Category: Family

[The following post requires some Latin to understand.  If you are a regular reader of this blog and you want an English rendering, please leave a comment.]

When the white smoke when up to announce the election of a new Pope last Wednesday, I was in a meeting.  I wrote a note to Scott Olsson next to me:  Habemus papam!

Scott replied:  Quis est?

I scribbled a moment and passed the note back:  Nescio.

Scott added the Roman numeral “I” and passed the paper back:  Nescio I.

Which didn’t turn out to be the name, but it was a great joke.

As the whole world knows, the college of Cardinals is gathered in Rome to choose the Church’s next Pope, which could happen as early as tomorrow.

As only a few people in the world know, Wyoming Catholic College’s Board of Directors is gathered in Denver to choose the College’s next president, which could also happen as early as tomorrow.

At a dinner tonight, I expressed my pleasure at the thought that both events could take place on the same day.  “Will there be white smoke when the new president is chosen?,” someone asked humorously.

“Oh yes,” the current president responded at once, flourishing a pack of cigarettes:  “White enough!”

I wrote a while ago about how Scott Olsson and I spun out on the highway going to Denver.  As our next trip approached, Scott sent a note to ask what time I wanted to depart.

Well, I wrote back, I want to go to Mass and have doughnuts afterward for my son’s birthday, but we could leave after that.

“Good thinking,” Scott shot back, “Let’s have our doughnuts this time before we get on the road.”

Today we celebrated Isaiah’s ninth birthday.  He is our mischievous one; I joke with Jacinta about starting a bank account for Isaiah to save up for bail money.  This meant he was the perfect kid for the tricksy, self-relighting birthday candles!

He actually had them all out at one moment, so even though they re-lit a moment later we gave him credit for blowing out his candles.  He thought the trick candles were a lot of fun and very funny, and gave us that unique Isaiah-chortle.

Incidentally, you can see that the cake is shaped like the letter I.  “That’s for ‘Ichabod,'” I explained to him.  [Chortle!]

My three-year-old nephew approached me today with this request:  “I want you to do the thing I don’t like you to do.”

Excuse me?

Turned out to be a tummy tickle, which was promptly delivered.

Yesterday I was looking at a model ship on Amazon.com, thinking about a possible birthday gift for David the ten-year-old (who will be eleven this summer).  Some stats on the beauty I was considering:

– 159 detailed parts

– Requires paint and glue (not included)

– Previous modeling experience recommended

That all seems pretty intense, I know, but here’s the kicker:

– Assembly time: 10 minutes.

No wonder previous modeling experience is recommended, if you’re supposed to have 159 parts painted and glued in 10 minutes!  Some of the reviewers (who claimed previous modeling experience) reported taking two months and more to finish.

Bernadette:  “Seven…six…five…four…three…two…one….”

Tina:  “Zorro!”

Many, many years ago, a fellow in my college dormitory by the name of Stan Grove tried to persuade me to like the music of Arvo Part.

[Brief digression:  It is customary to put an umlaut, which is like a sideways colon, over the letter “a” in Part, because this is how his name is spelled in his own language.  I do not think it necessary in English, since I can write Jackie Chan without drawing whatever Chinese figure stands for Jackie’s last name.  The “a”-with-umlaut is not an English character.  And anyway, I don’t know how to make my blogging software do it.]

Stan and his roommate, Owen Sweeney, would gang up on me and my roommate, Joseph Susanka, to introduce us to more daring forms of tonal (or atonal!) beauty.  At the time we were having none of it.

But now Stan Grove is a teacher on the faculty at Wyoming Catholic College, Owen Sweeney is the admissions director, and Joseph Susanka works in the fundraising branch, so it’s like a big reunion.  And today Stan brought up the subject of Arvo Part again.

Perhaps many years in the world have given me an open mind; perhaps those many years in the world have eroded my sense of absolute truth.  But whatever the case may be, I told Stan that I would buy Arvo’s setting of the passion of Christ and listen to it for Holy Week.

But I think I’ll leave the Mongolian chant alone.  That was just strange.

Long interested in the history of punctuation, I was fascinated as a boy by Victor Borge’s idea of phonetic punctuation.  As I became more aware of the world of computers, I learned about the emoticon, a strange new development beyond exclamation points and question marks.

And yesterday, for the first time, I was introduced to the phonetic emoticon.

Teresa the five-year-old and Tina the three-year-old have each begun adding a tongue click sound to the end of happy sentences.  Teresa:  “I’m doing three pages of math today [click]!”  Tina:  “Can you give me some raisins? [click]”  Really, really happy paragraphs will have as many as three or four clicks.

It seems to function more or less as a vocal smiley face–always accompanied by a visual smiley face, of course.  Now that I think of it, children have for many ages had the vocal equivalent of 🙁 and :-O.

Tina the three-year-old:  “Teresa and me are paying a dame!”

My reaction:  Paying her for what?

[English translation:  “Teresa and I are playing a game!”]