Note Takers at Mass

This weekend most of my time was spent in Irish class, which should merit its own blog post, so this will be about what I did the rest of the weekend. Saturday evening Tiffy came into town, and we had dinner at Himal Chuli’s (one of her favorite restaurants) and then went to a Madison Bach Musicians’ concert at Christ Presbyterian. The usual suspects played and were as good as ever, but the guest musicians (a soprano, a bass, and a Baroque oboist) were so amazing that afterwards Tiffy said, “This might have been my favorite concert ever by them!” and I had to agree. The audience gave them a standing ovation.

Sunday morning after my Irish class was over, I met Tiffy and Travalon at the Manna Café for brunch. That place is always crazy busy, probably because it is so good. I had the Hakuna Fritatta, which has lots of kale in it, and so did Tiffy, while Travalon had the Ojibwe Scramble with wild rice in it. They are both really tasty, but we all agreed the rice really adds something special to the Ojibwe Scramble. Then Tiffy and I went to the Treinen Corn Maze, which was Athena’s owl this year. We found enough secret stamps to both get special maze pens, which have little plastic mazes inside of them with tiny balls that can roll through them. We just love the corn maze, running around outside for hours while following a map and looking for secret stamps hidden in obscure corners. It exercises your body AND your brain!

After going to Rich’s house for dinner, Travalon and I had to go to the late Mass at St. Paul’s. This particular Mass starts at 9 pm and is geared towards college students, so the priest’s homilies are always about how they should be looking for good Catholic spouses. They even had cereal afterwards, but Travalon and I did not partake. We were a little weirded out by three young women sitting in our pew who were taking notes through the entire Mass. At first I thought they were just multitasking, doing homework while attending Mass, but slowly we realized they weren’t even participating in the Mass, they were just taking notes on it. Every time the priest did something interesting, like take the consecrated hosts out of the tabernacle, you could see them leaning over and writing madly. I was a little annoyed that they were treating the Mass like some kind of social spectacle and highly suspect they were taking notes for a class, maybe on Comparative Religion. So I prayed that the graces they received from attending Mass would lead them to the Church. At least they knew better than to receive Communion…

Famous Hat