Martha, Mary, and online Mass

Today being Sunday I got the trusty tablet and I heard Mass from St. John Cantius in Chicago. Remember, that was the church I went to that time where they gave me a holy card in the confessional.

I tuned in to this Mass last week and I liked it. It is live at 9:30 Chicago time, 8:30 Buffalo time. It is a Low Mass. There is a High Mass but it is something like noon, and that gives other things time to get in the way. One of these Sundays I will try the High Mass but today was not that day.

Instead I parked myself at the dining room table with the tablet. The Wi-Fi is good in there.

Everyone tells you to watch Mass online but it is easier said than done. Do you stand when you are supposed to? Do you kneel? How do you behave? I have decided the best thing to do is sit with my missal and I follow along. St. John Cantius is a huge and gorgeous church, rather like our dear departed St. Gerard's. I found myself just enjoying the pleasure of it all. It is actually a luxury to be able to follow along so carefully. At our usual in-person Mass I am so distracted by coffee hour and choir it is hard to think.

After all these years of being a Martha...

... I am turning into a Mary!

Mary is the one in the center of the picture at the top of this post. With her prayer book before her, like me.  I love the details and humor in the picture. The elaborate buffet in the foreground. The people eating in the other room. The birdcage! Of course there is a birdcage!

It's sweet how the artist captures St. Martha complaining about doing all the work and St. Mary just sitting there piously, having chosen the better portion. I always did have sympathy with Martha. Someone has to do the work. Also you have to remember that Martha is a great saint, as is Mary, and there is a high place in heaven for them both.

I did a little digging and the artist is a Renaissance German master, Georg Friedrich Stettner. I should have guessed German. We Germans, we love our food. And everyone in the picture looks German. I mean look at Mary, with her blond hair. I love the palette, the muted tones contrasting with that beautiful rich red. Nice work, Herr Stettner! Terrific job.

Back to my Low Mass. I am sitting there and Howard comes in to feed Jeoffry.

"Don't pay any attention to me," he said, getting on with his work.

So it was funny, all there was, was this silence. A Low Mass is quiet! There was nothing but silence and whispering and occasionally the tinkling of a bell. Once in a while a floorboard groaned.

Howard said, "I like the sound of this."

I did, too!

I can tell you what the Gospel was about. Go on, ask me. I know what the Secret Prayer was. I knew that it was the Fourth Sunday of Easter, alleluia, alleluia.

I miss being at actual Mass, that goes without saying. The situation can make me terribly uneasy when I think about it because I have not seen the like in my lifetime and I pray that when this is all over I never shall again.

But you cannot and should not ignore the blessings that are there!

You know you wanna... Go to Lackawanna

Today being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception I went to noontime Mass at Our Lady of Victory Basilica. It is only 10 minutes from downtown! Plus you get to drive over the Skyway. An experience I love!

Other people take pictures of the church. And the church is amazing. But me, I am different. I take pictures of the gift shop! The gift shop is where it all happens. That is a picture up above that I took in the gift shop. You can buy any saint you can think of!

My gift shop fixation reminds me of the Theodore Roosevelt Historic Site which I got to visit last week as part of the Buffalo News series 100 Things Every Western New Yorker Should Do At Least Once. It was a fascinating place but still I could not wait to get to the gift shop! And when I was there I bought a hat and a scarf. I wore them today to Our Lady of Victory.

After I got out of the gift shop I did take this brooding picture of the outside.

Remember my earlier adventure in Lackawanna? Who could forget it? But this trip was eventful too.

After Mass and the museum and lingering for a long while in the gift shop I drove a little around South Buffalo and saw the house where I lived when I was very little. When I was very young, my family lived on the first floor and my grandfather lived upstairs. My earliest memory dates from this house, at 193 Choate Ave. I remember being held in my grandfather's arms on the staircase in the back of the house and looking out a window. There was a star and the light from it was emanating as if it formed a cross. You know how that works, the window is streaked or something. And so you see this cross shape.

Today, passing the house, I slowed down and sure enough, there was this window at the back of the house. It was kind of between the first and second floors.

And I thought: That was the window!

That was where we were, my beautiful grandfather and I!

That was where it dates to, my oldest memory. That is where I looked out and saw that star. It is fun to think of what your oldest memory is. That is mine. What is yours?

My grandfather, whose name was George J. Kunz just like my dad, died when I was 9. He owned a men's clothes store in Lackawanna which I began thinking about while I was in Lackawanna today, at the Basilica. This being Buffalo -- well, Lackawanna -- I got talking with strangers after Mass and they were interested in where my grandfather's shop was.

I wonder if there is any Leonard Pennario connection with Lackawanna. I have not heard that there was. But there must be! I bet he was at the basilica once or twice.

Whether he did or not, I will have to go back there. A 10-minute drive, and you get to see this amazing place?

I am in!

Paging the patron saint of the Internet

It is the first day of November, All Saints Day, anciently known as the Feast of All Hallows. Which makes me wonder:

Who is the patron saint of Web logs?

Who is the patron saint of the Internet?

It is St. Isidore of Seville!

I am reading St. Isidore's bio which says that he was born in Cartegena and his siblings were all saints too. They are Leander, Fulgentius and Florentina and he is often known as the Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages.

Here is a story I like.

Once, when Isidore was a boy, he ran away from home and from school. His brother Leander, some twenty years older than he, was his teacher, and a very demanding one. While Isidore sat by himself out in the woods, loafing, he watched some drops of water falling on a rock. Then he noticed that the dripping water had worn a hold in the hard rock! The thought came to him that he could do what the little drops of water did. Little by little, by sticking to it, he could learn all his brother demanded, and maybe even more.

That is what my Pennario book work is like. Little by little, one drop after another, and we wear down the rock.

It is the reason I have not been Web logging, getting my act together with the writing I have to do. I have been up early and up late and in between the time flies. But now in the spirit of St. Isidore I am picking the Web log back up, and I will be posting every day, God willing, and St. Isidore interceding.

That is St. Isidore of Seville at the top of this post! Hahaha... I did a Google search on St. Isidore and this gentleman kept appearing:

And I was thinking: He, while doubtless very pious, does not look like the Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages!

Then I learned that this was St. Isidore the Farmer. I did a search for St. Isidore of Seville.

Ah. This was more like it!

That looks more like him! That statue presides over Spain's National Library, in Madrid.

St. Isidore of Seville, pray for us.

And for our books and our Web logs!

A midsummer night's dream

What a beautiful night! The air smells so smoky. It is the longest day of the year.

My sister Katie and my niece Rosie were over and so was my brother George and we all sat on the back porch tasting wine and eating cheese and crackers and fried rice. Then later George and I went out and saw this new bar that just opened in Black Rock.

And earlier I worked and worked on the book. And before that I went to Zumba.

A wonderful day!

I was thinking about the longest day of the year which is today. When George and I went to the bar in Black Rock it was 9:30 but still light.

Today was traditionally the Feast of St. John the Baptist, or Johannestag. It is famous from Wagner's "Die Meistersinger" where you hear them in church singing a chorale in honor of the feast day. Of course if you look at the Catholic calendar now, the feast of St. John is a few days away. Now it is June 24. Probably somebody changed it. They changed a lot of saints' days after Vatican II. Talk about a boneheaded thing to do, but they did it.

Anyway I always think of June 21 as Johannestag. It is also Midsummer Night as in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Just as in "Die Meistersinger," all this insane drama takes place in this one loopy day.

I was thinking also of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" but now that I think about it, I know the action in that opera also takes place all in a single day, but I am not sure it is this particular day.

In "Die Meistersinger," it is June 21. You can hear the chorale in honor of Johannestag starting at about 8:40.



And now the days start getting shorter.

A sobering thought.

Let us banish it!

Green Day

This weekend, going garage sale-ing, I garage saled down to my very last dime! It was literally true. By the end of the day I was borrowing from my friend Lizzie.

Lizzie and I are a garage-sale team and every week one of us goes broke and ends up borrowing from the other. Last time she borrowed from me and this weekend I borrowed from her.

One prize purchase was a set of 1970s curtains which I talked down from $3 to $1. I drive a hard bargain! I haggle like a Moroccan in the square. They are, or were, bathroom curtains. We know that because they came with a shower curtain in the same pattern, green and yellow and white.

But now they are office curtains! There they are up above, in their glory, next to the Leonard Pennario desk.

They will stop prying eyes from intruding on my work!

I like hanging curtains like that, one panel a window, bohemian style. And the curtains feel like summer. They are very clean and they smell good and waft around in the breeze.

I think I will use the shower curtain as a tablecloth.

We also went to a Plant Sale and the proprietor took us into his backyard to show us his koi pond.

It is amazing, this koi pond in this little Kenmore back yard! Here is a closeup.

Such a wonderful day of going through people's stuff and admiring things and just going where the day leads you. All these shades of green and yellow.

And the blossoms were out.

Here are my saints in the morning sunlight.

It is spring at last!

Rome weighs in on my statue

Remember St. Luke? That is he up above.

I have just received confirmation from Rome that the statue in question is, indeed, St. Luke.  My friend Brendan who is in Rome sent me a note and he said that is who the statue is, without a doubt.

Which thrilled me! I mean, I knew that already, thanks to my friend Missy.

But to hear it from Rome! It makes me feel I should get a plaque or something and affix it to St. Luke, saying that this authentication from Rome was received. It would be just what he needs. I like that statue, you know? I like its simple, almost primitive nature.

Elsewhere on the St. Luke front, I glued on his head. So now he is headless no more.

I cannot believe that what with Leonard Pennario and everything I got around to gluing on St. Luke's head. I mean, it was not a difficult job. But I never get to anything like that. Finally I have!

That is why these days St. Luke and St. Joseph are not the only ones around the house with a halo.

I have one, too!

Mystery saint identified

The mystery saint has made his identity known. He as not a martyr after all!

He was indeed holding a quill, such as would indicate an evangelist, and not a palm frond, which would suggest a martyr.

Not only that but near his feet, pointed out my friend Melissa Grace, was an artist's palette. And the shield shows, and only Melissa Grace would know this, a winged ox.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, our saint is St. Luke.

St. Luke was a physician and a painter. I had not known about the painter part. Apparently in Italy or somewhere is a painting of the Madonna and Child painted by St. Luke.

Imagine that.

"That is a nice picture over your couch. Who painted it?"

"St. Luke."

St. Luke was Syrian, as I understand it. He was the only non-Jewish evangelist and he reached out to the Gentiles. His skills as a physician supposedly helped keep St. Paul in one piece even though St. Paul was stoned and otherwise left for dead on several occasions. One thing that is funny about this is remember the statue's head had been broken off? I have to reattach it. I will have to play the physician to St. Luke, the physician. I will have to mend him as he mended other people. That idea makes me kind of nervous.

This cool St. Luke site has a bunch of interesting factoids such as that St. Luke is the patron saint to -- in alphabetical order -- artists, bachelors, bookbinders, brewers, butchers, doctors, glass makers, glassworkers, gold workers, goldsmiths, lacemakers, lace workers, notaries, painters, physicians, sculptors, stained glass workers and surgeons.

What about Luke Russert?

I am sure he knows all about St. Luke, being named after him.

Up at the top is a beautiful painting of St. Luke by James Tissot. We have mentioned Tissot before.

Here is a famous painting by Tissot at our Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It is a painting of me and Pennario going to the opera when I was in California. Tissot asked if he could paint us as we went in to see "Tannhauser" and after some hesitation we said yes.

There must be towns and countries that St. Luke is patron to, as well. We will find them at a later date. Perhaps on the Feast of St. Luke which is Oct. 18.

For now, I am just glad to have this saint identified. I was able to say, "St. Luke, welcome to my home."

The Internet is the answer to everything!

The mystery martyr

My brother is passing on to me all this Catholic paraphernalia that was in my mom's house. It is known that my house is hospitable to saints and so they are appearing on my doorstep in droves.

One recent arrival is the sweet gentleman pictured above.

Who is he? He holds a quill which makes me think he is one of the Evangelists -- Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Although now that I think of it a lot of saints probably hold quills.

He holds a shield which, here is a closeup.

These are all clues. Saints usually have clues as to who they are. If they are martyrs they will often have a palm frond and/or the instrument of their execution. St. Catherine will have a wheel and St. Stephen will have a pile of stones. Here is a fascinating list I have been wasting time with, er, studying.

On the bottom of my mystery statue it says it was made in England. His head has come off, George pointed that out. Right now it is just kind of sitting there. I have to glue it into place.

Hmmm. I have done a Google image search of statues of the four evangelists and have found none of them carrying a shield. And now I read that a quill looks a lot like a palm frond which would indicate martyrdom. Now that I look at it I think it is a palm frond.

But zut alors, I am Googling around for "saint with palm and shield" and have found none.

However I did find Palm and Shields Liquor, in Fresno, Calif.

Pictures of liquor stores also have clues as to what they are. In this case the clues add up to, it is time to get back to work on my Pennario project, mystery saint or no mystery saint.

Can anyone identify my new saint? Someone out there in Blog-O-Land must know.

I sure do not!

The stalker

Howard and I were in West Seneca this week where we passed Fourteen Holy Helpers and stopped in the Market in the Square in Southgate Plaza. I must have been there before but I could not remember it.

Haha... my computer is questioning the word "Southgate." It has it underlined in red. That is one way you can tell your computer was not made in Buffalo. The Southgate Plaza has been around since 1955. The same year that Leonard Pennario recorded "Concertos Under the Stars"! A most excellent year.

Here is a picture of me being a happy camper in the produce department.

Howard put that picture of me up on Facebook and it is funny how many of our friends thought I was buying food for Thanksgiving or some other big feast.

"Why do they think that?" That is what I said to Howard.

He said, "No one goes into a store and buys a huge stalk of celery."

Well, how else do you buy celery? That is just how I shop!

I buy a lot of food. We burn through it, too. If you look closely at my cart you will perceive a 10-pound bag of onions. They were cheaper than at the Clinton-Bailey Market.

Barely visible in the blurry foreground is a pile of cabbages as big as basketballs. That is where I am heading with my cart!

I like the Market in the Square. I can't remember going there before but I will be back.

It thinks big the way I do!

Back in the saddle

Yikes, look at the date! I have been away from Blog-O-Land for a while. What happened was, my mother passed away. It was a brief illness but a lot of ups and downs and it took me a while to be able to focus.

I wanted to write about it on the Web log because my mom was a major character on it even if she did not exactly know it. And I thought I should explain. But every time I sat down to do it I just kind of blanked.

However.

Now I am finding my equilibrium.

It is on the feast of St. Anthony when you find things! That is St. Anthony pictured above. Isn't that a beautiful picture? It is by one of the saint's namesakes, Antonio de Pereda.

As I regain my equilibrium I am powering ahead with the Leonard Pennario project. It kind of slowed in the last few months because of concerns over my mom but this is good news, even in the midst of my troubles, I got in a few minutes here and there, and things turned up. One of them was a great photo of Pennario with the great soprano Lotte Lehmann. My book is going to be full of pictures and this one is a real rarity.

Now with the incessant rain I should be able to get more done. We do not mind rainy days here at the Leonard Pennario desk. We pop open a can of Shur-Fine Diet White Birch Beer and we get to work.

Plus there comes a point when, whatever has happened to you, something comes along that jolts you out of it. For me it happened today because I realized, to my horror, that my car registration was due.

I mean it expired today!

What to do? What to do? Ah, I could pay online, right? I went out and wrote down my license plate number. I found my way to the site. I punched in information and credit card numbers.

Then I hit "submit." An appropriate word. You submit to the government. 

I wait for my confirmation. But then ... but then ... the stupid thing buzzes me back saying something like: "The program needed to process your payment is not working. Please try back in at least half an hour."

I tried again. It happened again. I hung my head. Clearly this was hopeless. And here it was the last day. I had thought the thing expired on June 15 but it was June 13, zut alors. 

What if I had to go to the DMV?

I scoured the house for my car registration paperwork. If I could find the form they sent me, maybe I could just mail it, and not drive before the new registration arrived. I could take it to the post office tonight. I could say I had tried online and it had not worked. I could --

I could not find the paperwork. 

Finally I decided to try online one more time. It was the Feast of St. Anthony. St. Anthony has to do with finding things, not making computer programs work, but he had helped me out so many times I thought maybe he might do it again.

I typed everything in again. I hit "submit." I screwed my eyes shut. "Please, St. Anthony," I said. "Make it go through. Please."

And it did!!

I opened my eyes and there was my confirmation and Temporary Registration, ready to be printed out.

How bad can life be when a man born in the 12th century, a Doctor of the Church, a disciple of St. Francis of Assisi, lets you know that you have his ear? I ask you.

We rejoice with the St. Anthony Chorale.

Whose feast was it, anyway?

One thing bugs me about St. Valentine's Day and that is how you turn on Catholic Radio, which I sometimes do in my car, and they tell you it is the feast day of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.

That happened to me yesterday on the way to work. Here it was, Valentine's Day, and they did not even mention St. Valentine!

I did, ahem, research (meaning, I got on Google) into the situation, and my fears were confirmed, that Valentine was one of the victims of this move the Catholic Church made in 1969, I think it was, to remove certain saints from the calendar because not a lot is known about them.

That downsizing hit St. Christopher too. That is why now you have all that talk about, "I thought St. Christopher was un-sainted."

Nothing against Sts. Cyril and Methodius. They are certainly photogenic.

And I understand Pope John Paul II named them co-patron saints of Europe. Europe needs help these days! So we must treat these two with respect.

But sometimes you just want to bean the Catholic Church. It is not as if we know nothing about St. Valentine, for heaven's sake. We know plenty about him. My friend Brendan is in Rome and just yesterday he posted a picture on Facebook of himself visiting St. Valentine's relics. There was St. Valentine's skull! I saw it.

And his feast day has such tremendous brand recognition, going back centuries. Shakespeare mentioned St. Valentine's Day in "Hamlet." Chaucer mentioned it.

But oh -- that is a Pennario expression, but oh -- he was a big problem, Valentine, this great Roman saint. Have to get rid of him, you know? Have to create all this confusion.

It would be really nice to turn on old Catholic Radio and hear, "Today is the feast of St. Valentine."

Oh well.

Whoever's feast day it was yesterday, Howard and I feasted. We got the Sweetheart Special from the Sloan Supermarket and I added a few touches of my own. One was this Cranberry-Pumpkin Cake. It sounds Thanksgiving-ish but I love the flavor of cranberry and orange, plus the red of the cranberries is perfect for St. Cyril and Methodius Day. I used fresh cranberries, not dried. I got away with it.

It did not rise like a cake but it is like really good, tangy bar cookies.

Delicious with today's coffee!

A visit from St. Nick

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas. Happy St. Nicholas Day! That is a picture above of St. Nicholas in his bishop's robes.

The other day in The Buffalo News we published this essay by a kid who has begun celebrating St. Nicholas Day. This was funny, at the end of the essay she was writing that St. Nicholas reminded her of Santa Claus. Both of them show up in the night and leave you presents, etc.

Um, honey, St. Nicholas and Santa Claus are, like, the same person?

No one had ever explained that to her!

I am not blaming her. I am honestly just floored sometimes by the things that are not -- how do you say it -- universally understood. Everyone should understand that Santa Claus is St. Nicholas, you know? As in "A Visit From St. Nicholas."

Just like everyone should know that Leonard Pennario was America's greatest pianist. Well, educating people on that is up to me.

Here is a bit of trivia I bet you did not know about "A Visit From St. Nicholas," the famous poem that begins "'Twas the night before Christmas" and goes back to, yikes, 1823. Can you believe it is that old? It is holding up rather well.



This is a nice reading except the reindeer are supposed to be "Donner and Blitzen," not "Donder and Blitzen." Donner and Blitzen is German for Thunder and Lightning.

But that is not the trivia I was talking about.

Here is what I love: The poem was written by Clement Moore who was a professor at Columbia University. He was friends with Lorenzo da Ponte, who collaborated with Mozart on "Don Giovanni," "The Marriage of Figaro" and "Cosi fan Tutte."

Should your day need jump starting the way mine does, take two minutes to hear the famous Champagne Aria from "Don Giovanni" sung by my favorite singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.



Hahahahaa! Is that marvelous or what?

Lorenzo da Ponte was born in the Jewish ghetto of Venice but came to America after Mozart died. That is where he met Clement Moore and my understanding is that the two poets hit it off.

I like playing this "six degrees of separation game." Who knew who.

Probably if we could go back far enough we would only be six degrees away from St. Nicholas.

And maybe Santa Claus too.

King for a day

Today is the Feast of St. Wenceslaus! Every day an email bounces up into my inbox to tell me whose saint's day it is. That is St. Wenceslaus up above looking over Prague. He is the patron saint of the Czech Republic.

Now all day I am going to have "Good King Wenceslas" on my brain.



St. Wenceslaus was born in Prague. But I get the idea "Good King Wenceslas" is an Irish song. The Irish Rovers do a good version.

There is a joke someone wrote on that video.

"How does St. Wenceslas order his pizza?
"Deep pan, crisp and even."

Ha, ha! Pennario would have loved that joke. He loved puns.

How adorable is this?



I am reading up on St. Wenceslaus and I see he was murdered by his brother, Boluslaw. He is supposed to inspire Catholics to political activism. Haha, that would go over big in Buffalo, if I got into political activism!  Variants of Wenceslaus' name are Vaceslav and Vaclav. He is the patron saint of the Czech Republic, hence Vaclav Havel.

St. Wenceslaus died in 935 in a place with a wonderful name, Alt-Bunzlau. On Sept. 28. That is today! Saints' days are often the day the saint died. His body was hacked to pieces but three years later his brother repented and moved the body to Prague's Church of St. Vitus. If you are ever in Prague you must take that opportunity to visit St. Wenceslaus' relics and pay your respects.

The Feast of St. Wenceslaus sounds to me as good a reason to start the Christmas season.

A good way to kick it off would be to open a beer! Besides being the patron saint of the Czech Republic, St. Wenceslaus is a patron saint of brewers.

We must drink to him.

Borne back ceaselessly into the past

There is this wonderful smoky smell in the air tonight. It makes me remember when I was a kid and used to go to this medieval war down in rural Pennsylvania where there would be campfires going all night long. It looked like the picture up above.

And in the morning you would wake up to the sound of chain mail.

Ah, youth!!

I feel kind of sorry for people who do not have those memories and yet they are very much in the majority and I am in the minority, remembering something like that. Here is something funny from that war, which was called the Pennsic War, and it was part of the Society for Creative Anachronism. A few priests belonged and that meant that on Sunday you got your choice of Masses. The priests got into the spirit of things and so one year you could go to a medieval Latin Tridentine Mass or a Byzantine Rite, the rite of Saint John Chrysostom. I seem to remember there was a third Mass too but it was just a normal modern Mass and only squares went to that.

I went to the Byzantine Rite. I always remember the priest's vestments. They were a beautiful powder blue, trimmed with gold. He explained them all to us beforehand. That was a nice priest, you know? I was a lame-brained teenager and I was just sitting there like this...

(you knew that was coming...)

... but it was nice of him, to take our interest in medieval history into all these matters deep and religious. He also explained about the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom who, attention music scholars, was one of the saints Mozart was named after. Mozart was born on January 27 which is the feast of St. John Chrysostom and that is why his name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb. Not Amadeus! He was baptized Gottlieb. Sorry everyone. Well, the good news is, it means the same thing.

All I remember of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom was there was one line that impressed me: "Oh, God, forgive me for I have sinned without number." I still think of that.

That line sure applied to me. I sure had sinned without number!

Here is a Polaroid I have held onto of me attending the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

Ah, Society for Creative Anachronism! One of the many things I did before I met Leonard Pennario and had to put aside childish things.

Ah, memories brought about by a night with a smoky smell in the air!

Out with the old

Today is a very important day in the calendar. Extremely important.

It is the feast day of St. Harvey!

OK, I am just kidding. Well, it is the feast day of St. Harvey. I just looked up which saints were today and he was one of them. Who knew there was a St. Harvey? I wonder what he is the patron saint of.

Perhaps the patron saint of rabbits.

Or Harvey Wallbangers.

Where was I?

The importance of today.

It is ... it is ...

... Large Trash Day!

Howard and I took out the box spring that has been upstairs forever, leaning against the highboy. That is a word I love, highboy! But I have mentioned that before.

We had to waltz this thing down the stairs, turning it this way and that. It was an adventure with trying to get it under the ceiling fan and around the landing and finally -- yay! -- out the door.

When you get out the door the adventure is only just beginning. That is because we live on a well-traveled street. Whenever you do a single thing there are inevitably cars lined up outside at the light, stereos pounding, drivers rubbernecking.

All the drivers are watching you take your large trash out to the curb, and trying to figure out where they know you from, and checking out what you are throwing out, and deciding whether they need it.

The best is when someone is throwing out a toilet.

Ha, ha! That is classic! But any item is worthy of note.

"We saw you taking your mattress out to the curb." Someone, somewhere, will tell me that today.

That is Buffalo!

On the bright side, it is rare that here it can be not even eight in the morning and already I have accomplished something. These household tasks, they kill you, you know? Here I am struggling to put every minute into Leonard Pennario and meanwhile that stupid box spring has just sat there, and sat there. And there is junk in the upstairs hall. And the bishop's weed shall inherit the garden.

Oh well. I always think of Christ saying, "The poor will always be there."

The house will always be there!

Luckily, now minus the box spring. With which, I just looked up St. Harvey and found he is responsible for many miracles.

My box spring out for Large Trash Day is now one of them!

Lost and found

For a week I have had St. Anthony on loan from my church and now it is time to bring him back. Tomorrow morning, I have to remove him from the sun room and bring him back so he can go to his next home, which is with Steve from the choir and his wife, Trish.

I wish I could have St. Anthony for another week!

Last year I got away with that but this year I cannot, alas and alack.

Every year there are three statues of St. Anthony from our church that go on the road. We get to keep him in turns for one week each, and this all rolls on until the Feast of St. Anthony, which is June 13.

I feel St. Anthony has brought blessings on my house. The very first day he was here he found several things that were lost! Well, I believe he found them. Unfortunately he was not able to find the hour we lost for Daylight Savings Time. That hour stays lost until next fall!

Above is St. Anthony dwarfing my statue of Our Lady of Victory. They occupy a makeshift altar on a radiator in my sun room. I feel like such a dork, writing this! If you have a Buddhist or Hindu altar that is cool but if you have a Catholic altar, you sound like some 95-year-old Italian woman.

Between St. Anthony and Our Lady of Victory, if you look sharp, you may spot a Candle-Lite Cinnamon Pecan Swirl candle. It is my favorite and so I keep one in this sacred space. I should put a Pennario record out there too! Nothing but the best.

St. Anthony has such a sweet face on that statue. It is easy to forget he died at only 36.

I hate to lose him!

Heigh ho, silver

You, there, prepare me a place in Heaven. The sun has hardly set on Ash Wednesday and already, I have done my Lenten penance.

Last night I come home from Ash Wednesday Mass and call my mother because I had promised to. And my mother told me:

"If I pass on, don't go looking for the silver. I've given it all to St. Vincent de Paul."

"Oh," I said. "OK."

So I am sitting there digesting this news. And my mother goes blithely on: "I had it all covered up in case of a break-in. This is a load off my mind, having it gone."

I am thinking: You could have confided in me, that it was bothering you having this silver around, you know?

I could have figured out a way around that problem!

"It was only worth $500," my mother said. "So, St. Vincent de Paul got $500 out of it."

Above is a painting of St. Vincent de Paul looking up the silver and figuring how much it is worth.

I do not mean to sound irreverent. St. Vincent de Paul is practically a member of the family. He is the founder not only of the St. Vincent de Paul thrift stores which, you know me, I frequent, but he is the founder of the Vincentian Fathers and Brothers who educated Howard at Niagara University.

Wherever there is a Catholic family there is talk of St. Vincent de Paul. When Leonard Pennario passed on, the name of St. Vincent de Paul was loud in the land. There were a few things of Leonard's I grabbed away from St. Vincent de Paul for sentimental reasons, the bathrobe I am wearing right now being one of them. I think the good saint forgives me.

But this silver, this transaction was too swift for me.

Oh well. You know what, I guess it doesn't matter. As Muddy Waters sang, you can't lose what you ain't never had.

You know what else, my mom is right. What would I have done with that silver? Number one I would have had to polish it. Then I would have had to put it somewhere.

Whatever, you know?

However. I do think one thing.

It is going to be one of those Lents.