A Wedding, a Journey and a Party

During the papacy of Benedict XVI, I thought we were in an ecclesiastical restoration. In fact, I spoke about it with a capital-R: the Restoration. For obvious historical reasons, I stopped talking this way. However, now I am not so doubtful. The cleaning and reconstruction work has not stopped. You can catch a glimpse of the workmen flitting past in the dark of night, and you can wake up before dawn to the sound of hammers. Behind closed doors, women pick out the stitches of torn lining and add new embroidery to old chasubles. 

A WEDDING

On Saturday we were at a traditional Catholic wedding in our little wooden church. There was an accident on the highway, and so the bride, bridesmaid, and their father were very late. However, the organist was excellent, and some of us had brought our beads. When I passed my beads to my husband, I read Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski.  

I also whipped out my handkerchief, for there suddenly appeared with the 20-something MC and Thurifer, who were garbed in black cassocks and white cottas, a tiny altar boy in a red cassock and white surplice. Although one of "our boys" began when he was about 12, I have never seen a small child serving at that particular altar, let alone this particular sprig of a young and growing family. And as the veteran Thurifer gazed down at him, and the hulking  MC pointed at this and that, the blond moppet solemnly placed his wee right hand on his small chest.   

It was unprecedented and delightful and promised future victories. His appearance made social sense, too, for it came to light that two of his sisters (also very small) were flower girls. They, like the bride and the maid of honour, wore white and flowers in their hair. I don't remember if they had sleeves: the bride and MOH, both slim tall girls, had long translucent sleeves. The mother of the bride had a splendid navy blue hat. The father of the bride, like a satisfactory number of the guests (but not the groom, who is English), wore a kilt. 

The choir alternated Gregorian chant with Mozart's Mass in B-flat Major. As most TLM lovers will know, the wedding service itself was short but fiercely solemn, and the Mass itself began afterwards. Of course, the readings and prayers were about matrimony, and there was the traditional long prayer over the bride, but Mass was directed firmly towards Almighty God. Well, so are reverent Novus Ordo Nuptial Masses, as B.A. and I have cause to know. But there is nothing like a TL Nuptial M, which is why so many young Catholics have chosen one, and no doubt why it is being so savagely suppressed.

The bridal party went out to Widor's Toccata in F, so I stayed behind for the last thrilling notes, and emerged to find sunshine (there had been torrents before and during the Mass) and happy guests milling about in the carpark. Rides were found for those who did not yet have rides, and off we went to the countryside. (B.A. and I had packed sandwiches for the journey, a top wedding tip I offer to all of you.)

The bride's parents are the fortunate and hospitable owners of a large house with ample grounds in Fife. Naturally the reception was there, and naturally they had hoped the weather would be fine and not, you know, off-and-on flooding. Happily, they had rented an enormous marquee and had it set up in a paddock. After we squeezed about the house drinking champagne and scarfing savoury pastries, we went out to the great tent to eat our very Scottish supper: mixed seafood-and-salmon platter, deconstructed Chicken Balmoral, and strawberry pavlovas. Delicious. 

Benedict Ambrose and I were surrounded by TLM-loving Catholics from all over Scotland, England, and France. A German diocesan priest shouted witticisms from beside my right hand neighbour, one of Fr. Tim Finegan's flock. (The male-female-male order of our table was thrown into disorder by a car breakdown and lateness of a French couple.) At least twice, I recognized complete strangers when they mentioned the names of their children. I introduced myself to one French family because I know their married daughter. Really, it was like a gathering of the clans or, even, the gathering of one clan, or (dare I say) tribe. And hand on heart, there was not a dress in the tent St. Pio of Pietrelcina would have condemned. 

The bride's father, clearly relinquishing a solid third of what he most dearly prizes in the entire world, gave the best father-of-the-bride I have ever heard. The groom exulted in saying "My WIFE" at least three times in his own speech. The best man, who was French, threatened to give his speech in French (which would have been nice for the many French guests) but sadly stuck to English and told the traditional stories against the groom, who laughed heartily. The bride gave no speech.

(That reminds me that I want to write a post about authentic wifely obedience and how it so flies in the face of everything contemporary women [and men] in the West are brought up to do, say, and think that it is both a problem and a challenge. However, I will need to read and think a lot more.)

After the supper, there was a ceilidh. We moved the tables and chairs to the sides of the marquee as the musicians tuned their musicians and fussed with cables. The Gay Gordon was a massacre, but from what I could see from the outside, the Dashing White Sergeant turned out very well. I was outside because I was looking for the taxicab that would whisk my husband and I to the railway station in time to catch the last train. Unfortunately, it had left already, so our hostess asked one of our people who is also a Pioneer (that is, perpetual abstainer from alcohol) to drive us. With great panache Pat sped up hill and down dale and around sharp corners and through the night until he got us safely to the station. But then, as Benedict Ambrose and I were racing for the opposite platform, Pat called us back: the last train to Edinburgh had been cancelled.

A JOURNEY 

It is no joke to be stranded in the Scottish countryside on a showery August night, let me tell you. Fortunately I had a warm hat and overcoat, but B.A. the cancer patient did not. After some consultation of my phone, B.A. and I decided to take the last train to Dundee and find either transportation or lodging there. So off Pat went back to the wedding, leaving B.A. and I in enough privacy to have a massive row about what train we would take the next morning. 

I felt rather badly about this, as it is unseemly to have a marital spat while the wedding ceilidh you've recently danced at is actually still going on. However, I was very tired and had a dance party to host the next day, and tickets to a dance to sell. Nevertheless, we stopped quarrelling by the train arrived. That was a very good thing, as when we got to Dundee we discovered there was no room in the first inn, and then no room in the second, either. 

Fortunately, we told the second night manager that what we really wanted was to return to Edinburgh, and he pointed to a bus a few metres away that would take us to Edinburgh Airport. Amazed at our luck, we rushed out and got onboard. At Edinburgh Airport, we caught a bus to the city. We arrived at Princes Street five minutes before the night bus to our neighbourhood. Thanks to that, we were in bed at 2:30 AM. 

A PARTY

I got up at 8 AM, drank some coffee, and went to Tesco. I then made 3 dozen chocolate chip cookies because in my philosophy it is deeply shameful to host a private party without home baking. I also made sandwiches for B.A. and me, as Sunday Mass was at noon, the dance party was at 2:30, and it would otherwise be a long time before we saw protein. 

You already know about my dance parties. But to recap, I rent the hall, press invitations upon the Flower of the TLM community (and our childless married couples and mother-chaperones), find the instructors among us, and generally bring the waltz back into fashion. Last Sunday I was too ill to go to Mass, so I gave the invitations to B.A. to give to a trusty dance lieutenant. She did a good job, for 17 people attended and--oh joy!--once again we had almost exact numbers of men and women, which is no assured thing in our male-dominated TLM community.  

The first hour was dedicated to the Viennese Waltz, which is so much more challenging than the official (or English) Waltz that my left knee ached afterwards. Then there was a break for coffee and cookies. The second hour was given over to Scottish country dancing, taught by an authority who dismissed mere ceilidh dancing as something anyone can do. This boded ill for poor us, I thought. However, we succeeded at the Dashing White Sergeant, improved at the Reel of the 51st Division, and very much enjoyed Strip the Willow. Then we put the hall back together, washed the dishes, and removed cookie crumbs from the floor in 10 minutes flat. 

Between dancing and cleaning,  I sold the first ticket to a dance I am organizing for the end of September. It went to a Glaswegian, and I hope this fact shamed all my Edinburgh guests into privately vowing to bring their £20 notes next Sunday. Happily, I have hired four musicians, and so although we can have Strauss, I will ask the musicians to match the tempo to the dancers' abilities. 

And I do think we are going to have to do to basic footwork on the Waltz again---but that is a worry for September's dance party. For now I will delight in the memory of our waltz instructors--a Classics PhD and a Physics PhD--dancing together to illustrate what the Viennese gentleman's and lady's feet are supposed to be doing. As both scholars are solidly masculine men, this could have been rather funny, but naturally we were all too intimidated to take out our phones. 

 

Hockey Skates

Not my actual skates

I woke up this morning to see in the Daily Mail that women who work for the National Health Service in Yorkshire are being discouraged from stating their fears about men--oh, sorry--biological males (men) in their private spaces. And, weirdly, instead of people explicitly demanding women's sex-based right to privacy and safety at those times when we are most vulnerable, "South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust has been accused of unlawfully discriminating against employees with gender-critical views."

I'm not sure what to make of this appeal to "belief" except to suspect that the Equality Act no longer protects women's right to single-sex services. This is a serious problem because, as every culture has recognized at all times in history, women and girls are vulnerable to aggressive male sexual interest and violence. Sometimes women have found the lengths their cultures have gone to protect them--e.g. confinement to women's quarters--oppressive in themselves. But in the West men fought themselves and each other in a millennial-long project to make the public streets safe for women and children. (It was originally called Chivalry.) My Orangeman (and therefore anti-Catholic) great-grandfather, already the father of four, took up arms and went back to Europe because of news stories about German soldiers' violence against Belgian nuns. 

It absolutely blows my mind that we're now giving up this culture for a fraction of men--among them very rich men, Helen Joyce documents--who want everyone, especially every woman, to recognize them as women. Well, that's not going to happen. All women are never going to recognize gender-confused men as women because they aren't women and the first thing humans innately notice in all other humans is their sex. 

Ironically, it is easier for old gender-confused men to look like old women because many (or most) old women lose their distinctively feminine features. Our estrogen goes down, leaving androgen to rule the roost. Maybe that's why old women are more quick to wallop men with umbrellas and to stick their elbows in your face in their hurry to be first at the communion rail. However, most men who want to look like women seem to want to look like 30-year-old exotic dancers.  

The first thing I want to say, though, is that I do not "feel like" a woman. I am a woman because I am an ensouled body and my body is female. Everyone around me, perceiving that I have a female body, has responded to me as a girl or as a woman. Having the capacity for self-reflection, I have been in conversation with my female body since I was toilet-trained. Being able to read, I have grasped that female bodies are more vulnerable to male violence than male bodies are and that this has always made an enormous difference to the human race. Having sparred with men (who always pulled their punches) and boys (who once did not) in the relative safety of a supervised boxing gym, I am convinced that the only time a woman should fight either is to escape him. 

Being an ensouled female body, I have gone through the gamut of physical challenges female bodies usually experience, save pregnancy, childbirth, and serious illness. My mother explained menorrhea when I was ten, it happened to me and most girls I knew within three years after that, and this decades-long experience--and the massive cultural baggage it went with--shaped us all. It was a training in keeping a secret, in valuing one's own privacy, in respecting other women's privacy, in living with pain, in being careful, in being compassionate, in being prudent when choosing clothes and, unfortunately, in feeling self-conscious and dirty. 

Beyond the obvious, we also had new kinds of hair growth and taboos around that to deal with. And, since we were not growing up in purdah, we perceived that boys and even (ick!) grown men were looking at and/or speaking to us in new ways. Women did, too, of course, with a directness that could be excruciating, e.g. "You're really filling out." 

Women's lives as ensouled female bodies are deeply rooted in painful and/or culturally embarrassing physical realities, it is little wonder we so often try to escape through our imaginations. However, this is a very bad idea and can lead to serious trouble. Having been handed particular physical challenges (e.g. being significantly weaker and yet attractive to men who might not even like us), girls and young women need to develop their vast capacity for reason. They must grasp the realities of themselves and of the world outside themselves. As they are given a lot misleading advice and false information--particularly from advertisers and pop culture and journalists and irresponsible older relations--this is very much an up-hill battle.  

One of the difficulties of my own generation was being told that everything male-dominated was necessarily better than everything female-dominated. Boys necessarily had the better toys. At 12 I honestly believed that the pinnacle of success would be to become the first female Prime Minister of Canada. (Ha! Kim Campbell became Prime Minister in 1993 when her predecessor resigned, but she is even better known today for a risqué photograph of her holding QC robes in front of her apparently naked body.) 

Never mind a happy marriage with healthy children, standing in the community, enough money for Christmas presents and summer holidays, rewarding work and all the other things that really do bring happiness. No! "First female" this-or-that was the goal The Toronto Star set before my eyes. And this mentality is why, by the way, even though I loathed it (sorry, Aged Ps), I grimly forced myself to play ice hockey for years. I was, most definitely, the First Female Hockey Player in my classroom and possibly my elementary school.  

I don't want to think about what a reproach I was to the noble game of hockey or how my unfortunate sister and I were loathed by our (all female) teammates. Instead I will dwell on the beautiful black skates promised by the title. They were often called "boys' skates" because most girls who learned to skate back then had white skates. White skates were invariably figure skates with a sharp ruffle on the tip of each blade, presumably for spins or whatever else figure skaters got up to. I had such skates before my hockey days, and the ruffles made me trip. Hockey skates were made entirely for support and speed, and I loved them, if not the game.

A preference for hockey skates--like my haircut of despair--made me not a whit less of a girl than other girls, as girls are young ensouled female bodies. It was, however, what is fashionably now called "gender non-conforming," which is why I mention it. Apparently such things now lead girls to believe they are "really boys," just as enjoying dressing Barbie dolls now leads boys into believing they are "really girls." This would be hilarious if it didn't now lead to dangerous experiments with artificial sex hormones and horrific amputations and mutilations. 

Here, then, is a list of things that do not make a woman more a woman than she already is, or magically transform a man into a woman:

make-up, nail polish, fake eyelashes, hair extensions, wigs, hair dye, hair removal, artificially created breasts, artificially created genitalia, any plastic surgery whatsoever, high heeled shoes or boots, pointed shoes or boots, stockings or tights, leggings, leg warmers, dresses, skirts, blouses, ballgowns, twinsets, lacy or satin lingerie, crinolines, corsets, white skates, handbags, hats, high-pitched voices, mincing walks, mannered hand gestures, playing with toys (e.g. dolls) others associate with girls, playing games (e.g. skipping, Ringette) others associate with girls, tricking an infant into thinking you can breastfeed him with your milk-less chest.

That last, by the way, is such a violation of trust that I don't think it would occur to any woman that a man would ever do that to an infant or, if such a pervert existed, that he wouldn't confine his fantasy to strictest secrecy or at least share it only on the darkest part of the dark web. However, I'm very sorry to say that such a man has been making headlines, and it's all very horrible. 

As an ensouled human body, you're male or female whether you like it or not and no matter what doctors do to you. It is fair to say, though, that a very small percentage of boys are conceived with a total insensitivity to androgen. Their bodies outwardly resemble female bodies, and their parents are (or were) advised to raise them as if they were girls. Innocently and naturally resembling girls, they are treated by the outside world as girls--complete with an automatic F on their birth certificates--and, if the truth is kept from them, they believe they are girls. They worry in the same way girls worry when menorrhea does not come, and they cry in the way a girl would cry if doctors had told her she had to have a "hysterectomy." 

And yes, I do know someone with CAIS, so I can never write about these matters without recalling this.

Bring Back The Schoolroom Miss

The Costa Coffee surgical mutilation scandal broke before I finished reading Helen Joyce's Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, to cite its original title. I have put it down for the time being, feeling overwhelmed by the horrors of what girls and boys have done to themselves and why their parents permit it. It seems that reaching puberty has become even worse than it was in the 1980s, when bullies mocked us for our humiliating new secrets.  

Apparently one online transgender activist is exulting in, rather denying, the concept of "social contagion," stating that this is "how transgender people reproduce." In short, they're coming for your children, to quote the recent Pride Day chant, and it absolutely blows my mind that children whose parents forbid them to travel through seedy districts are allowed to absorb the philosophies and ideologies of simply anybody online. I have always admired friends who forbid their children the internet--and all but the most innocuous televised/filmed entertainment--but now I wonder why more of them don't do the same. 

I do not wonder at thousands of 11-year-olds dreading puberty or shying away from its first claims upon their bodies. It is awful to go from the lightness of childhood through the heaviness of adolescence towards adulthood and death--our parents' deaths, if not our own. To unformed intelligences encouraged in make-believe, it not obvious that the alternatives are worse. 

Children enjoy having their height measured against the doorframe, but puberty means growing out, not up, and it's embarrassing. I was never overweight as a child or a teenager, but by 16 I longed to escape my annoying, achy, leaking, earthbound body. My unruly hated hair I had already vanquished by having three sides of it cut, at intervals, close to my head. 

I was deep into my twenties before I understood that we are our bodies--ensouled bodies--and that the way forward is acceptance, kindness, rational fasting, good nutrition, and intense physical exercise. My poor parents had paid for any number of physical activities--gymnastics, swimming, skating, ice hockey, ballet, Girl Guide hikes--but most of these just hadn't filled me with the joy of life. (Mad props to skating and hikes.) It may have been different if my parents themselves had been sporty; my Polish goddaughter told me that she wants to learn golf so she can golf with her [golf-mad] grandmother. 

Yesterday I confessed on Facebook to having disliked being a girl from the ages of 11 until about 14, and I got all kinds of sympathetic emoticons and praise and whatnot, which was not my goal. My aim was to remind my intended audience that female puberty is often unpleasant but we get through it and enjoy being women. My intended audience was friends with daughters. However, it was the mother of a son (and a teacher of teens) who responded by  saying that girls that age have an awful time and need role models. 

I am not sure who these role models are. (Occasionally I look at "great women role models" books for my niece, but they invariably include Margaret Sanger and are actually thinly disguised left-wing propaganda.) My own belief is that girls aged 11 to 18 need to be removed from our terribly debased pornografied culture until they have come to terms with their changing bodies and developed their characters along rational and virtuous lines. In the past, the most privileged women in society found this protected place in "the schoolroom," that is, the place put aside in their father's (or brother's) house for their education, and then (possibly) in a select seminary for young ladies or (if Catholic) in a convent school. 

But now I must put aside these thoughts to take my husband's computer to the repair shop and shop for a dress to wear to the wedding of a young convent school graduate. 

Update: My concept of "The Schoolroom Miss" is quite different from that of the Regency romance novel. More on this anon.

The Work of the Liturgy

Behold me, in your mind's eye, in blue T-shirt and grey leggings, a furry pink sleep-mask clinging above my hairline, sitting in my green armchair of illness. I look every year of my age and then some. Poor me, full of the cold. The only stickers I have been earning for my diary are for flossing. 

I had so much I wanted to do yesterday. I knew the gym was out, but I needed to buy coffee and milk for After-Mass Coffee and Tea, arrive at Mass itself on time, hand out dance party invitations and inform the community that tickets for a Real Dance go on sale next week. I didn't get as far as the bus stop before I burst into tears, handed Benedict Ambrose a sheaf of printed materials and the parish hall key, and went home. 

It's interesting. Even after COVID, online priests opine on the question "Am I sick enough to stay home from Mass?", not "Am I too sick to go to Mass?" It implies that people would rather not go to Mass and are just looking for an excuse. However, there are people who love Mass so much that they would be tempted to risk giving their fellow worshippers smallpox, let alone a merely abysmal summer cold. Possibly the man who coughed so hard behind me on the bus on Thursday was on his way to Mass. How could I continue to blame him for my pain if I my germy self took public transportation? And how was I going to make the coffee in that tiny kitchen without infecting the flower-like youth of the par---? Waaaah!

To assuage my pain, I got involved in an online dispute with mothers who habitually carried their infants to the front pews of churches for Mass. 

This was not my intent. Someone had posted a link to a document by a young father understandably furious that an Eastern Rite priest had halted Mass and refused to continue until he (the young father) and his wife removed their crying 10-month-old baby from the church. I felt very sorry for them until the story turned into an apologia for always sitting at the very front.  I still felt sorry for them, but I was unconvinced that a 10-month-old baby's "brief intervals" of watching the priest outweighed the needs and wants of everyone else in the church. So I weighed in to agree that people who glare at young parents are mean and that a church that isn't cryin' is dyin' and to suggest that the laity should voluntarily give up [the highly coveted] back pews to parents so that they can slip out easily when fussing turns into full-throated screaming.

Well, faster than you can say "Rosa Parks," a mother of many objected to the idea that her children should have ever had to have sit at the back of the church. She and another mother declared that they had always sat in the front rows with their children so that they could see what was going on. When the children scream-cried (my phrase), the first mother took them out. I wrote that this showed great love of neighbour, which it does. And who am I to have online fights with mothers-of-many?  

But one of the mothers did say something fascinating, which was that it had never occurred to her to doubt the priest's ability to say Mass such that "the normal sounds a toddler might make would be the deciding factor in whether the mass is validly celebrated."

"After all, they do have the words in black and white in front of them."

Now, I hadn't brought up validity, and I was talking about scream-crying, not toddlers demanding Cheerios or announcing their boredom. But had I not already known we were talking about the Novus Ordo,  the legalistic mention of validity would have tipped me off. Nobody who goes to a TLM thinks "validity" is the be-all and end-all of the liturgy. It's so basic and assumed, we don't even think about it. It never occurs to us that a priestly slip might render the whole deal invalid. ("Gosh darn it, I guess now we'll have to try to make it to the Cathedral Mass on time!") 

We also don't think of what the priest does being as simple as reading the black, doing the red like an ecclesiastical plumber looking at the boiler manual. We assume the work of the liturgy is actual real work, even if the priest makes it look easy. (TLM altar servers are most definitely working.) But, you know, that's the TLM. Maybe having three front pews of noisy children makes absolutely no difference to priests saying the Novus Ordo. Being able to entertain the thought that I am wrong is my online super-power. 

Therefore, I shot off a couple of messages to priests, and one immediately got back to me to say--adding that I could quote him--that when he says Mass--the Ordinary Form as well as the Extraordinary Form--he never looks directly at the congregation. 

"Zero idea what's happening two feet beyond my altar," he typed.

"They could be on fire, and it's not my problem." 

I laughed so hard it almost cured my cold. 

One thing about not being a mother-of-many---and, by the way, apart from the cloister I cannot think of a more meaningful and valuable life for a woman than being a mother--is that I do not have overwhelming demands on my attention. At Mass, I am (if not in the front pew) free to direct it on all kinds of people. (I try to use this for good, not evil.) Back before Pope Francis, when we were an "old" community with a 3-or-4 voice Men's Schola, and not the men-and-women's choir youthquake we are now, I used to sit in the back choir stalls and meditate prayerfully on everybody.

As we were (and still are, relatively) a small community, I recognized almost every regular parishioner and knew most of the names. I noticed when the thurifer gained weight, and I noted which university student had joined the ranks of the candle bearers. I noticed that one of my Head Tea Lady predecessor chose to leave Mass to set up during the Communion of the Faithful. I could see that one of the few (then) young mothers was frantic with embarrassment whenever her baby cried. When a loud ker-THUNK indicated that someone had fainted, I instinctively knew where to look for the doctor.  In community disputes, I can simultaneously see all sides and mentally side with and (less nobly) against all parties.

And this, I think, could be a super-power all Catholics should cultivate: the ability to see Mass-related disputes, like co-existence with crying babies, or what women should wear, or what men should wear, for that matter, from everyone's perspective. Of course, this takes some imagination, and ultimately, of course, it demands some research.  

The Misleading Glamour of Artifice

I have caught a cold from my poor immunocompromised husband, and so I am not going to the gym. Instead I am going to bewail online my misspent youth. 

Well, not really. However, I am going to approve the choice of a young Catholic lady I know who said she didn't want to go to a dance club, thus causing a flutter amongst her peers. 

I heard this story at the sink of the tiny galley kitchen in the parish hall, the one place all week where I congregate with other women. It is also a locus for Real Trad Life, quite distinct from the bizarre impressions we get from Twitter (or, as we are presumably now supposed to call it, X). This slice of Real Trad Life was about, in short, partying, and one girl's reluctance to join the other girls in going to The Hive or whatever Edinburgh hellhole nightspot they had in mind. 

It will very much surprise my mother--to say nothing of friends who saw me dance many nights away on Toronto's Queen Street West--to hear that I came down firmly against le clubbing.

"Just because we misspent our youth doesn't mean [she] has to," I harrumphed at the other married lady around, which was a bit thoughtless. First, I out-age her by over 20 years and, second, instead of misspending her youth, she married young.* Frankly, the only person in that kitchen who no longer had youth to misspend and had thoroughly misspent it was me. But I digress. 

As a young teenager, I longed to go to dance clubs, and I didn't understand why my parents didn't go to such glamorous places, especially given my mother's growing collection of ABBA records. Now I can't understand my teenage thought process. I recall that I thought night clubs were full of excitement and adventure and very likely chaste and handsome young men with whom I might fall in love. If they weren't already chaste, I would surely inspire them to virtue with my virginal ways. Clearly, what I knew about real life as a teenager was almost nothing. 

Fortunately for me, the first time I went to a nightclub (in fear and trembling lest my mother find out), it was late one afternoon with my church youth group, and it was quite empty and although there was a glitter ball and loud music, it was boring. Later visits to other nightclubs were less boring, as they were downtown and involved the risk of being turned away at the door for being under-age. Also they were dark and crowded and shot through with the energy of dozens of people packed together dancing and sometimes singing away. They provided an excellent opportunity for my then-favourite hobby--daydreaming about love and adventure. The clubs were black velvet jewel boxes containing sparkling, leaping diamonds ... until the lights were snapped on.

In harsh electric light, dance clubs are unfinished rooms with wires hanging from the ceiling, holes gaping in the walls, and indescribably dirty floors. The WCs, never attractive, are unspeakable. The people still lingering about are tired and drunk--and often sad--with slack, pale faces. Clubs after closing time are the visual representation of the maternal proverb "Nothing good happens after midnight." 

In justice to my teenage self, the idea that I might find chaste and undying love with a complete stranger met at a dance club was imparted to the wider culture by Rodgers and Hammerstein, whose musical South Pacific promises: 

Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger

You may see a stranger across a crowded room,

And somehow you know, you know even then,

That somehow you'll see her again and again

Never mind that South Pacific debuted in 1949, and society is rather different now. (For one thing, you can't see anyone across a crowded dance club.) The idea remains, and now it is sad to think about all the primping at mirrors my friends and I did before going out to dark bars and clubs where we were just more woman-shapes. 

At the end of the day, if you want to meet marriageable and marriage-minded men, you need to go where that sparse brotherhood spends its few hours of sociability, and for Catholics that means church, Church events, Church-positive events, university/college Catholic clubs, Catholic singles conferences, Catholic dating websites (although they are a form--however mild--of human trafficking, if you ask me), and the smaller, friendlier pilgrimages.  

Alternatively, you could befriend Catholic men with no romantic interest in you (the vast majority of men you will meet at the above) and say, "Who among your friends ya got for me, pal?" This is how I first heard about the existence of Benedict Ambrose, so don't knock it. 

Meanwhile, I hold my waltzing parties not to marry off young traditionalists but as a form of rational amusement. They hold no dark glamour. They are firmly rooted in reality. The parish hall is never more nor less than a parish hall. The only artifice to be seen is my overly red last tube of lipstick--which brings me to my next theme.

Nailed it

As I mentioned, last week I went to the nail shop frequented by my blonde sister. I got the works: manicure, pedicure and OPI gel polish on fingers and toes. The polish is now peeling off in plastic-like slices, which inspired me to ask the internet if it IS plastic. 

And yes, of course it is. This kind of nail polish (like almost all nail polish) contains toxic ingredients and, although it falls apart on your fingers, it is ultimately not biodegradable. Thus, it creates microplastics. 

This is a bit tragic. At one point during my work event, I gazed at a number of sandalled female feet, and they all had perfectly polished toes. I felt pleased at the time that I had made the professionally- and (for North America) culturally-correct decision to "get my toes done" before displaying them to my colleagues. Now, of course, I think about four (perhaps five?) generations of women covering part of their epidermis with toxic chemicals that end up in the earth and drinking water. And for what? 

Thus, to continue my adult life project of becoming rooted in reality, I am going to give up even the occasional shellacking. The next time I go to a manicurist, it will be for a manicure or pedicure, but that's it: no polish. And I look forward to the time when young women are astonished that their ancestresses used such stuff, just as we are amazed that 18th century people covered their faces with lead paint.

*Of course, not marrying young does not mean you have misspent your youth. I shall have to write something about a "youth well spent." At the moment, I think a youth well spent could include marriage, but also (naturally) religious life, priesthood, child-rearing, learning and working at a useful trade, learning and working at a noble profession, evangelizing, volunteering, developing skills, developing athletic ability, and generally rooting oneself in reality. 

The Past is a Foreign Country

Ye werken womman c. 1387

I was going to call this post "Hotel Living," but I spent some of my flight back to Scotland and most of today reading L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, whence cometh the famous remark.

The Go-Between, written in 1952 about 1900, is absolutely stunning and near the end made me think of Wuthering Heights. (I discovered afterwards, while reading the Penguin Modern Classics' introduction, that I was right to do so.) As good novels do, it both debunks and promotes myths, here of a "golden age." 

I am glad of the promotion, for civilizational health relies on myth. When Americans stop weeping over "The Star-Spangled Banner" and thanking veterans for their service, the USA is toast. But fortunately for my American readers, the USA is likely to survive Old Canada, which will die with the last Canadians to learn "The Maple Leaf Forever" at school. L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea may have been fiction, but I'd rather be a Canadian with Avonlea in her heart than a corrosive hatred for her ancestors. 

Interestingly, on my flight back to Canada I read Johann Strauss: Father and Son and Their Era by Hans Fantel (1971), which is also very good and also debunks and promotes the myth of a golden age. It also speaks in the same accent as the traditionalist Catholic Austrians I know, who both rejoice in Vienna's glorious past and seethe over what has happened to it since. 

I read the latter to try to understand the waltz. My poor parents plunked down up to $15  a week for me to take piano lessons for years and years without succeeding in making me musical. I much prefer silence to music, but I have committed to the waltz, so I should like to know more about it. It is also a "traditional" ballroom dance--although of course it was at one point considered revolutionary and immoral--and I am as interested in living traditions as in healthy myths.   

Incidentally, the idea that women didn't work for money before Ms. magazine rolled off the presses on July 1, 1972 is not a healthy myth. For one thing, there have been female paid domestic servants and farmers for millennia. As for the lettered, English-speaking women have openly written for money since 1688. Unmarried women survived as paid governesses from the 17th century into the 20th century, and as schoolteachers from the late 19th century. My Canadian grandmother was a teacher until she married; my American grandmother (born 1904) was a bookkeeper. 

There have also been, probably since the beginning of commerce, women in trades that don't rely on brute strength or in family businesses. The New Testament records that (in Acts 13) a certain Lydia of Thyatira was a dye saleswoman. Over 1300 years later, Chaucer characterized the Wife of Bath as a wealthy woman in the textile industry. 

That large numbers of European and North American women of quite humble origins did not go out to work in the19th and 20th centuries--not even in fields--strikes me not as "traditional" but as a historical anomaly. And as we have seen, it has proved to be unsustainable for all but the rich or the very determined. It is very difficult for men today to command the kind of wages commensurate with running a middle-class household according to the expectations of 1900.

And so I work and try to get along with men who think I shouldn't. When, at my work event this week, a man recommended that I read Mrs. Timothy Gordon's Ask your Husband: A Wife's Guide to True Femininity, I affably promised to do so because I want to see what she brings to the debate. 

One of the perks of this work event was staying in a business-class hotel with a a splendid gym; there I did bicep curls and other activities I do not expect to find in Mrs. Tim's opus. I very much enjoyed looking at the Canadian sky while running on the treadmill and travelling from this gym to my suite without having to go outdoors. There were lots of fluffy white towels that renewed themselves daily and apparently the bed remade itself. The breakfast buffet was bounteous and delicious.  It crossed my mind that it might be nice to live permanently in a hotel, if one could afford to do so. However, now it escapes my mind how I thought I would get a whole post out of that fanciful notion.  

UPDATE: Benedict Ambrose says he's going to write a book, too. He will call it either Make Me A Sandwich or How Interesting. Where's My Dinner? He's currently in the kitchen washing the dishes, so I am not taking this pronouncement very seriously. 

Toronto on Business

I arrived in Toronto on Thursday afternoon with a cloth bag of books and a small suitcase. For the first time ever, my parents were nowhere to be seen. I spent a few unhappy minutes looking for both my father and a payphone. The fortunate two quarters in my change purse were weirdly light. There is more heft to British coins in more ways than one. 

Fortunately, my father and I found each other soon after, and--I think also for the first time ever--I paid for the parking. We drove from unfamiliar Terminal One, special to Air Canada, missing one turn but recognizing another route home. The air was hot--"Italy hot," I said, meaning Italy in May, not Italy in the jaws of Cerberus. My mother and a tin of my favourite cookies welcomed me in.

I flew Air Canada, not Air Transat, because a travel agent organized all the flights for overseas staff. Months ago I petitioned to be allowed to arrive four days before my colleagues because I suffer from extended jet lag. Past work events have seen me longing for my bed by 9 PM and creeping away unsociably at 10 PM. 

My mother always tells me it's worse West to East, but that's not how it is for me. On Friday morning I first awoke at 2 AM, on Saturday at 4, on Sunday at 5, on Monday at 5, and at last this morning (after remaining awake until around 11:30 PM), 6:30. Yesterday I thought I was teetering on the edge of a sleep disorder, but this morning I think I have finally acclimatized to Eastern Daylight Time. I will be able to comport myself at tonight's Gala like the sane woman I know myself to be. 

Incredibly, I spent my first afternoon in Toronto correcting the English translation of Polish liner notes for a friend's frantic musician sister. But I also called my best Catholic Toronto friend, and we made a Saturday brunch date. One of my sisters dropped by with her son. We sat on the deck over the garage with coffee and cookies and discussed her Latin American travel plans: Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina. She is now taking a Spanish course in Colombia; the computer test placed her at C1 and C2. I felt torn between pride and envy. In Polish I careen from B1 to A2 to oblivion. In Italian, I'm probably a solid B2. I'll find out for sure next month.

Friday

The following morning, I had a 6:30 AM Italian lesson. My tutor, visiting family in Italy, was having a respite from Cerberus but expected its return later that afternoon. My brain was mush; really, there is nothing so bad for my language skills as actually travelling. (This is, as you can guess, inopportune.) And then I did a full day's work, texting "Could you...?" and "Would you...?" to reporters and publishing their submissions.

Saturday

On Saturday my Best Catholic Toronto friend (MBCT), accompanied by my Canadian goddaughter, bore me away in the family van to Cora's for brunch. MBCT and I agree on practically everything despite living almost complete different ways of life. She married in her mid-twenties, a few months before I met Benedict Ambrose in person, and now has five children. She is almost always with at least one of these children; she remembers our last pre-COVID brunch as a rare outing in which she was entirely "child-free." 

"What do you usually get here?" I asked as I turned the heavy colourful pages of the Cora menu.

"I don't," said MBCT in the firm tone of a felon unexpectedly released on parole. 

My Canadian goddaughter sat quietly listening to the adult talk and ate her brunch without fuss. This is not something I can imagine my Polish goddaughter doing, but to be fair, the former is almost 6. Neither of them is permitted smartphones, tablets, computers or any other screen except on the rare occasions the Canadian is allowed an (old) Disney film and the Pole a ballet. I know demanding it is for both MBCT and Pretend Polish Daughter-in-Law to have to tend their attention-greedy children almost ALL the time, but it makes such an enormous difference. 

Meanwhile, when MBCT got a call that her youngest was inconsolably crying for her, she took me home. When we pulled into the driveway, I felt like bursting into tears myself. Happily, we have tentative plans to meet after my work retreat. In fact, she and the children are likely to drive me back to the airport. 

Sunday

On Sunday I went to the Oratory for the 11 AM TLM, finding a Pride flag wound around a flagpole and lying wedged in a corner by the front doors. It made me think of the unamiable habit of Toronto's Orange Order of marching past St. Michael's Cathedral. The laypeople socializing by the religious articles counter were interested but not concerned. Only one lady voiced my private suspicion that it may have been left there for a later protest, and I wondered if she were a regular reader of my news outlet.

The choir and organist, as always, were incredibly good.  

Afterwards I met my Chicago-Polish friend (CPF), whom B.A. and I met through Polish Pretend Son, in the narthex. He is also in Toronto on business and, as he is fascinated by everything Polish, showed me phone photos of Toronto's Polish Combatants Association (SPK 20).  

We went for brunch, walking along King Street West to the Katyń memorial at the foot of Roncesvalles, where CPF took more photos. We then walked up "Marszałkowska" towards such remnants of the vanishing Polish-Canadian community as St. Casimir's Catholic Church, the statue of St. John Paul II, and "Polonez," where CPF spoke C2 Polish--and I oblivion Polish--to the waitresses. We consumed traditional fruit punch, cold soup, cabbage rolls, pierogi, a pork cutlet, potatoes and several salads, and then we resumed our walk. The Polish-Canadian highlight of this stretch was, of course, Chicago, where I once hid from an irate blog-reader who had verbally attacked me after Mass at nearby St. Vincent de Paul. 

The outing was capped off by cappuccino and tea at Coffee & All That Jazz, and then CPF went back down Roncey for eventual Vespers at Holy Family. I loaded money onto my Presto Card and took various trains and a bus home. I was joined soon after by my youngest brother, youngest sister, and oldest nephew, the young man once known to these pages (and, come to think of it, to Seraphic Singles) as Pirate. 

We had what seemed to be a normal Sunday dinner. I told them the staggering price CPF pays to rent his Manhattan apartment, and they told me it wasn't staggering at all, as he could expect to pay that in Toronto, too. There followed a conversation about real estate, house prices, house taxes, and the interest rate, pet obsessions of the British middle-classes and very likely that of their Canadian counterparts, too.

Monday    

On Monday morning I began work at 7:30AM, annoyed at Elon Musk for taking Archbishop Viganò out of Twitter jail on a Sunday. But we got the news of his release published before 9 AM, so I was happy. 

I stopped work just shy of 3:30 PM and walked to the mall to get a mani-pedi at the salon my C1-C2 level sister frequents. Like nail shops all over, this one is run and staffed by Vietnamese-speaking women, and I was pleased when I was approached by "the chatty one." I was less pleased when she put the ultraviolet nail dryer on the edge of the foot basin. I asked her if I would die if it fell in.

"You make fun of me," said the chatty one genially and, as you see, the machine did not fall in. My toes are now a rakish dark blue-red and my fingernails a safe toasty pink because I am British now, ye ken, and even if the Princess of Wales got away with it.... 

Anyway, I paid up and walked to another part of the mall to meet my Poet Convert Friend (PCF) for a drink. Years before she was baptized, I admired her as the least egotistical career poet I knew. She ran a poetry event for years before I realized it was her show. This was heroically unassuming for the Toronto Poetry Scene, in which--incidentally--the Catholic Church was constantly the butt of jokes and the target of diatribes. However, for some art-loving non-Catholics Catholicism holds still holds some stale Brideshead glamour, so when PCF told me one winter-visit night that she was thinking of converting, I was suspicious.    

"Oh," I said. "Is it the art, or is it (ahem, ahem) Jesus?"

"Jesus," said PCF fervently. "I want Jesus." 

When I heard why, I gave her the Prayer to St. Michael and sent her to the Oratorians. The rest is salvation history. 

Tuesday

I am now going to take myself off and study some Polish. I brought my daily planner and some stickers, which have created the necessary psychological bribes needed to study. Then I will act against all normal routine and iron a load of laundry. I am, after all, in Toronto on business and should turn up uncreased.