Feeling like an ash hole

I'm eating cold sausages and bacon rashers left over from last night's pancake feast. Ash Wednesday today, so the Resident Fan Boy will give up coffee for the next forty days and compound his sacrifice by making coffee for me after dinner. This evening, if the weather is not treacherous, he will take the dried out fronds of the palm leaves that have been stuck behind a picture frame above the computer and get smudged with the ashes at church.

In the meantime, I climb the hill to younger daughter's school, trying to take arty pictures of February devastation.As I bring younger daughter to her locker, I take the opportunity to congratulate Guardian Angel on her award.
"What award?"
"The book review award."
"I won an award?"
At this point Russian Prodigy, a rather nasty piece of work who has been known to speak to younger daughter as if she's an imbecile when people are watching and stuff snow into her boots when they're not, appears from nowhere, fixes me with an alarmed stare and declares: "She's not supposed to know! We were told not to tell her!"
I return her stare and say: "But the parents got an email about it yesterday! There was nothing in it about it being a surprise!" Indeed, the lengthy and rather poorly punctuated message had appeared on my monitor the previous morning. Why on earth would they send such a notice and try to surprised the recipients more than 24 hours later? All the same, I leave the school under a cloud, and feeling rather upset and disgruntled, am halfway home before I remember I was wanting to take pictures of the stuff I missed en route to school.

While I'm snapping, I see a regular on my street, a book under one arm and her trusty dachshund under the other. It's a mystery, of course. The book, that is.
"They end well," she shrugs apologetically. "That's why I like 'em, I guess."
"Yes," I say, being a P.D. James fan and of not much else in that genre, "Justice prevails."

I wind up in the coffee shop to scribble and sort. I'm re-examining two of my favourite books about writing, both by Henriette Anne Klauser: Writing on Both Sides of the Brain and Put Your Heart on Paper. She's since come out with two more books and all are available at my library. A guy in one of the booths making business calls is intrigued and asks if I'm a writer. "Not for money," I smile ruefully. I've just read in one of the books: "The difference between a writer and an author is Page 53."

The coffee shop seems to be tuned to an easy-listening satellite station this morning; they're playing The Carpenters and that ghastly "I Am Your Lady" song from the Eighties, which would easily make the Songs I Loathe list. Before I'm driven out, though, a James Taylor ditty that I do like comes on (I don't like all of James Taylor's stuff, but he did write some lovely songs), and it just happens to be another one of the songs Launchcast sent me when I first began listening to my station. Here's the video for it, and check out who's singing back-up! Feeling a little less ashen, I make my way into the salty morning.

The Rites of Mid-Winter

This has been a rather solemn week, liturgically speaking, particularly for a Unitarian married to a practising Anglican.

On Sunday, I decided to accompany the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter to church, having given it a miss for several weeks. I used to be a regular churchgoer, but the Unitarian church here in Ottawa doesn't feel so much like a church as a country club, only with a air of earnestness and social responsibility. So, after five years of banging my head against a brick steeple, I started accompanying my husband to his church, which sadly has only emphasized the fact that the one thing I've truly learned from all these years of being married to an Anglican is that I'm definitely not an Anglican. Still as Anglican churches go, the RFB's is not bad. I'd even go so far to say that it's the most Unitarian Anglican church I've ever attended. And that's saying something. This is probably due to the high percentage of gays that attend this particular church. I'd never met an Anglican church with a "rainbow section" before. (You don't have to be gay to be Unitarian, far from it, but the Unitarian church was blessing gay unions many years before it became legal in Canada for gays and lesbians to wed.)

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with why I decided to go along with the Resident Fan Boy last Sunday. It was Candlemas, a holy day I've always rather liked. (Groundhog Day has to be one of the lamest ideas ever.) I love watching younger daughter's face as she grasps the lit candles and the lights go off for the reading of the Gospel. And watching my daughter's face in the candlelight, I found myself choking back tears at the words of the gradual hymn, sung to the old English folk song O Waly Waly: "O little love, who comes again/ the Word reborn to make God plain..." For Candlemas, like most liturgical things, has a strong undercurrent of sorrow. It's based on the story of Simeon who saw the infant Jesus being brought to the temple to be presented, so it contains the Nunc Dimittis, the canticle of Simeon, the words you hear at nearly every Christian funeral: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace . . . ." And the not-so-comforting words to Jesus' parents: "a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also . . . ."

These strange shining pools in the centre of the dark, festivals in wintertime, are like roses with thorns for parents, particularly parents of special-needs children. But all the same, it is beautiful, and although I cannot in good conscience call myself a Christian, I do rather love the words from the opening of the Gospel of St John: ". . . the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not". Modern translations say: "and the darkness has not overcome it" which is no fun at all; I like the idea of the darkness saying "Huh?" Rather like my younger daughter shining out there in the sea of neurotypicalness...

Lent comes early this year, treading on the heels of Candlemas, so the service was supposed to end with the "burial of the alleluias" which we missed because the service went overtime and we had to catch our bus. All the same, this meant hauling out some of the best hymns for the last time before Easter, and younger daughter particularly enjoyed "All Creatures of our God and King" which is called the "Mr Bean Hymn" at our house. (Younger daughter adores Mr Bean who surely must be a little PDD himself.) And tonight we'll have pancakes and bacon and sausage for Shrove Tuesday. Tomorrow, the Resident Fan Boy will decide whether to brave the elements to get his forehead smudged on Ash Wednesday.