Mother’s Day

My own personal mother (who died in 2001, 4 days after Joseph was born, for those not keeping track)  always scoffed at Mother’s Day, claiming that it was all just a means to assuage guilt for ignoring mothers the rest of the 364 days of the year. I’ve pretty much followed in her footsteps.

I’m not much of a  holiday person anyway, since to me holiday=more work, and I always stand resolutely against anything that =more work, even if the holiday is ostensibly in my honor.

So today, Mother’s Day went down like this:

First of all, everyone slept late, which was the most fabulous gift anyone could ask for. Everyone except David, of course, who was headed to Mass and then to work in the relatively early morning, poor guy. But the little ones slept til 8:30, which was unprecedented.

Our Mass-going is determined not only by our parish, but also by our responsibilities at our parish on any given Sunday. This Sunday, none of us had any responsibilities, so we headed over to the Sister Servants at Casa Maria, where I am pretty much guaranteed that I will not have to hear All Are Welcome Here or One Bread One Body or even (one a day like today) Gounod’s arrangement of Bach’s Ave Maria. Or whatever it is. You’d think that in 2,000 years, no one had ever written another hymn, motet or chant concerning the Mother of God except that one. Spare me. At this point, I am honestly not sure which is worse  – All Are Welcome Here or one more bloody rendition of Ave Maria. Every time those arpeggios begin, I envision Michael sitting beside me, smirking, because he knew how crazy it made me.

And I heard neither today, thank goodness.

What I did hear was an endless, but fascinating homily from the quite elderly chaplain which, in its references to various aspects of Irish Catholicism, including the distinction between the Irish term for the name “Mary” for ordinary folk and the Irish term for the name “Mary” as in The Virgin Mary,  meshed an a pretty interesting way with K’s reflections on her studies of Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man which, along with Heart of Darkness,  is the subject of her IB test on Monday.

Ora pro nobis.

After Mass, I dropped the offspring off at home, and then headed over to the place where I’d purchased my table of a few weeks back – the folks who sold it to me are heading to Hawaii on Tuesday and had their stuff picked up last week, but found that what they had pegged to move was too much for the space allotted, so they put out the word that they had More Stuff to sell for very cheap or to give away, so come get it.

I got there too late, and there wasn’t much great stuff (to my taste), but I did grab a picture frame and a planter, so there’s that.

Spent the rest of the day, appropriately enough, planting.  I am not a flower person – much – and am far more interested in vegetables and herbs. I’d planted many herbs about a month ago (which are doing fabulously, thanks) , and  just got a new supply, but have been confounded as to where to plant them. I’ve been studying the patterns of the sun over my back yard for two months now and have finally concluded that it is hopeless. Too many damn trees. So I went and bought some vegetation today and worked in the front to plant it. Lord knows what will come of it.  I still might do some container gardening in the back if I can maintain my attention enough to move the containers with the sun, but I’m not sure.

And then it was dinner.

After some false starts, we ended up at Chez Lulu, which was nice even though I had to go stand outside on the sidewalk to read the menu. I recently got my contact prescription adjusted and as a result hardly need reading glasses anymore, so I don’t carry them…forgetting that “dim restaurant lighting” would probably be an exception to this new rule.

We settled here mostly because I knew it was a place David could easily find on his way back from work. (And how very odd that even before I called him and told him where we’d meet him, this is the Mother’s Day gift he’d purchased for me…)    I didn’t know that it would be easy to tell him where to go because there would be an accordian player out front!

Who at one point, moved inside.

I know nothing about him. He spoke Italian to David.  He played show tunes and Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, and then he played Arrivederci Roma just for David, which made us both kind of sad.   Dinner was overpriced, but worth every penny, if you get my drift.

Buona notte…

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