* CWF at church tonight. We're a small group, and everyone's vaccinated and careful, so it's one place where I elect to not wear a mask. (I did last month, after having traveled, and also having a number of students in class who were probably contagious - the only people I have "isolating" now are people who have some health concern where getting breakthrough covid would be bad)
I still mask up in class - lots of people whose status I don't know, and in stores, where I know even less who's around there.
In the prayer concerns we got to talking about a couple we know where one partner has a form of dementia, and it's really sad and difficult for the spouse, because the person has to be watched all the time, they are very restless. And I think about how, towards the end of his life, my dad would bemoan his physical disabilities, and how my mom had to do everything around the house as well as help him with things (e.g., putting on shoes) and she had always told him "Yes, but you still have your mind, I would rather it be this way than the reverse" and I think she was right about that, and how much harder it would have been on her if it HAD been the reverse, watching what this couple is going through.
This is why I cheer ANY positive development in preventing or slowing dementia in any form - it's a horrible condition.
* The end of this month I fill the pulpit again. (This is the curse of doing something once or twice and doing it will, I guess). I had held off on consenting as it is my BIRTHDAY the day I have to do it, but whatever - if I write the sermon early enough I could still take the Saturday before and go to the yarn shop and do a few other things (maybe even? if omicron continues to recede? and I can find one that's not absolutely slammed? Lunch in a restaurant?)
Anyway, it's Transfiguration Sunday and I think I can do that, the Bible passage for the day from the lectionary (the whole "let's build three houses and stay here FOREVER!" that Peter, bless his heart, says) has a lot of possible avenues for interpretation and discussion and I think I'm going to contrast the idea of the high-minded "mountaintop experiences" that a lot of people HOPE Christianity is alongside of the day-to-day effort (feeding the hungry, teaching kids, helping those who are sick or indigent) that Christianity actually is. And maybe bring in the idea that for a LOT of us, the past two years have been a lot of time down in "the valley" and very little in the way of mountaintop experiences, but that hopefully maybe we'll find some of those to sustain us. (I find I can do this sort of thing best when I bring my own experience in to it).
And in a month, he has another continuing ed weekend, so I'll be doing it again. The Gospel reading for that day is the parable of the Prodigal Son, which I already did once before - but I think this time I'm going to look at it from the perspective of forgiveness - the eponymous son asks for it and gets it, the father willingly grants it (because he thought his son was dead, even if that son basically said earlier to him "you're worth more to me dead than alive" when asking for his inheritance) and the oldest son* is in NEED of forgiveness, but maybe hasn't realized it yet.
(*and yes, I admit I often identify with that poor fellow; it does seem sometimes that I work hard and never get the offer of a fatted calf being killed for me...)
* A memory brought up on Twitter - someone talking about "Valentine's Day carnation sales at school" and I had blocked that from my mind. At my prep school they did that, only they delivered them at LUNCH so literally everyone in the 450-person or so school saw who did and did not get a carnation:
"Do you guys remember in middle school when you could buy carnations for people to be delivered in home room and the popular people got a ton, and the normal people had like one and the rest of us weirdos had to sit there while our school engaged in active bullying, a day for love"
-Amber Sparks
Yeah, I remember that. I remember always feeling slightly bad I never got one, I remember feeling bad for a friend the year she broke up with a boy she was "going with*" shortly before the day. I remember how we rolled our eyes over the girls who got six or eight (and perhaps, one of us cough-muttered "EASY!" as an explanation of why she got so many?)
(*I NEVER understood that. I understood "dating," where you went places together and did stuff, and I assumed on some level it was checking to see "could I be married to this person and do these things with them for the rest of my life" but "going together" was different - you just SAID you were, maybe you talked to each other a bit more between classes than otherwise, but.... you didn't really GO anywhere)
I will say they also did candygrams - little bags of wrapped cheap candy that could be sent to ANYONE (not as a romantic gesture, necessarily) so my friends and I sent them to each other with truly ridiculous things written on the tags - like Monty Python quotations or stuff. That was better.
But yeah, the carnations is another thing that I look back on and go "a lot of us felt really bad and yet no one ever seemed to notice or care." I mean, they could have done it but delivered them in a less-showy way (MAILBOXES. We all had mailboxes....it would have been easier, too. I think that was actually how the candygrams got delivered)
But yeah. Valentine's day is a weird and hard day for many people - for those of us unattached, it reminds us that we've somehow "failed" society's expectations; for people in a new-ish relationship it's probably worse because there's the whole "I can't screw this up" anxiety...It really was easier in grade school** when you sent dumb little cards with cartoon characters on them to your friends and had red Hi-C and a cupcake after class.
(**except I also remember one year one kid in my class saying point blank to me "I am only giving you a card because my mom said I could only hand out cards if I gave one to everyone in the class" and yeah some kids learn cruelty early).
* So yeah, V-day is not my favorite holiday. Which is sad because I really feel like we need a holiday about now, when it's been cold and grey for a while, and it's still many months until the good fall/winter holidays again. But as a single person it's hard to know how to do this day.
St. Patrick's day is not much better for me but at least I could make Irish soda bread.
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