I left my sins in Chicago

At church today I was thinking: It is nice to have Confession settled for the time being.

When I was in Chicago I went to confession. It was thanks to my friend Lizzie. Lizzie is not exactly a churchgoer but she is responsible for getting me to confession twice in recent memory. It is because she has total situational awareness, as Howard puts it. Lizzie knows everything that is going on everywhere at any moment.

And twice when we have been to Mass together she has noticed there are confessions going on.

She whispers to me: "They're doing confessions."

And I say: "Oh!"

I never notice anything on my own. Anyway, Lizzie got me to confession at the Paulist Church in Manhattan where Leonard Pennario used to go. And last week when we were attending the Solemn High Mass at St. John Cantius she nudged me and whispered:

"They've got confessions going on."

I looked past the end of our pew and sure enough, there is this booth with the light on. Did the light mean the box was open, or that it was in use? That is always a puzzle when you are in a new place. Remember when I opened the door on that girl at St. Benedict's? Things like that can happen.

I waited and waited through the Kyrie and the Gloria and no one went in or out. So finally I took the plunge and went in.

It was strange to be going to Confession while Mass was in progress. I went when the sermon was just starting, or maybe it was during one of the readings. I know, shows how much I was paying attention. But anyway I dumped my sins on this priest and he was exceedingly nice. He told me to say a few prayers for my penance and he gave me a holy card. The card came out of the box like your receipt at an ATM. That has never happened to me before!

Then something happened that has stuck in my mind. He said to keep the card on me, which, I have been keeping it on my purse.

And he said, "Say a prayer for our country." I said I would.

He said, "We're in deep trouble. And it's going to get worse."

It was dramatic for a priest, in a confessional, to make such a pronouncement. I said I would pray. 

This priest, he could have meant any one of a million things, you know? I will tell you the thing about this country that worries me the most and be warned, this may be divisive. I worry about the growing number of people walking around like zombies with their cell phones. They are glued to these phones! They walk into traffic like cattle.

I think anything else we as a nation disagree about can be discussed and settled. But what do we do about these cell phone zombies? How do we fix this? I mean you are not dealing with thinking beings.

Anyway.

I guess I know now how I deal with these cell phone zombies.

I will pray for them!'

Goin' to Chicago

I never travel. I have hardly traveled since, in that freak occurrence, I went to see Leonard Pennario and stayed for three months. However last weekend I went with three friends to Chicago. We planned this trip a few months ago and all of a sudden here it was.

That is our hotel, the Palmer House, up above! We got a deal online. It wasn't much, as you can see, but it was home.

Our friend the jazz pianist Mike Jones was playing at a cool old place called the Green Mill and we caught his act there on Saturday night. On Friday night we hit a great down-home blues joint called Blue Chicago.

They had this great singer named Demetria something and the line we all took away from that show was:

"Where do ya think you're going with that suitcase in your hand?"

And it ended up that you better put that suitcase down because ain't nothing in it belongs to you. Ha ha!

We got a great dose of blues because it turned out it was the weekend of the Chicago Blues Festival. I really enjoyed hearing all this old stuff I used to love by Muddy Waters and Little Walter and Elmore James. Here we are outside the festival grounds by the fountain. That is me in the middle.

We went to Solemn High Mass at St. John Cantius. Here is my view from the pew.

I whispered to Lizzie: "We have a problem. I have to move to Chicago because I never want to go to Mass anywhere else from now on."

We got back late Sunday night and I was a zombie. I was hyper and couldn't sleep.

But as my friend Jane says that is a sign of a well-spent weekend!

Our friend in Guyana

This one friend of mine is in Guyana on vacation and before she left, I have to admit it, I initiated with her the most sophomoric conversation.

"Are you going to see the, ahem, compound?" I asked.

"No," she said.

"But come on! How can you not?"

I was such a pest!

Anyway. I forgot about my compound remarks the way I forget about every stupid thing that I say. Until today at the gym when I ran into a mutual friend.

She said she had teased our Guyana-bound friend mercilessly too! And she was more out of bounds than I was.

She said: "If they give you any Kool-Aid on the plane there, say no."

Like me, she asked our buddy if she was going to go visit the, ahem, compound, and was told no.

Our friend told her: "It is all forested over."

"But come on!" she said. "Look around. There's probably a paper cup or something somewhere on the ground."

We are so awful!

It is strange to look back on that whole Jonestown tragedy. I remember it kind of dimly from when I was a kid. My brother George remembered more about it. He remembered that a congressman had flown in to investigate, and was shot dead trying to leave.

Imagine, knowing in your last couple of minutes that you have run up against evil like that.

Reading up on what happened I learned a few things. One was that the Jonestown people moved there to get away from American capitalism. Now they would call themselves Occupy Guyana! Another was that Guyana is in South America. I do not think I could have told you where Guyana was.

One weird thing is that the incident lives on in the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid." If someone drinks the ...

... it means he has swallowed something nefarious.

Kool-Aid must hate that!! Especially since according to Wikipedia -- a long and lurid and fascinating account -- it was not even Kool-Aid, it was Flavor Aid. I remember Flavor Aid from when I was a kid. It was kind of a cheap knockoff. You had to provide your own sugar, I remember. My parents hated that.

Guyana is one of the few places where Leonard Pennario did not play, at least not to my knowledge. I believe he went his whole life without seeing the place.

I believe I will, too.

Institutainment

Today I am going to Chautauqua. I don't go there very often and every time I do, I can't quite make up my mind whether I like it there or not. I love the area, the Chautauqua County wine country, Bemus Point, the Hotel Lenhart. But once I get inside the gates of the Institution I sometimes start feeling a little funny.

One thing I do appreciate about Chautauqua is how weird it is.

There is nothing like it in the country. There can't be. This odd little gated community, frozen in time, like the setting for Booth Tarkington's "Seventeen." (Remember George's and my little book club that I talked about the other day? That is one book on which we disagree. I love it and he finds it annoying.)

You would think people would at least try to film movies at Chautauqua. It is like a turn-of-the-last-century Pleasantville. Those old WASP names. Pratt Street. The Miller Bell Tower. One thing I do love is Palestine Park. I have read that it is built to scale and everything. Who could make this stuff up?

And here is what really blows my mind when I contemplate the uniqueness of Western New York. We have not only Chautauqua, but Lily Dale. Is that ever a strange place!

You would think that Chautauqua would have cinched our gold medal in the Weirdness Olympics, but no, someone had to go and create this musty moldy old community of spiritualists and mediums (media?). A whole village of them! Why is this place not played up in horror movies? How does Hollywood miss it? Just like Chautauqua, I am sure there is nothing like it in the world. There cannot be.

As a trad Catholic I am forbidden to dabble in the occult, and to tell you the truth I am happy for the excuse not to do it. I have enough problematic people in my life. Why do I want to go usher in ghosts and goblins?

What about "The Fall of the House of Usher"?

But I did have my (very few) encounters with Lily Dale. Growing up around here you cannot completely avoid it. Once in Lily Dale I went to Inspiration Stump (now there is a place name that has to be unique in the world). And to my astonishment I was contacted by Elmore James, the dead bluesman.

Not only that, but a couple of years ago, when I went to Lily Dale for a Halloween story I was writing, I am pretty sure that a medium predicted my book on Leonard Pennario.

But that is a story for another day.