Tag: Religion

Three incorrect assumptions police will make at my murder scene

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When you watch a lot of crime dramas, it’s inevitable that you’ll start to view your own surroundings with the eye of a police investigator.

Not a real detective, though. I have no idea how they actually do their jobs. I’m a trained flatfoot in the long illustrious tradition created by Arthur Conan Doyle; that is, clues are everywhere and you just have to notice them, and whatever you find has profound significance to the way the DB was killed.

See? I told you I watch a lot of these things. DB = dead body.

Now let’s take a quick look at my murder scene. There I am, dead. The circumstances are very suspicious indeed. Tras was in Venezuela so he’s not a suspect. All my children have airtight alibis as well. In other words, anyone that could legitimately want me dead is in the clear.

So let’s look at the evidence surrounding my person and see if we can find the killer.

  1. There’s a booklet entitled Pray the Rosary in my purse.

You know what that means. The victim is a Devout Catholic. Is there any other kind? Sort of like Observant Jew, the religions all have their built-in modifiers.

So naturally, since I’m a Devout Catholic, the killer must be someone from my parish. The priest is a likely suspect. Nuns are even better; after all the Beatles put “creeping like a nun” into our collective consciousness. So a creeping nun is a guilty nun. Case solved.

Keeping it real: I do have a copy of that booklet in my purse. I only vaguely remember how it got there. My mother may have given it to me, or I could have actually picked it up after Mass, where I go on Sundays. So give the poor nun a break.

An Enterprise to the jugular
  1. I was killed at home, and there’s a knife laying on the counter. 

It, therefore, must be the murder weapon. Test that thing for my blood (which has been wiped off, but you know they can still detect it). Because you know, a kitchen implement that’s out of place is a big giant clue that screams Murder Weapon.

Reality: There are very few knives, mixers or other kitchen implements of destruction that are actually put away in my non-gleaming kitchen. Any one of them could have killed me, according to this theory — even the bread maker. (It might have it in for me. Bread maker: I have my eye on you.) Anyway, in what universe does a home, especially with children, exist in a state of House Beautiful? Especially when its mistress is lying in a pool of blood.

  1. My car radio station was tuned to the local pop station.

This is practically definitive evidence that I’d been carjacked, held at gunpoint, forced to change the radio station off NPR, and brutally killed by a teenage terrorist.

After all, why else would my radio not be tuned to the news, which as anyone who lives with me, lives near me, or works with me knows, I never listen to anything else. If it’s news, I’m there. Also there for public radio shows, like This American Life, Fresh Air, Serial, or Invisibilia.

Oh I do occasionally listen to a couple of classic rock stations, which, shockingly, play songs from the ’80s, which as everyone knows, was just a couple years ago. (I graduated from college in 1985.) That stuff’s CURRENT, man. Sigh.

Anyway if Kanye West and/or Lady Gaga was blaring from the Prius speakers, somebody else was in the car. Case closed.

Reality: I’m currently obsessed with Uptown Funk. Every time I get in the car I turn to Your Pop Station in order to sing at high volume along with Bruno Mars. About 60 percent of the time I do. Don’t believe me — just watch! Heh.

Hot damn.

Another reality is that I’m most likely not the enigma I believe myself to be. Having children means you’ve got people to detail, in the most unflattering way possible, each of your habits, quirks of speech, how you laugh, how you answer or say good-bye on the phone, etc. Also to enumerate how many times you’ve told a particular story about your days in band.

So please, show this to the police when my lifeless body is discovered in one of the above scenarios. Contact my office, where I’ve got a current approved photo on file that can be given to the media.

This is totally true. I don’t want unflattering Facebook photos to be splashed all over the newspapers (are too still newspapers!) and the Action News.

What? I like to plan ahead.

Big shoes to fill

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Yesterday morning I was astonished to hear, along with the rest the world, via my AP News app on my phone that Benedict XVI is parking the Popemobile — permanently.

It seems unreal. Popes don’t resign! Popes pope until they poop out. There’s HISTORY here! Not since 1415 has one of them just decided, “eh, I’ve had enough of this gig. I no longer wish to preside over my own country and live in the Freaking Vatican.”

“Also, I wish for my head to be removed from the Pope Room tables at Buca di Beppo.”

Seriously, how could you give that up?

And then there’s the red shoes. I know, I know. I’ve made this point before. So sue me — shoes are an absorbing topic. And look what I found at the Pope Shoes Tumblr. (Can you believe it? a Tumblr devoted to Pope shoes?)

HOLY HUARACHES, BENEDICT! Sandals or slip-ons, textured leather to smooth, St. Peter’s throne shall never run out of options!

The pontiff was given this selection when he was touring Mexico last March. I ask you — how does one literally walk away from a job where people give you rooms full of shoes just for showing up?

All kidding aside, it’s because of his advanced age that Benedict has decided to give up the Holy Ghost. Early speculation had it that he determined that Pope John Paul II’s long years of decline were not a history he wanted to repeat. Sayeth the Associated Press:

Declaring that he lacks the strength to do his job, Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday he will resign Feb. 28 – becoming the first pontiff to step down in 600 years. His decision sets the stage for a mid-March conclave to elect a new leader for a Roman Catholic Church in deep turmoil.

The 85-year-old pope dropped the bombshell in Latin during a meeting of Vatican cardinals, surprising even his closest collaborators even though he had made clear previously that he would step down if he became too old or infirm to carry on.

In Benedict’s own words:

“After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age are no longer suited” to the demands of being the pope, he told the cardinals.

“In order to govern the bark (ship) of St. Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary – strengths which in the last few months, have deteriorated in me,” he said.

Now that everyone’s read The Davinci Code, there’s going to be several weeks of intense interest in Rome. Will plots be hatched? Will the fate of the world hinge on a decision of the College of Cardinals? Will Tom Hanks be involved?

We’ll all just have to wait for the other shoe to drop.

A plethora of tornadic activity

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We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog today for an update from the National Weather Service. There is a tornado WARNING in effect for the area directly above your head.

Well, maybe not directly, but that’s just what it feels like when you’re in the middle of a storm and suddenly herded into the basement. In my case, the basement in question was beneath the Cathedral and I was surrounded by about a thousand middle school students.

OK, so it only sounds like a thousand in a basement hallway after we’ve been sitting on the hard linoleum floor for 45 minutes.

But yes — this morning Tras and I were innocently attending Mass, which incidentally was the day that the middle schoolers at the parish school also had Mass. Blissfully singing along, we were — when abruptly the piano trailed off and Father announced, “There’s a tornado warning — let’s all head to the basement!”

When a Man of God speaks, you listen.

So we all trailed downstairs, speaking only in hushed, are-we-gonna-die tones. The children were instructed to sit in the hallway along the wall and, being a good Catholic school veteran myself (although my experience was directly with Catholic School Nuns) I did obediently sit along the wall with them. I yanked Tras down to the floor with me; he, being a newly minted Catholic, wasn’t quite as responsive to instructions from Catholic-school teachers.

It wasn’t our first foray into the basement this tornado season. Last Friday, the first Tornado Warning was issued for our county — a situation about which we were blissfully unaware until I received a telephone call from my mother.

An Aside

This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten a Tornado Warning from Mom. About 15 years ago, the phone rang around 11 o’clock at night. I was already in bed, exhausted from spending the day at the Oaks, which is (for the non-Kentuckians among us) the race for fillies the day before the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.

Oaks has become a tradition in Louisville as a more sedate day at the races than the Derby, which brings out millionaires and mouthbreathers alike for a day of partying at the Downs. Still, I’d spent a day dressed up and drinking mint julips; I was whipped.

Then, the phone. It was my mother’s voice, and when you hear  your mother’s voice when you’ve been awakened from a deep sleep, it sounds something like the Voice of God. In this case, the Voice said, “Get in the bathtub, Ellen. There’s a tornado headed right for your house!”

The bathtub instruction was added because, at the time, I was living in a house without a basement. But no matter, The Voice had instructed me to get to the bathroom, and get I did. Springing from bed and grabbing baby Claire (now 16) from her crib, I launched myself toward the bathroom. I don’t think I became fully conscious until I was almost in the tub itself.

Back to Last Friday

So anyway, Friday evening Mom again calls, this time with less panic-inducing instructions, which were to turn on the TV and listen to what they were saying. We were again under a tornado warning. Still the dutiful daughter, I complied, and we all sat around listening to the weatherman tell us about the incomprehensible radar information appearing on the screen, which was indicative of tornadic activity.

Now, I’ve heard the word “tornado” and experienced “tornado” first-hand since I was a small fry; I did, after all, live through the Super Outbreak that occurred throughout the midwest and southeast in April 1974. But in all that time, I’ve never heard it referred to as “tornadic activity,” and the term strikes me as frighteningly hilarious and ridiculously verbose.

Indeed, why have a tornado when you can have “tornadic activity”? Tornadic, tornadic, tornadic. My son Christopher remarked with a completely straight face, “I can honestly say I have never heard that word until today.” Me neither, son.

So when Tornadic Activity Weatherman announced Friday evening that the hot-zone for the aforementioned tornadics was between the two very roads which bound my subdivision, I herded my offspring, plus one visiting friend, down to the basement for some quality time with the basketball hoop, toy cars and swing.

No such luck this morning, when all I had to entertain me was Tras, the iPhone and some random middle-schoolers. As Tras and I updated the moving weather map on our Weather Bug apps, the girls sitting next to me wanted to know if I liked to shop. (What is it, tattooed on my forehead or something? Sheesh.)

They also asked if I had any cool apps — a rather non-so-subtle hint that they’d just love to get their textie little fingers on my phone, I’m sure — so I showed them the face melter.

They are cute girls, as you can see, even before I melted their faces. They quickly became bored with making polite chit-chat with somebody’s mom they didn’t really know, and went back to drawing on the paper the teachers provided. After a bit, they trooped reluctantly upstairs for school; we rejoined Father in the church after an hour-long gap in morning Mass. Soon we were back outdoors, which still seemed to contain most of Lexington.

Looking at the weather systems brewing west of here, I have a feeling this isn’t the end of the week’s tornadic activity. But maybe if I just say it repeatedly, I’ll scare all tornadic everything away. It’s scared me enough already.

Bless you, my children

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Today is Good Friday, a day I thought I’d invite Pope Benedict XVI to the blog to bless each and every one of you as you prepare your hearts, minds and souls for Easter Sunday.

I took this photo several years ago, obviously at Christmas time, at the Buca di Beppo in Louisville, a completely fun dining experience. The whole place is rigged out like a 1950s Italian-American Catholic family restaurant, or something. I’m not sure precisely what they’re trying to convey, other than hilarity. You also have to walk through the kitchen to get to the restaurant. Inexplicably, there are framed granny-panties on the wall of the women’s restroom.

Anyway, if you have a big crowd, like we did, you can request the Pope Room, which features a lot of pictures of popes both past and present. In the center of the table, behold, a bust of the current pontiff. The first time I went, John Paul II was the resident pope.

I’ve had popes on the brain since earlier this week, too, when I moped about Goober Shoes. My friend Alert Reader Holly — yes I totally stole that from Dave Barry — let me know that the Pope’s shoes actually have their own Facebook Fan page. (Yes, I “liked” it. What did you expect?)

Snap! They’re red and they’re gorgeous. They’re not wingtips, but they’re certainly wasted on a man for heaven’s sake. Well, he is The Man when it comes to the Catholic Church, so I’ll give him a pass. Wear those red shoes, Benedict!

Can’t you just imagine the Easter Bonnet with these babies?

Wait a minute. Why is it so hot in here? What am I doing in this handbasket?

Have a blessed Easter, everyone.