on paper, that windex was the wrong thing to use. Warm water was all. Kimberly and Dolores had a seething bubbling tense argument about this. Kimberly with her evidence and Dolores with her "that's the way we've always done it." It lasted far too long, a ridiculous length of time. Kimberly got up and left and never came back.

When I say "never came back" I mean it. She left the parish and I never saw her again. Dolores continued to hold meetings, but I only attended one more. That was it. She was going to do it her way and I didn't even know why I was there. I had some choice words with myself and stopped going.

Roxanne and her family left the parish a few months later, and Dolores stood alone as the art and environment committee. Even though Roxanne's family drifted back in later, she didn't join A&E. There wasn't anything to join. It was just Dolores, doing all of it or none of it, whatever.

198/365 Altar Guild Part 3

Hildegard had us come in and offered us wine, or water. I chose the latter because I was driving to Cairo later and, while I probably wouldn't have enough to be over some limit, it would make me sleepy and that wouldn't fly.

Gary was already there. He'd helped out at Christmas decorating before with his fiance but I'd never really spoken with him. Susan came in soon after--a long-standing A&E member. And then we were joined by Gianna and her daughter Mary Kate. A few minutes into Hildegard's introduction, Anya came in, a new parishioner from Texas.

How I envisioned the meeting going was not how it went. I walked out of the meeting with fewer official jobs than I walked in with. Sort of. I have a definite list of jobs--Christmas and Easter, essentially. Advent, too. But there are others that creep in, and still others that I should be doing and I'm not, for a variety of reasons that start with S, M, and L and keep me busy at home.

I left with laundry on the third week of the month; season decorating; washing the altar dishes once a month in soapy water; and polishing the handrails (a job I like) every other month.

I left happy and hopeful. Hopeful that Gianna and her daughter will come through on what they volunteered for. Happy there were new people raising their hands. Happy that it wasn't just me, Hildegard, and Susan divvying up the list.

Lynn didn't make it.

And so she only has one job.

But I wasn't even mad about that. She's so caustic, it was better that she wasn't there at all.

200/365 Juggling the Laundry

Coming home from working the Irish dance competition (feis), I was planning the rest of my day. I was already on 39th street heading home when I remembered it was my week to do the laundry at church.

Purificators, towels, a few odds and ends each time. I drive over there--it's 3:00 already and there is no time to have it done by 4:30 mass. I remember these problems in calculus class. Even if I traveled at the speed of light, I will approach but never reach my destination in time.

So I pick up the laundry basket full and take it home. Life intervenes--Leo needs a nap so we lie down together, and I fall asleep. When I wake up, 4:30 is already over so I can't just sneak them in then, either. Plus they're still sitting in the washer waiting their next step.

I iron them while I watch TV that night. I'm too tired to take them up (it's after 10 at this point) so it'll have to wait until Sunday. Which means waking up at 6:30 and going over before the 7:30 mass. Sigh. Nobody to blame but myself.

201/365 Reset

Waking up, I'm already sick of church. All the laundry is ready to take over and I grab it up and stumble out to the car. I'm in a foul mood--my 4th night in a row of 4 hours of sleep or less. Mike was out of town all week and I fear I'll never catch up. I already have my excuses and defense at the ready, should anyone have anything to say about my laundry duties. It starts with "I didn't ask for this job" and just gets angrier from there.

I walk into church--7:30 mass is sparsely populated--and take this stuff back to the sacristy. Monique is back there in her hat, going over the reading. Monique is a character. A little odd. Many of us are. She has a thing for hats. And she's always giving people hugs. I'm not a hugger. At least not often, and definitely not with people I hardly know. I know Monique from several small things I do at the parish, but she's one of the people I put up the protective coloration for. I don't want to have to try to translate my life. I keep it on the surface with her.

She ignores me as I put purificators in piles and some in a drawer. Glance out to the credence table (I think that's what it's called) and there are already ones in place. Wilma, of course, is really in charge of all this. There are, in fact, plenty of purificators in the drawer. I really could have brought my load up when we came for 10. More words in the back of my head, but I'm done. I turn and smile at Monique.

Who of course, according to strict cliche, puts her arms up to hug me. And I'm not in such a bad mood to tell her to go away. So I hug her. "Everyone needs a hug!" she announces. Maybe so.

After brief pleasantries, I go sit in the second pew. I'll stay for mass, and then go home and try to catch up on sleep. And quit all this grumbling.

284/365 Cleaning Out

Sometime in the first year Fr. Miguel was our pastor, we cleaned out the sacristies. Some of the trouble back there was just years of not noticing mess. I have a feeling Fr. Bill just didn't see mess. And didn't care. So there was decent stuff in some corners, but covered up by mess. Especially in the servers' sacristy.

But other things were just wrong. Lots and lots of clingy polyester vestments that were too short for Fr. Bill but he wore them anyway. Banners that were just, well, too much burlap and felt. Fabric that was kept "just in case." Bad bad satin. Poles that didn't go to anything. Half-empty cans of pledge--like, 4 half empty cans of pledge.

And don't get me started on the crap we were storing in the choir loft. A creche that was supposed to go on the roof of the rectory porch (Sal is still asking me if we're putting it up on the porch roof this year--we threw the whole dang thing away). Fake Christmas trees. Items that were impossible to identify until we envisioned them as the base of an advent wreath, for instance (I remember Hazel and her husband describing in detail how to take off each piece of fake greenery and wash it with mild soap and water before reattaching it each advent).

Junky junk and ticky-tacky kitsch. A box of Christmas ornaments--not like, you know, gold and silver glass balls that would maybe have a place in a Christmas church environment, but stuff that you wish your grandmother would throw away, like coffee filter angels and clothespin reindeer and plastic nativity scenes. A fake dove that came off some floral arrangement (which Miguel placed atop the John the Baptist statue on the baptismal font like a perch, umm, we were pretty slap-happy by that point). Just stuff.

We threw it away.

We don't miss it.