181/365 Drug Dealer Season

The summer when I moved into the old 3rd grade classroom, I busied myself with the library as well. I'd toyed around with it a bit during my free time the first year, usually with JD in tow that second semester. We sorted through books and cleaned stuff up and I got way too involved with that kid. He was usually skipping English, or was getting kicked out of PE. He cemented my preference for bad boys and good girls when it comes to what students I connect to best. I don't handle fast-moving girls very well, girls who know too much by the time they are 13 and often become Mean Girls in the process. And good boys, ugh, were usually such suck ups that I had flashbacks to my honor classes in high school. No. Thank. You.

But anyway, that summer, JD was gone for good and my friend Jenna and I sorted through the library and even found a book on the Dewey Decimal system, which of course was right up my alley. Sorting is one of my favorite hobbies, after all. We sat in the room, evenings when it was still light, box fan going, and became friends, really, finally. That's the summer she broke up with Graham and the summer when I learned how to be friends with other girls who aren't good at being friends with other girls.

We'd stay in the evenings until it started feeling too dicey to stay. This time of year was drug dealer season and we could set our stopwatches by the routine: honking at the end of the block, slow driving down the block, more honking outside the house, a car door, footsteps, a car door, speed away. Right outside our window. We weren't likely targets of violence (that would interfere with business, after all) but we could become collateral damage and preferred not to.

That was ten summers ago. The school is closed, the pastor is different, the street is evolving but not completely healed. The Drug House, 3535, is closed down, boarded up and empty. But I know it's not the only location. Water finds its level and drug dealers find their customers. But we're still standing there, we still process on Corpus Christi and Palm Sunday and Easter Vigil, right past the rough patch. We'll outlast them.

220/365 Coffee with Fr. Miguel

He was supposed to get his hair cut. The barber shop is across the street from the coffee house (I love my neighborhood, have I mentioned?). We were chatting about vacations, mostly about Astrid's thousand-day vacation to South Carolina. He appears around the corner and comes in to chat. Keeps looking out to see if the barber shop is open yet (I don't think it ever did, for mysterious reasons).

We talk about vacations some more, about knitting, about kids, about the oireachtas (Irish dance regional competition) Sophia will probably not attend. We talked about this and that and whatever, just like any coffee Wednesday or Friday (Wednesdays are our standard, but in the summertime things get loose, especially when Astrid takes 1000 day long vacations).

It's a great way to start the day. Energizes me and not just because of the coffee. I get so much done on the days I go to coffee.

He left about 9:30, realizing he'd have to do something else about his hair (which is a quarter inch long, if that). We stayed a bit longer, but knowing we had things to accomplish as well on this hot hot day, we wrapped things up and went down the road.

235/365 Looking Backward

When I raised my hand in 2005 and said that I might just be interested in parish council, I had to write some essays. This is funny to me now because writing is one of those things that just happens for me, but I'm sure it was used as a weed-out activity. Get them to jump through this hoop and whatever applications we get, we'll consider at that point. One of the questions was, Over the next five years, what are the three most important areas in parish life at St. Pius V for growth and vitality to be cultivated and sustained?

My first answer involved drawing out new leadership at the parish level, which I admitted then and still think now, is a problem at any parish, in any organization (I know this from being on the ground floor of a new school and my involvement in La Leche League and Girl Scouts). So that wasn't any big thing. But I was rereading my second answer this evening and it really struck me. Not that I'm some kind of prophet, but here we are 5 years later and I think we have cultivated in this area.

I wrote that I thought St. Marge was more of a threat than a neighbor. I wrote that while Mike and I automatically chose our parish because it was in a public location, because my grandmother recommended it (she knew Fr. Bill), because we tried out a few other parishes and ours fit best, while Mike and I did that, all our other Catholic neighbors at the time belonged to St. Marge. One even told me during a conversation about parishes, that she hoped we'd still talk to them if they chose St. Marge over us. I asked her if she'd ever been to our parish. She shrugged. She wasn't interested in an immigrant parish, in a parish in trouble.

And we were in trouble. We had about 300 families and our school had closed. We'd merged with another school, one that was already supported by several parishes. And within a year of that conversation with my neighbor, we were threatened with closing. She was right that way. It was a struggle and it was amazing that we came through.

Five years later, our school is growing. The bulletin mentioned they have 200 children starting this year. We have just over 500 families registered. I don't know how St. Marge's parish is going overall. I don't know their ups or downs. I know their kindergarten and preschool is booming but I also know they are bleeding out middle school students, their families dissatisfied with what's going on there. Not a big surprise to me, since I did some pre-teaching work there, and later I worked at our school and saw the difference in our math abilities. We might have had hard to pronounce names and shabby textbooks, but they weren't doing algebra by eighth grade. Anyway, that's an old grudge of mine.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't seem to matter as much now. I'm not on parish council anymore (sigh) but I wasn't on it when I wrote that, either. St. Marge just seems like another south side parish instead of the slick jocks or cheerleaders who keep the goth kids down.

And my neighbors? The Catholics on my block are no longer monolithic. Three families go to our church. Two go to St. Marge. An older couple goes to the Italian church nearby, mostly because they have the earliest Sunday mass around here. And the family that was worried we might not talk to them anymore never settled at St. Marge's after all--their kids go to another Catholic school further south, and that's where they've put down roots. Even my parents on the next block gave up on the Jesuits and joined our parish.

We're not the same place we were 5 years ago.

311/365 Win My Soul for Jesus

So I got really drunk last night playing mah jongg, which means to me that I need to play mah jongg more often so I don't feel like I have to push myself over the edge when I get to. The girls who play mj with me live on my block; except for Jackie (who had left before we started the conversation below) we are all in our mid-thirties and have kids between the ages of 22 months and 14 years. And while on paper our character sheets (roleplaying game reference) look pretty similar, we are obviously not the same. Among other differences, three of us are Catholic and two of us aren't. There's another girl who plays with us pretty often, also Catholic, but wasn't able to make it last night.

The two who aren't are Zelda, a non-denominational Christian of the best sort and Gretchen, a recovering Baptist who is now a Presbyterian (USA). She's Leo's godmother and attends the church that houses my girls' school for the moment (until we don't fit in their building anymore!). The pastor of the church is the one who had me make advent banners. His kids go to our school, too. So all of this is kinda intertwined as you can see.

And we were drunk. And Gretchen, who perceives things sometimes that surprise me at first and then make me say, oh, yeah, said in the height of this conversation (after several times telling me to be quiet so that she could ask the other two Catholics a question without my interfering), "You are going to wind up at my church."

I laughed, because I'm so dyed in the wool about ritual and the jarring cracked reflections of ritual at mainstream protestant churches. There's no way I could go be a Presbyterian, any more than I could go be a Lutheran or Methodist or Hindu. The only one that draws me is the Friends, and that's really only an affectation if I admit it to myself.

I turned to Zelda, who was the only one not drunk by that point and said loud enough for all to hear, "Gretchen's going to win my soul for Jesus."

Zelda smiled wisely at me, and later, after the hangover, after the nap, I reflected on this. I want to be Catholic. I want to be a part of where I am. I'm not a Presbyterian. But sitting in RCIA some Sundays I wonder why I'm doing this. Sitting in Worship Commission Wednesday night, I looked at those changes in the language of the mass and thought about the nit picking and the hierarchy and just wanted to chuck it all.

What keeps me here? My parish keeps me here. If I moved, I'd have a hard time integrating into a new parish, starting over. Since that's unlikely to happen, a more solid question is "if our pastor leaves and we get some shit-for-brains pompous dickweed for a pastor" or, with more trepidation, "if our parish closes"....then where am I? Where do I go? I think about that line from John 6: Do you also want to leave? Master, to whom shall we go?

I'll probably always be Catholic. Stability really calls for it, frankly. This is who I am and where I am.

But I don't think that precludes finding other streams to draw water from if this well runs dry for a season or two.

Gretchen will probably not win my soul for Jesus. I love her pastor and I think he'd probably be good to listen to. He is a good person and adores me (which is always a plus). But the energy required to make that change for good is just not in my soul: I am not a convert. I would not be surprised to have a summer home, but my mailing address will always be at my parish.

349/365 3535

It stands there across the street from the school.

Owner occupied drug house. In 2000, police officers sat in our classrooms monitoring activity. In 2001, they forgot about us and moved onto more fertile ground. Every raid produced the wrong people, never the owner, never someone to pin it all on.

Drug dealer season starts with the first warm weekend and continues until stoop-sitting is too uncomfortable. A lot of the school year, pretty much.

The school closes, a new pastor arrives, other things fall here and there and life goes on.

Then one day heading down to a girl scout meeting I realize the front doors are boarded up. Must have finally caught the right guy, I think. I wonder how long it'll be empty.

Delivering Christmas packages, Mike and I head into the church hall with our kids. The doors are now boarded up with new boards. And the windows, too. It's a shell. Waiting for something? To fall down? So many barriers to success.

"I wish I'd taken a picture of that place," I say to Mike. "Like one every year from the time I started at the school. Its downfall."

We walk into the church hall, a dim hallway that leads to the cafeteria. "You wait long enough, I guess," I sigh.