I attended mass on Sunday, during which time a priest for whom I do not particularly care, utilized the homily to tell me how I should vote, and that I should, if my children expressed that they thought they were gay, try to turn them back toward heterosexuality.

I am disappointed, though not surprised, that the Catholic Church, or any church, feels they have the right to dictate how I vote, and more disappointed that they care more about admonishing homosexuality than teaching love and tolerance.  Through recent actions of priests in regard to homosexuality, such as a priest who denied a lesbian the right to receive communion at her mother's funeral mass, they are portraying themselves more as an institution of hate.  If they wish to view homosexuals as not living in a state of grace, and therefore choose to deny the sacraments to them, I suppose that is their choice, though an unfortunate one, and one that does not apparently apply to their own clergy.  But they have no business attempting to browbeat their parishioners in an attempt to dictate public policy.  There is a very good reason why our founding fathers encouraged the separation of church and state.

On another note, Father Buckler should pay more attention to the number of parishioners who routinely walk out on his homilies because of his dismal failure to communicate to them with respect, or in a way that relates the homily in any way to our daily lives.  He has angered and alienated more people than I care to admit.  Perhaps he should consider that the priesthood is not his true calling.  

A Story Excerpt

Orange-red embers pulsed and flickered in the bottom of the copper saucer, now dirty, dented and stained from exposure to the elements over the course of several years.  The last remnants of the fire still shared some heat, warming the man’s legs as he sat, transfixed, in the warm November night.  He poked at it occasionally with a stick, startling the dog that lay in the leaves next to him. 

“Go back to bed Charlie,” he mumbled, and the dog dutifully laid its head back down on the ground, though its ears still perked up occasionally as it parsed out the sounds beyond camp – leaves falling with each gust of wind, crickets chirping, an animal sneaking through the shadows.

Above the man and the dog a string of lights had been suspended between two trees and now, even with intermittent burnt out bulbs, they lit the perimeter satisfactorily, swaying in the pleasant, breeze.   He stared beyond them, at the silhouettes of leaves against the sky, wondering absently what planet was lit so brightly against the dark. Then he tilted his head to the left, looking into the distance at the milky blue-white illumination of the clouds, as the waning moon struggled to make itself seen.

A siren from a police car, or perhaps an ambulance, sounded in the background amidst a dull quiet roar of traffic noise.  He was never certain where that noise came from.  There wasn’t a major highway nearby – just Capital Boulevard, the main thoroughfare that brought folks out to the suburbs from downtown, and Main Street, a not-terribly-busy road either.  Neither were heavily traveled at night.  

Either way, it reminded him of Maryland where the house he grew up in had the same sound – the constant, dull roar of traffic from I-95 that ran several miles from his neighborhood.  It reminded him, too, of his grandparents’ house, off of Liberty Road, where he lay in their bed late into the night while the adults celebrated the holidays downstairs, and the noise was more constant and sirens were commonplace beyond their bedroom window.  It was oddly comforting to him.

He sighed, staring back at the fire, savoring the evening that was devoid of the day, devoid of progress, of electronics, of everything 21^st century.  Yet still, he felt compelled to pull out his phone just, he thought, to check the time.

A few moments later, perhaps because of the quickly approaching midnight hour or perhaps because the spell had broken, he decided the night must end.  He lifted himself out of the plastic Adirondack chair, poked the fire one more time, and threw his phone into it, before heading inside.  On his way, he unplugged the lights and called the dog, who lumbered along, nonplussed by the course of events.

Mornings

Well, school is back in session.  Track out has ended and here I find myself again, trying to regroup.  It's one thing I'm not sure I like about year round - the back and forth between lives - nine weeks in one mindset, three weeks in another.

In traditional calendar schools, one knows there will be one long summer break, and that is one life.  That is long, lazy summer days, endless time at the pool, kids home, lunches whenever, mornings in slow motion.  Then September comes and back to school and lunches and busy-ness that way and one can settle into it for a good nine months.

But in year-round it's constant motion and change.  Nine weeks in, time to get projects at home started and complete, lunches, papers, homework, field trips, volunteering, conferences, end of quarter celebrations, done.  Then kids home all the time and projects are put on hold.  A week easing into track out time, planning play dates around an ever-decreasing number of time slots in friends' busy lives, fitting in activities, packing and shopping for vacation, late nights for a short time, then easing quickly back to earlier bedtimes for track out ends in just a week, four days, tomorrow.

My head spins and it seems like as the kids get older, the time is quicker, crazier, busier.  I don't know that we ever really get to relax, not the way one does during summer vacation.

But then, isn't that the way the world goes now?  Few of us are fortunate enough to even be able to stay home.  This economy isn't very forgiving in matters of family time - it is nearly impossible to get by on one income and has been for a long time.  And for those of us who are able to (sort of) make it work, we still struggle to slow things down, if not for us, then for our kids, so that they might still, somehow, enjoy being a kid when the world is pushing them to be little adults.

That is my struggle with year-round in a nutshell.  Sure it's nice to have flexibility in vacation time, and it's nice for the kids to theoretically get a routine break, and sure, I'd probably get tired of the long summer days after a while.  But summer breaks force us all to slow down, remind us all to take a long deep breath, make us all learn to enjoy each other's company again.

Even in today's world where every kid is in a sport and parents enroll their children in travel leagues that become a whole family activity, and many families see both parents working, I can't help but feel that the year-round calendar complicates things, makes schedules crazier, imposes an unnecessary burden on our lives.  I wonder, in twenty years when society looks back and evaluates its success, what they will determine.

Rainbows

We left Myrtle Beach late yesterday afternoon.  It was 84 degrees and sunny, but as we approached the I-95 corridor the sky was looking stormy due to the line of thunderstorms crossing the Carolinas from west to east.  By the time we'd been on I-95 for 30 minutes or so, we were smack in the middle of the storms, my husband driving precariously through intermittent bands of heavy, windshield spattering rain as I desperately fiddled with the defrost mode to find the right setting that would allow a clear view of the road ahead.  The temperature reading on our dash was dropping quickly, first 75 degrees, then 70, then 64.

At some point, as we marveled at the beautiful sunshine to our left, the ominous deep gray sky in front, and the stormy mottled sky to our right, my husband remarked that he hadn't found the rainbow yet, for surely there would be one.

And shortly after, sure enough, it came in the form of a brilliant double bow, one whose clarity and depth of color I have never witnessed before.  The arc stretched out before us on the right and we were able to see the full bow, end to end, for many miles as we traveled.  I tried to snap some pictures, but the quality of color was lost.  It was something that had to be seen in person.

It was a lovely moment in a very stressful drive, in a very stressful and busy time in our lives, after a weeklong vacation that fit the description dubiously at best.  Rainbows always seem to portend good things, a purging of sorts of all bad thoughts and worries.

As the remnants of a long, hot, ho-hum summer pass on by us, I hope this rainbow does, indeed, mean good things.