Neighbourliness

B.A. did not like yesterday's post, for he thought I was expressing discontent and (worse) nagging him passive-aggressively about the lawn. You would think after 12 years of being married to me he would know there is nothing passive about my aggression. Ha ha! 

Meanwhile, B.A. mowed the lawn this morning in lieu of peddling away on the stationary bicycle in the kitchen and, edified, I went out afterwards to cut the long bits around the edges with the massive hedge clippers. Afterwards, I carefully wiped the hedge clippers, fit the lethal points back into their orange plastic guard, and carried them back into the house. They cost a bomb, and sometimes the local thieves target sheds. 

Look, I am not unhappy with our neighbourhood. It has many good points, and before yesterday no neighbour in any of the neighbourhoods in which I have hitherto lived have come outside to give me a loaf of home-baked bread. It is just an ordinary Scottish neighbourhood with ordinary Scottish working people, and people who read this blog must be interested in what it might be like to live an ordinary Scottish life. If you have a certain baseline amount of dosh (or are lucky), it involves owning a garden shed, and everyone on our street has a garden shed. 

Five years ago, our life was a lot less ordinary, since we lived in the Historical House (and did not have a garden shed), but it wasn't necessarily better. For one thing, I was depressingly underemployed, and for another, random curators and plumbers used to come upstairs into the Historical Flat as if it were the communal property it actually was. Also, the fire alarm went into fault quite often, usually in the middle of the night, and it stepped this up when B.A. was in the hospital. Of course, it had its marvellous points, too. We had wonderful parties and pretend country house weekends. My dear friend A lived just across the fields in her own historical house. She has since died, which has very much closed a door on the most glamorous, arty part of our lives. 

So here we are, and I quite like it, and I will remind B.A. that when I first started writing "Why Seraphic Hung Up Her Gloves" (aka "The Flyer's Ring"), it was in basement of my brother' Nulli's two-floor flat in Montreal, which shared the scuzzy street with a goodly number of addicts and dealers. That said, the first house Nulli actually bought was on the same street as the house of a well-known Canadian politician, and now he has a house with a view of a lake. I do not know, however, if he would trust one of his next-door neighbours with the keys to the house or has even been given a loaf of bread by the other. 

Top characteristics of Ordinary Scottish Life

1. Almost everybody around is Scottish. 

2. Garden sheds.

3. Nobody, no matter how poor, keeps broken down cars, etc., on the front lawn. 

4. Flowers in gardens, flowers in pots, flowers everywhere----or spending the Covid savings  to concrete the whole garden over and putting in bricks or tiles because you couldnae be bothered. There is definitely a baseline tidiness to Ordinary Scottish Gardens. 

5.  Work the curse of the drinking classes. Full-time work. Part-time work. Looking for work. Hiding from work. Work, work, work. 

6. Weather as the usual beginning of a conversation. Apparently people from Anglo-Saxon countries are known for this and others find it strange. 

7. Chinese takeaway within walking distance.

8. Indian takeaway within walking distance.

9. Three or four pubs within walking distance. 

10. Tesco, Lidl, Aldi. 

Our Neighbourhood

Today I went to my Italian class outdoors in a sunny spot and then very much enjoyed the walk through my neighbourhood back home. I contemplated the newer-built home that are larger than, but probably not better built than our own. We have a nicer view, too. We like our neighbours. We probably would like the other neighbours, a few streets over. 

It's not a bad neighbourhood, really. I wouldn't want to work in one of the nearby shops, mind you, and toolboxes occasionally go missing from the backs of vans. There was, of course, that stabbing and also that xenophobic attack on that Eastern European. A woman, clearly off her meds, stopped us on our way to the railway station the other day to complain that she couldn't get her meds. But it's not a bad neighbourhood, really. It's cautiously friendly. It doesn't put on airs. It abounds in small dogs and large children.  

Nevertheless, it's the kind of neighbourhood where, when I was about to hang up my regular uniform out on the clothesline, I knew my long, barely frilly black dress would startle the neighbours, and I had better put on leggings and a long white T-shirt instead. 

My T-shirt says "Phil. Theol. Hochschule Sankt Georgen Frankfurt am Main Seit 1929" which would shock the stuffing out of your average German trad, but the neighbours almost certainly don't read German, so no worries there. 

Leggings rate as modest dress for women in our neighbourhood, and I am probably really going out on a counter-cultural limb by wearing an ankle-length denim skirt 6 days out of 7. It just occurred to me that the neighbours might think I am off my meds when they see me wearing my navy blue French scout hat. (It is the only wide-brim hat that actually fits my 60cm-round head I have ever found.) 

As a matter of fact, the only neighbours I saw today at all were the Moppet Next Door's Eastern European father (partner of her Scottish mother), who was in his pigeon cage, and Sandy, the oil rig chef, who came wandering out of his flat to give me an extra loaf of bread he had made yesterday. I reminded Sandy that he may make free with the herbs in our herb garden, and he assured me that he had recently taken some of the coriander. 

Everybody on our street hangs up their clothes on fine days--including Sundays--in their back gardens, which is to say, their back yards. I padded through embarrassingly high grass (B.A. cut it just two weeks ago) to pin up "the darks" and hope the the pigeons from two gardens over would not spatter them from on high. This happened last week, in fact. I was glad Sandy saw me wearing my arm brace, for it suggested an explanation for the overgrown state of our beech hedges. 

In my dreams, the grass is as manicured as one of the bowling greens in which our neighbourhood abounds. But also in my dreams, everything hanging from the clothesline would have been "Made in U.K." The clothes pegs would all be wood, and none plastic, and I would actually be hanging them up either in the New Town or outside our country cottage in some bucolic locale featuring lambs and chickens instead of pigeons and extremely lost fawns who eat pea shoots out of my veggie trug.  Also in my dreams, the neighbourhood cats would not use my raised garden by the shed as their outdoor litterbox, nor would they get squashed in the street and brought to the pavement to die in decency by poor Sandy. That happened to one of them last week. 

Really, I need to do something about the lawn and the beech hedges, so I might as well get stuck in first thing tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, I am slowly replacing cheap foreign clothing with quality British clothes, and the plastic clothes pegs keep breaking, so their replacement by wood ones is inevitable. The New Town will have to wait until we win the lottery, I'm afraid, and the country cottage is not really practical for non-drivers. Lambs and chickens are impractical for a couple whose idea fixé is to spend as much time in Rome as they can without going broke. But the cats I have manage to keep out of my raised garden by planting wooden skewers all over it. I feel badly for the squashed one, but at least it wasn't Lightning Next Door. Lightning is so desirous of human companionship that he actually invaded our house without a warrant and got as far as the hallway before we shooed him out. 

One last story about our neighbourhood for the evening, in case I didn't tell you last year. So last year we were all supposed to stand on our front stoops on Thursday nights at 8 PM and applaud the NHS. It was a tad alarming, for weekly state-organised community expressions of gratitude for state departments are just a tad Orwellian. Anyway, one Thursday last midsummer when people were enjoying the evening sun in their gardens, 8 PM struck and there was scattered applause for the NHS and a bonus: cheerful live bagpipe music from one street over. 

Live bagpipe music is not actually fake shortbread tin tartan tat Shhhhcottish, Moneypenny; it is actually part of normal Scottish life, with bairns learning it in school, and people practising it in all kinds of odd locations, like water treatment centres. When it suddenly bleats out, spontaneously, from somewhere unseen on a summer's evening, we listen and approve. When the piper finished his five minute tribute to the NHS, the whole neighbourhood applauded twice as hard as it had for the NHS. 

Sharing Core Values

"Do you share the same primary values?" I asked a young person who had approached me for advice about marriage. "For example, are you both Christians from the same denomination?"

The young person assured me that they did and that they were. This sounded satisfactory although I must admit that this does not always matter. (In this case it would, though.) If you take a nominal Catholic whose real core values are vegetarianism and earning money and a nominal Presbyterian whose real core values are also vegetarianism and earning money, then there is less likely to be marital friction and disappointment, however their devout or orange sash-wearing parents may feel about it. 

It feels a bit risqué to encourage nominal Catholics to just admit to themselves that their faith is not really a core value and to look for fellow adherents to their real religion (money, animals, Gaia) when seeking a marriage partner. I will make up for this by pointing out that religious Catholics are often much more interested in actual marriage than nominal Christians are. Of course, it is extremely unfair for marriage-minded nominal Christians to go seeking spouses amongst devout Christians--unless, of course, they have an inner voice telling them that they really need to do that. 

Happily, earning money, vegetarianism, love of animals and stewardship of the earth are not incompatible with Christianity.  

Anyway, I know of perfectly happy "mixed marriages" which for Catholics has always meant religiously mixed, not biracial, and of marriages in which the Protestant or agnostic spouse has eventually converted to Catholicism. Presumably there were other core values that brought them together--or kept them together--all those years: marriage itself, mutual love of their children, etc. 

I deeply believe that when you know and embrace what your core values are (pick the two deepest), you should not settle for different ones in a life partner.  (Marriage is hard enough. Really.) You should also listen when you get a crush on a handsome or beautiful person and they level with you that they can never marry someone like you because, for example, they must/want to marry someone from their own ethnic background. 

The correct thing to do, in such a circumstance, is to thank the person for his or her honesty, cut your losses, and buzz off. The incorrect thing is to get all huffy, deplore his or her "racism", and attempt to change his or her mind. For many--if not most--people, marriage, family and ethnicity are completely intertwined. 

Also, there were a goodly number of genocides in the 20th century that made the survivors very committed to replenishing their numbers. In short, for some people, their very ethnic nation is their primary value, and when it comes to looking for a marriage partner, I think you should respect this. When a very decent and handsome Armenian chap told me twenty years ago (when I was still dumb enough to ask men out for coffee) he could only marry an Armenian, I got it. I got it because after a lifetime in Toronto, I had realised that other ethnic groups are much less likely than mine to "marry out." 

But again, this all depends on core values. The biracial Catholic wife of a Catholic man from a separate ethnic group once contacted me because she was horrified that a Polish-Canadian in her Catholic mothers' group (or whatever it was) had stated that she would be very upset if her children married non-Poles. My friend-from-way-back had heard similar remarks from Eastern Europeans, and she was shocked such views existed in modern Toronto. (If my memory does not betray me, she married very young and thus was spared my adventures in multicultural dating.*) 

Well, I wrote her an entire essay on the topic, which may have killed her, as she never got back to me. But at any rate, that Polish-Canadian mother will probably make a hellish mother-in-law unless her children all share "Poland" as a core value and marry only other people who have "Poland" as a core value. Chances are, though, that she may have given birth to someone who falls in love with Japanese culture, goes to Japan to "teach English", and comes back to Toronto only at Christmas with his Japanese wife and three beautiful Shinto-Catholic children. And good for him, say I. 

If you can think of "shared core values" which absolutely would not work to foster a marriage (besides "open marriages", i.e. sexual promiscuity), do let me know. I was going to say consumerism, but if a couple are united in their love for the earn-to-spend lifestyle, it might not be fatal. I suppose it depends on their degree of honesty and ability to share. For example, if a man loves to collect Matchbox toys, he can't really kick up a fuss if his wife loves to collect shoes. 

*Being told over a friendly lunch that my East Asian luncheon companion was attracted only to East Asian women of his own ethnicity felt rather old, though, as I was in my 30s and actually had no designs on the chap that I can recall. But what a relief to have understood at last that only men who are "into redheads" will ever be interested in little me. "Redhead" is not a core value, but it is a basic attraction thing, which seems to be way more important for visual men than for imaginative women.)

Buying Security

Today Benedict Ambrose went online and made a lump-sum overpayment on our mortgage. He waited until I was in the room so I could feel the buzz. I suspect the endorphins caused by overpaying the mortgage will increase as the interest projections decrease, and I will be as high as a kite the day we make our last payment. I hope there's a lot of B.A.'s homemade elder flower champagne around when that happens. I won't need it, but we can serve it at our party. 

Would it be in poor taste to have a mortgage freedom party? 

Increasingly young people have been asking me for marriage advice lately, and I keep mentioning being financially prepared for ILLNESS and DEATH. I'm not sure that's what the young people expect or want to hear. 

Before B.A. got sick, I concentrated on the just-being-a-decent-person stuff. For example, if you suddenly feel acutely pleased with your spouse and grateful this spouse is in your life, you should tell him or her at once---if Spouse is not at home, send Spouse an email or text message. You should tell other people, too, although not in a gushing way or in a way incongruous with the local culture. When I was growing up, my mother used to tell me, my brothers and sisters that my father was very clever, often just by exclaiming, "Oh, clever Daddy!" or variations on that. My father would extol us to thank my mother for the wonderful meal.  They're still together, seven hundred years later. 

While B.A. was sick, I concentrated on keeping him alive and me sane and employed. Fortunately, being a writer I could write about B.A. being sick when I couldn't make myself write anything else. This led to some very poignant articles about marriage that have made people, including me, cry. 

During B.A.'s illness, I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that his death-in-service payment would actually be enough for me to bury him and buy me enough time to get the rest of my life together---if only he had joined the pension plan. Oops. 

So while B.A. was still lucid, I brought him the pension plan paperwork, explained it, and got him to sign. That wasn't really the hard part. The hard part had already happened: calling up the HR guy--in Britain, where we don't really talk about money, let alone death--to ask "How much?"  

I don't want anyone to ever feel the shame I did making that call at that time, and so now that B.A. has recovered, I bang on about the importance of being rooted in the realities of family finance. And the big daily question of family finance is "How much?" 

Yes, in the West we marry for love, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm not sure how marriage could work in the West any other way. But even so, love can survive and thrive only under certain conditions, and one of them is mutual tranquility about finances.  B.A. and I are mutually tranquil about paying off debt--and a mortgage is indeed a debt--as soon as possible. We have learned our student loan lessons.

In 1990, I remember young men in the pro-life movement saying "My wife should not HAVE to work," and I heartily approved of this opinion. It definitely makes sense if a young engaged couple is planning on having children, and if they are believing Catholics under 35, children they will almost certainly have. 

However, life is not as easy as all that. In fact, the very summer I first heard someone say that, the market crashed, ushering in a recession and Reality Bites. (This guy was okay, though, because he A. had a good job, B. bought a house and rented out its rooms to other bachelors until the mortgage was paid, C. married a good woman, had kids and as far as I can tell from social media, has lived happily ever after.) 

B.A. and I were lucky in that we had saved enough for a down payment on a two-bedroom flat in a not-horrible neighbourhood by the time we left the Historical House. I remember feeling sad, though, the first time I saw it because I was still in "entitlement" mode and, deep down, wanted to live in a magnificent Georgian flat in Edinburgh's New Town like everybody else while knowing that this was the best we  could do.  

Now, though, I am thrilled. Our mortgage lender, looking at our past record, may have thought it was dealing with a couple of financial ninnyhammers and would make gazillions in interest over the next 20 years. What it did not know was that I had made a deeply humiliating--and therefore life-changing--phone call to a (very kind, by the way) Human Resources man, and was therefore never, ever going to stop thinking about money for the rest of my puff. 

By the way, I have changed the title of this post from "Buying Freedom" to "Buying Safety" to "Buying Security." Never having to pay for housing (beyond taxes, insurance and repairs) again sounds like a giant step towards security to me. It sound better than travel, eating out, fancy clothes and a host of other things I really like. 

Meanwhile, the roof maintenance man has called to say he's free to come tomorrow, and I just cheerfully invited him over. We've got "roof money" in our savings account; we're good. 

Gardening Update: My French beans all withered. This is probably from being brought outdoors to "harden off" too soon, but this could also be down to some illness. Thus, I have thrown them in the garden waste bin and planted 5 new beans in the veggie trug.

Chaos...

 ... is the enemy of the poor. 

I'll expand on this eventually. At the moment, I'm working.

Bambi Ate My Peas

When B.A. and I got home from Ely on Tuesday, I went at once to the garden to see how my plants were. Pauline (the blackcurrant) had flourished in our absence, so I was really very pleased. Paul (the other blackcurrant) was his quickly growing, sturdy self. The herb garden is coming along, without any sign yet of the chives, however. The broad beans in the veggie trug were looking a bit chewed; I should co-plant some marigolds, I believe, but fortunately the beans are far enough along not to mind bugs too much. The peas had sprouted but---at least two were missing, and there was an actual hole where they should have been.

The hole was odd, for the trug is high enough off the ground that cats can't get into it with a giant leap, and that would mean landing in plastic netting. It was also rather a large but shallow hole. The easiest explanation was a naughty squirrel. However, we learned the truth yesterday when B.A. was out in the garden and our downstairs neighbour called him to her kitchen door. 

Our downstairs neighbour showed B.A. photos on her phone--of a young male deer, but for his horns, barely a fawn. He had somehow found himself in our neighbour's back garden and then, after she had taken a number of photos, he squeezed through the gap between fences to our back garden. Our neighbour watched from her window as he wandered over to my veggie trug and helped himself. Sadly, she did not take a photo of that. 

The news is bad and good. On the one hand, a marauding deer has snacked on my peas! But on the other hand, we live in an area with so much greenery that fawns appearing in the garden are an actual possibility.  

I have never read Silent Spring*, but it was mentioned--along with a number of other interesting books--in Steel's Sitopia. I'm delighted to report that spring is silent neither in Scotland nor in Ely. In Ely the blackbirds were loudly yakking to each other, and the ring-necked doves were positively mooing. This morning I went for a walk and enjoyed all the real-life tweets and twittering. 

If you are interested in conservationism, eating and food, I highly recommend Sitopia. It is not a Christian book--the ending chapters on human mortality make that clear--but it has a goodly amount of Classical Stoicism which makes it at least mostly compatible with Christian reading. It speaks well of traditional meals and mealtimes, and as I mention every Lent, I think our ancestors in faith really knew what they were doing when they banned meat, milk, eggs and oil for six weeks and tightened their belts. (They often did this in Advent, too, which is why traditional Christmas Eve dishes are pescatarian.) 

Personally, I object to feeling helpless about matters that affect me and the society I live in, so I have taken a few radical steps to cut down on my own use of plastics, for example. The most dramatic one was stopping my contact lens subscription--throwing out the little single-use plastic packets every morning and the little one-day plastic lenses every night. My coarse hair, it turns out, has always hated shampoo (a product first invented in the 1930s), so I no longer buy that. Bath soap is still available in bar form, thank goodness, and I can live without shower gel (1865) and its plastic, disgusting shower puff.  My annual makeup splurge--over. Hair dye--never started.

As for the grocery shopping--it's a work in progress. I loved Bea Johnson's Zero Waste Home, and I was sad that our household of two produces more than a quart of rubbish and recycling every few days, let alone a year, until I reflected that cutting down that dramatically takes time and also, to a certain extent, relies on the nearby shops. Pre-Covid, Tesco promised to minimise its carbon footprint by 60% by 2025. Well, let's see. 

*Silent Spring was very influential, but it is quite controversial today. The late Kathy Shaidle frequently accused its author Rachel Carson of being responsible for the malaria deaths of millions. Others defend her.

Writing Joy

I was going to write something today about sustainable living--and how much I enjoyed Caroline Steele's Sitopia, which is about sustainable eating, one of my favourite topics--but the first thing I came across this morning, via Facebook, was Steve Skojec's cri-de-coeur expressing his disappointment in the Church. 

Long pause while you read Skojec's broadside against the Una Vera Fides. Maybe make yourself a cup of coffee first. 

The Church has been a disappointment to Steve from beginning (or by the time he was 14) to end (or very recently when an easily-recognised priest denied baptism to his youngest child). Steve writes that he is angry, which will not be a surprise to any of Steve's long-time readers. Steve has been angry for as long as I remember reading his tweets, and the mischievous have inspired Steve to new paroxyms of online rage for months, if not years, now. As you know if you read the article, Steve has reason to be angry, and he has the right to be angry---and yet I'm sorry that he's writing angry because I don't think it will help him become happy. 

The internet loves anger, mind you. I don't think I realised what an addictive drug online rage is until I started reading Mundabor. (Vox Cantoris to me in Toronto: "People admit to reading Mundabor now?") Eventually--after I met her, in fact--I even starting reading Ann Barnhardt. Yowza! Even spicer than Mundabor!

 If I were interested in building up a readership for readership's sake (or to get Substack subscriptions), I'd start a blog called "Reasons I'm Angry" and let rip every day. Although it might be good for our bank account, it would be very bad for me. When I was writing the "Seraphic Singles" blogs, I was often angry and depressed, but obviously I couldn't sound that way when I was calling myself "Seraphic Single", for heaven's sake. Therefore, I summoned joy into my brain and wrote cheerfully--or at worst just solemnly--about aspects of Single life.  Blogging was often the best part of my day, and it wasn't just because I was distracting myself or thinking about other people. It was because I was writing happy. 

My wellness journal has a daily space for writing out what I feel grateful for. When I'm in a rush, I skip it, but sometimes I take the time to write things like "B.A./parents both well/mortgage overpayment/Pauline [the blackcurrant bush] improving.'' It's a really good idea. And it's also a good pastoral practise. Once when I disclosed my pain about an unfortunate confession by my ex-therapist, a Jesuit friend asked me if she had helped me. That stopped my complaints short, for I had to admit that, yes, she really had. Was she a saint? No. Had she helped? Yes. I never felt as badly about her massive screw-up again, and so not only was I reminded to be grateful for her good work, I was grateful to my Jesuit friend.

This reminds me the the messiness of life is not all bad, for I sustain joy and gratitude for all kinds of disparate things and people. I'm grateful I can go to the Traditional Latin Mass every week, and I'm grateful that I had an enriching, happy time at a Jesuit theology school. I'm grateful that there are Benedictine monks celebrating the Old Mass in Norcia, and I'm grateful that there are Benedictine nuns singing the old Latin Office in Ryde (even if only the New Mass is celebrated in their chapel). One of my best friends is a leftie-lib agnostic feminist, and another is a devoutly Catholic traditional mother of five. One of my old mentors is such a fan of Pope Francis, he clearly isn't comfortable meeting with me anymore, and I remember to pray for his late parents every Sunday because--despite his religious beliefs--I am terribly grateful for his kindness to me years ago. 

Agonized by scandal after scandal, Catholics ask ourselves how our faith can survive all this. I think of my thirteen or fourteen year old self, in our beautiful old parish church (sold soon afterwards because the land under it was worth millions), wondering what martyrdom might look like in my lifetime. I thought it might involve being shot by Soviet invaders for sneaking off to church. Now I wonder if it doesn't simply mean hanging onto the mast, singing snatches of childhood hymns or even psalms set to tunes in the Bad Old Days, i.e. the 1960s and 70s, while the barque fills with sewage.

The funny thing about being a Catholic trad who grew up in mainstream Novus Ordo Catholicism is that I have a lot of 1970s and 1980s hymns stored permanently in my memory banks, and if I were languishing in prison, I'd be singing "And I will RAY-AY-se you UH-UP on the LA-AST day!" Yes, I have terrible taste, but that's what I've got, and I'm grateful for it and my elementary school music teacher. (Weirdly, he also taught us "Hava Nagila" in kindergarten, so technically I knew some Hebrew before even French.)

But my point is--in case you are wondering--is that the way through all this mess--the disappointing priests and the wrong-headed bishops and the usherettes in jogging pants gesturing at you to receive  Holy Communion--is to remember everything you love or have loved about your Catholic life (if you are Catholic). I shall now write a short list to prompt you to your own:

Catholic Book of Worship II.

Sunday Mass (either Form) on a very sunny morning, especially Easter.

The 1960s wooden Stations-of-the-Cross at St. Left-wing.

The 1940s stained glass windows at St. Right-wing.

Fr C and Fr L (crypto-trads, the both of them, I later discovered).

Heroines of God by Fr. Lovasik.

My First Communion dress and veil.

My mother cutting up my First Communion veil to make my wedding veil.

Doughnuts after Mass. 

Parish youth group.

Parish youth group dances.

All-girls Catholic school.

Catholic school dances at the all-boys Catholic schools. 

My-grade-going-on-retreat

That time I helped served tea to the priests who had just heard up to 900 teenage girls' confessions, and the air was blue with cigarette smoke.

That time I ran away from an awkward social situation to get to Midnight Mass. 

That time the archbishop was coming at last, and so every Trad from here to Glasgow filled the pews. 

That time my husband was in surgery, and I went to the [Church of Scotland] chapel to argue with God, and the Lord was there with me. 

Those times friends walked with me on my pilgrimages to the local saint, interred five miles away.

That time our priest came to my husband's hospital room to give him Final Unction, and B.A. struggled to sit up and began beating his emaciated breast. 

That time my Protestant friend died of cancer and I went to the Cathedral to cry. 

That time during Covid we were so worried about our priest being sick and then there he was in the carpark, wan but alive. 

This morning's Polish class--live from Krakow--when my teacher explained why in Poland Whitmonday is dedicated to Mary.

Update: Dr. Edward Feser knocks it out of the park.