Good Friday

Back in the day we had fish every Friday. Fish on Friday, that's what was for dinner. We fasted from eating meat. Somehow it didn't seem like such a sacrifice. Yesterday I bought some ocean red snapper on sale for $6.99, and tonight we will have that, brown rice, collard greens, and Brussel's sprouts. I'll deglaze the pan with white wine, butter, and add some capers on top, herbs of Provence, and fresh lemon as always. Geraldine loves red snapper.

I completely spaced out ash Wednesday. Growing up in a community with a lot of devout Catholics it always seemed a little pagan and morbid to be walking around with ashes on my forehead, and hundreds of other people as well. Ashes to ashes, come on. Everywhere you went, the grocery store, barbershop, people with ashes on their heads, which always turned to smudges. I think a lot of people thought it was a sacrilege to wash the ash off too soon. I washed mine off as soon as I got out of church.

If you went to Catholic school you attended church at least two times a week in addition to Sunday mass. Ash Wednesday signified another morning of mass for Catholic school kids. Good Friday also signaled another morning of boring mass. Easter week was a guarantee 4 mass week. These masses were all in Latin, which you had to learn before confirmation. Certified would have been more like it. Certified fucking crazy for putting yourself through all that ritualistic bullshit. Who said kids don't have it hard.

Tuition for Catholic school in my day, 150 AD, was $20.00 a year, plus books and uniforms. Private school for twenty bucks a year. That's why we did it. Today it costs a minimum of fifteen thousand a year to attend private school. That's inflation for you. The price us kids paid was having to suffer through mass a minimum of three times a week. If you had a bunch of deaths in the parish you might have to attend church every school day.

My mother never went to mass on Sun. She worked at Emily Shaw's restaurant in Pound Ridge N.Y., an hour commute, on a good dry day, from our home in Danbury. When the head priest in our parish, St. Gregory the Great, asked me why my mom didn't attend mass on Sunday she said, "You ask him if he waits tables till 3:00 AM if he's going to go to mass on Sunday, and then tell him I do my praying to God in bed." That's just what I told him. He was not happy. I in turn had to go to mass to attend school, so I got a ride with my cousins, hitch hiked, or the old man dropped me off and picked me up. Either way I went.

I didn't like fish then as much as I do now. I could eat fish almost everyday now, and no church today. It is a good Friday.

That's it. No blog tomorrow, just the fact, and a stupid Easter story for Sunday. Maybe some photos. We are going to brunch on Sunday, no cooking.


Peace,

Make Food/Not War

What I ate today:

Breakfast: Cereal w/soy, blueberries, banana and black tea & 1 sugar

Lunch: Rice with collard greens and 2 chicken Dijon sausage

Snacks: nuts/raisins

Dinner:  Red Snapper (as described above), brown rice, collards, Brussels sprouts
              water

Exercise: 5.5 miles walking, no running today