Another blow to Ecumenism

Today my son and I went to church. My daughter is an irreligious heathen and my husband couldn't be bothered, but I managed to talk my son into joining the choir, so for a few weeks now we've had our Sunday morning routine: we get to church at 9:00, robe up, warm up, sing the 9:30 service, and then at 10:30 he has an hour-long confirmation class.

Now, I wasn't adamant about sending him to confirmation class. I figure a boy who has never gone to church regularly is already making a considerable lifestyle change in joining a choir.

Especially this choir. There are about 75 kids in the choir. It starts in third grade, and they go through a choir curriculum modeled on English cathedral and collegiate chapel choir curricula. As they progress, they wear slightly different vestments. The first year all you get is the basic choir robe. Your second year you get a surplice to wear on top (code name: the puff) and beginning with your third year, you add crosses, first silver, then gold, which go on different colored ribbons. I haven't figured out the ribbon thing. It's complicated. It reminds me of the belt system in karate.



Anyway, it's a huge choir, and it's serious. The kids stay in it through high school. I suspect this is partly because of the trips. Every other year they go to England where they're a resident choir at a cathedral.

Next August it will be Salisbury, and in August 2011, it will be Canterbury.

Now because I sing in the alto section, I get to go on the trips, too.

And this explains why I didn't put all that much pressure on my son to sign up for confirmation class. I was too busy wearing him down to a nubbin to make him agree to be in the choir.


But my friend Fiddledeedee shooed him up the stairs with her son in the beginning of September, and history was made. Now here he is getting his first formal religious education! And again, these people are serious. He came out of confirmation class today with all kinds of materials.


And how much fruit is it bearing? I'll let you be the judge.

He was telling me today about this fantasy world he's been creating for a few years now. Apparently, it's a very inclusive--you might even say politically-correct world. And he was telling me about the different kinds of characters he had invented for it:

Poppy: So, do you have any Asians?
Young Master Buxom: Yes, two.
Poppy: Blacks?
YMB: Four.
P: Any gay characters?
YMB: Yeah, main character's brother is gay. That way people will realize there's nothing wrong with being gay.
P: What about Jews?
YMB: The main character is Jewish.
P: OK. Now what about Catholics?
YMB: What's that?


All photos taken from the church website by disobeying the eighth commandment, unless you're Catholic (whatever that means) when it's the seventh.

The Lenten Light Bulb

Today I went over to Sarah O's blog and read about her passion for Hershey's Reese's eggs.

And it struck me. That's what I should give up for Lent! Easter candy!

See, for some reason, it wouldn't actually occur to me to eat Easter candy until the day itself. This is probably because while I like candy as much as the next fat American, I don't buy it for myself.

I do buy it for my kids, though. Or for other people's kids, as in Halloween. But even when I do that, the candy stays in the bag until it's time to put it in baskets, stockings, or the lobster kettle I use as a Halloween candy holding doohickey because I'm a cheap bastid from New England who wouldn't spend money on one of those cutesie Halloween-themed bowls.

So actually, giving up Easter candy for Lent would be a really painless sacrifice. Which is naturally, my favorite kind. But if I play my cards right--say, spend a little extra time hovering around the candy section of Walgreen's--I can even feel all deprived and virtuous and shit like that.

So get behind me jellybeans

and Cadbury Creme Eggs

and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs


and Peeps



Because I'm going to resist you until Easter Sunday.

But just to prove that I'm open-minded when it comes to OTHER PEOPLE'S GLUTTONY, Sarah? This is an early Easter gift for you that I found on the Hershey's web site.

Look closely--Hershey's totally has your number.

I wasn't blogging because I was too busy wasting time on the internet, OK?

The past couple of days have been pretty quiet around here, and it isn't because I didn't have access to the internet. (Well, OK, on Sunday I was either going to church, in church, or coming home from church for an eleven hour stretch, so I couldn't post, but don't worry, internet, because I was praying for you--in particular that you would see fit, in your infinite mercy, to leave me lots of comments.)

Wow, that was a long digression. I'll start again.

Hello, internet, and welcome to a side of Poppy you haven't seen before: the side that gets totally sucked into internet user group dramas.

A friend of mine owns a Yahoo group, and things got ugly for a few days there, and I was pretty much glued to my laptop for hours at a time keeping up with things and weighing in from time to time with what I hoped was sage advice.

Because, you know, been there/done that.

You know, sometimes I think people get fooled by the slick hardware and software they're using. You know, here I am with a completely beautiful 17-inch laptop, running all kinds of excellent software, able to check the weather, listen to music, IM my pals, look at people's pictures, blog, email, update a spreadsheet, and write the long-overdue letter to my mother (who lives in a cave, eats mastodon for dinner, and expects me to write her letters--and no, a phone call won't do. )

Surrounded, as I said, with all this slick software and hardware, which, when it works, works amazingly well, it's easy to forget that the people on the other side of the screen are human beings. Who are imperfect. Maybe they have morning breath, maybe they're catching a cold, and maybe they don't read with the kind of attention our elegant, eloquent writing deserves.

And yet, we keep writing.

Now that I have your attention, let me take you away from the internet and bring you to church with me. I'd like you to meet the choir, which is mostly made of professional musicians. I've learned a lot from them, and in turn, I have taught them to be patient with well-meaning amateurs like me.

So anyway, this is one thing I've learned from the pros: in a studio, an artist like Barbra Streisand will record 16 versions of the same song and polish and perfect until it's just right. But in real life, when you perform for a living, you do the best you can, and then you move on. When a performance is over, you don't perform endless post-mortems on it; you get ready for the next gig. You get better not by working on a single song and making it perfect, but by performing lots of music many times. In front of a live audience. Which may or may not appreciate your talent.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that even in a written medium with a long, long archival memory, this too will pass. The moving finger writes, and having written, forgets what the hell it was saying.

And now, excuse me. I need to go check my email. Maybe something else has happened.