Recycling Day: Searching for God and Underpants

I have decided Tuesday would be a good day to sift through the Archives here and recycle posts I’m particularly fond of. Because it’s my blog and I can. Also because writing something new and fascinating more than once a week is kind of tiresome. (I know some of you think, now that I’m retired, I have nothing but time on my hands. Actually, that’s true, but it doesn’t mean I want to spend all of it creating more stuff to fill this space.) Sometimes Tuesday may fall on a Wednesday. We’ll see.

Searching for God and Underpants
(originally posted 9/23/10)

We baptized Baby Bret recently. He was baptized in the Lutheran church, which was a bit odd for me. My own children were baptized and raised to be good Catholics. They defected, every one, a puzzling thing and still a little irritating. It isn’t that I can’t go with the flow, but excuse me, I must have spent close to $100,000 on Catholic schools over the years, and if I had known how things would turn out, I would have taken advantage of free public education like everyone else.

Gina, who is Baby Bret’s mother, had no problem being Catholic right through her expensive college education with the Jesuits. Then she met Bret Sr. and promptly converted to Lutheranism. My middle daughter, Jill, and her family are some religion I can never remember the name of but they sing really loud. And the oldest, Jessica, who I thought had settled on Episcopalianism or Presbyterianism, is on the hunt for her spiritual home again and presently attending the Unitarian church.

It rankles a little, I must admit. All that money and my grandkids don’t know the Hail Mary.

Moving along… The baptism went well. The service was nice and Baby Bret never said boo, not even when he was passed around like a plate of rumaki. Afterward everyone drove to my house for lunch, simply because adding a fourth person to his parents’ house has made it impossible to squeeze in guests even if someone sits on the diaper pail and someone else holds the breast pump.

Lunch was nice, too, if hectic. Jill had an anxiety attack when she realized five-year-old Grace wasn’t wearing underpants. Apparently Grace sat through the entire church service in her little red sundress and white shoes and no underpants. So I went searching for little girl underwear, couldn’t find any, and ended up pinning the sides on a pair of my own for her. Gracie was utterly disgusted, but I just told her, “That’s what you get for not wearing underpants. You have to wear your grandma’s.”

The weather was good.

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