His Mother Must Be Proud

Saturday August 5, 2006
Went to mass as I always do on Saturday at 5pm, with all the other people who don't want to be bothered with the obligation on the proper day of Sunday. Gotta love the Catholics, they understand the whole "convenience" factor... the Baptists will never get it I suppose... I am a Convert by the way, I grew up a Southern Baptist. Not being a "Morning Person", I always made my parents late to church on Sunday morning... Mom hurriedly dropping me off at my Sunday School room where I immediately snuck out and down the hall to the bathroom where my other heathen friends would be hiding, smoking cigs and talking about boys and such important things as the length of Gene Simmons' tongue and who got lucky in the dark corner of the skating rink the night before... Anyway, back to the point... the visiting priest tonight was a monsignor who had some pretty impressive priestly credentials… he is the emissary between the Pope and the British government… he was over here slumming it to fill in for our vacationing rector because they are pals and he started out here years ago. I was pretty immpressed. He told of carrying a letter from the Pope asking ol' Slobodan Milocevic to please (I'm sure the Pope says "please") stop bombing things during the war in Kosovo. I don’t care if you are an atheist or an animist or what, there’s got to be a bit of awe there if you ask me… carrying something written by the most powerful man on the face of the earth. Did he have a Trapper-Keeper to keep it safe, or did he just fold it up and stuff it in his shirt pocket maybe? I could just see me patting my pockets saying "Yo Slobo, I got a note here somewhere from JP for ya... now where did I put it... " All I’ve ever carried that was important was a note from one elementary school teacher to another, and even then the note just probably read "Meet me for a smoke at 2:15 in the teachers’ lounge."
My cat Mr. Whiskers (not very original, I know, but I had grown tired of thinking up cool cat names by the time he came along) is sitting in the dry bathtub, all alone except for his favorite toy, a bottle cap… he’s knocking it around and meowing to it… he’s giving it a great tongue lashing I must say… he’s been yowling on for about 10 minutes straight now, with his weird siamesey-gravelly-nasally tone, which is weird coming out of a black cat. I wonder what is going thru his little cat mind... he does this EVERY night. Does he have a whole little scenario going on? Do cats pretend? I wish I had a Babelfish.