Poems

Thin Soup Celebration

72 Comments

There was a hopeful sign this week out of a gathering of officials of the Catholic church. They said some things about gays and lesbians that fell somewhat short of complete condemnation.

In a preliminary document produced by some senior clerics at a lengthy Vatican meeting that would otherwise go unnoticed by most of the world, it was acknowledged that “Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer the Christian community.”

For those who have been waiting for a fundamental shift and an embrace of common sense and simple humanity from a bureaucracy that maintains gays are “intrinsically disordered,” being bestowed with generic “gifts” and unidentified “qualities” can’t be dancing-in-the-streets news.

But it did make me think of how we all feel after a long winter when we’re hungry for the thaw. It’s remarkable how little it takes to cheer you up when one is desperate for a sign of warmth.

No fireworks yet, but I think the moment is worth a three-limerick salute. However I only have two, because I couldn’t think of enough good rhymes for “intrinsic”.

I.
All those Catholic guys who are gays
are “disordered”, the church doctrine says.
But their spirits, it lifts
when it says, “They have “gifts”!
Minor progress – with major delays.

II.
I have scorned you and left you maligned.
But my views have been lately refined.
You’re intrinsically bad,
but that’s not iron-clad!
You have qualities, too, of some kind.

What’s the most watered-down compliment you’ve received (or given)?

72 thoughts on “Thin Soup Celebration”

  1. That’s easy. It was from a guy who had just eaten a steak dinner at a small restaurant where I worked the summer before starting college. The film “Rosemary’s Baby” was showing at the local theater, and a lot of customers had told me I looked a lot like Mia Farrow who starred in that film, with a very short haircut – a cut similar to the one I had been sporting for years.

    I noticed that this man was giving me furtive looks throughout his dinner, but thought little of it. When he came to the cash register to pay his check he looked at me and said: I know you must have heard this a million times, but I know what I’m talking about. I’ve just returned from a trip to California where I happened to be staying at the same hotel as Mia Farrow. You are a lot taller than she is, and she has more freckles, but without make-up on, she’s a real Plain Jane too.

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  2. If gay and Catholics your lot
    You’ve landed an uncomfortable spot
    But with this new pope
    At last there is hope
    Of your living life out as you ought

    Gays and lesbians with catholic leanings
    Have hope that their souls are careening
    Toward gods pearly gate
    With saint peter in wait
    Where the love that they’ve felt now has meaning

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  3. In 1991 I was burned out as a teacher. I was attending a summer workshop in town at which I was a lethargic attendee. My depression had been moderate to bad all summer. I got a note to go see the new interim supt. promoted from MS princ. I had been part of a small group which talked him and then the board into the idea of a 2 year interimship. He and I got along well but were not buddies or anything. he offered me a job for 2 years working at the regional level with the man who later became my partner and being curriculum director of the district on a part time basis paid from a regional grant. The interim supt was all excited with this idea, extolling its virtues. Mostly he could save a lot of money by putting me at the top end of the salary scale on leave. And replacing me with a cheap new person at the bottom of the scale. I was resistant to the idea. He kept trying to talk me into it, not once talking about what I might gain. Finally he laid it out again adding that he thought I might like a change. At the end he almost begged stressing the good I could do in regional schools and in our district. He knew I was up to the job, and that he needed to nibble $600,000 out of the budget. “Besides, we won’t be losing one of our BEST teachers in you.”
    Right there I took it.

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      1. Actually I have great respect for him. He turned the district around in his four year interim position. We worked together very well.

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  4. Hey all – Blevins Book Club Change. Since things are still a little discombobulated at Jacque and Lou’s, we’re moving book club this Sunday to MY HOUSE. Still 2 p.m. If you don’t have my address, let me know – shelikins at Hotmail.com.

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    The ever popular High School/Middle School Mean Girl compliment: “Gee, you look nice for a change.” This is followed by “Your wife/husband is so nice. How did YOU meet someone like that?” And then there was my late, great passive-aggressive mother-in-law who told my husband after meeting me for the first time, “I just love her. She is just so common.”

    What does one make of that?

    Thanks to Sherrilee for taking BBC. I hope to be there–I read the Art Forger and everything. But indeed we are still recovering from Lou’s many, many trips to Iowa in the last 3 mos while Okie was ill, company here, and all the stuff we brought home from Lou’s childhood home: Lots of tole paintings and Nissa, 2 century-old dried out violins good only for hanging on the wall as DECOR, a very large, disorganized stamp collection, and a partridge in a pear tree.

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    1. Hide the nisse in corners, like they are watching you and the pooches…it might confuse the dogs, but think of the fun for guests at your house.

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    3. In a fit of compulsion I am writing my second bad novel. This time I have Clair, the boy of my first novel 65 years old. He has retired back to the land he on which he grew up. He built a new house a few years before in which he will now live. But all the buildings of his childhood still stand in deteriorating condition. He has to drive through the farmyard past those buildings to get to his new house. He is overwhelmed by all that stuff and what to do with it. There are other elements to the story, but playing with the metaphors of his rotting past has been fun.
      Typing this has been my challenge, of course.

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        4. tim, you have many talents, but i never thought proof-reading was one of them. just goes to show i should never underestimate you.

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      2. Clyde, have you considered Dragon Speaking or any other voice-recognition software to ease your typing problems? I know this sort of software has a learning curve (both the software and the user need to learn), but it might be worth a shot.

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      1. Apparently at least 1/2 dozen of them, painted at your local ceramics shop. These seem to be a great comfort to Lou and are definitely part of the landscape of his life as he says good-bye to his family of origin. And indeed they are everywhere near Decorah, and in the area of Norway where the family originated!

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    5. Our house is in a shambles because of all the things we brought up from my parents’ home and haven’t yet put away. All of husband’s business stuff and books from his old job are lying around as well, plus boxes of ripening tomatoes. We have been gone so much over the past month that we can’t get anything organized. I have hopes for this weekend.

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      1. How to get through the work week without guilt: during the week tell yourself you will get it done on the weekend. On the weekend tell yourself you deserve to relax and have fun.

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        2. I had hoped that retiring would mean that I would never again feel guilty about not getting anything done during the work week. I looked forward to seven days a week of delicious idleness. Alas, I now feel guilty seven days out of seven.

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        1. Thanks. I am sure that if my dad could see the house now he would make the same comment he made a couple of months ago when laundry and other things got away from us- “It looks like somebody had a fight in here”!

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  7. I never wore skirts or dresses when I was a kid unless I absolutely had to; Mom had embraced women’s pantsuits with fervor when they were finally socially acceptable, so she had no problem with that at all. One holiday season, sometime in my later high school or early college years, I decided I wanted to dress up a bit and bought a long skirt and sweater to wear to the Xmas Eve candlelight service (at this point we’d quit going to the WELS church that ran my school, and started attending Ft. Snelling Chapel instead. Mom’s idea, thank you Mom). My dad, who always had the gift of the wrong word at the wrong time, told me, “It’s nice to see you dressing like a girl for once.”

    Not only did he never comment on my clothing choices again , he probably lived to regret saying anything, because not long after that I entered my Goth phase. I was wearing skirts and dresses all right–and spiderwebs, and skulls, and bats. I’m kind of surprised he didn’t try to have me exorcised. I still miss my vegan screaming-skull-buckle boots. They were cheap and didn’t last long, but they sure were fun…

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  8. I remember early and my sales career I was asked to go and be the guy standing in a booth at a tradeshow it was a tradeshow for hardware stores and I was 19 and had never done this before. I was told it would be horrible and that no one would stop and talk to me at all when I got there the guys in the booth on opposite sides were friendly and nice and people did stop by and talk to me about the product I was promoting when the buyer came by and asked me how was going I told him not nearly as bad as I was told it would be it occurred to me after he left what an idiot thing that was to say I think that was the first time I ever felt changed and regret about saying something along those lines
    But my biggest guffaw was with the new sales manager for my fertilizer company
    His name was Pomsel and he was very flamboyant and drove a Lincoln town car and ordered bottles of wine with lunch and when I asked him what the name Pomsel was nationality wise he said German. My comment was that it was nice to have a member of the master race on our side. He of course was Jewish.

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      1. he buried me quietly and slowly and completely
        he had me take him to all my accounts twice then gave me the pink slip. i had successfully gotten him into every (count them every) in the geograph area he was capable of supplying and he fired me. i was able to go back and get 1/2 the business back from people who realized that the guy was a sham and who believed me when i pointed out that the expensive stuff that was supposed to be in the bag wasnt there. he was known as a guuy who came out of nowhere and had all the business there was to have. it is one of 4 or 5 stories (all exactly the same) that still gets my blood boiling every time i think about em. in reality i am pretty certain that he would have fired me and put it all in his own pocket anyway. he finally got fired when he took the son in law of the owner out and got him sex on the company credit card after he had been warned to shape up. that company got sold a couple years ago for a fistfull of money to a walmart suplier. argggg

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  9. Well, I’ve been on that end of it too. Many years ago I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in several years at the Ren Fest. She and her then husband had a ceramics booth there and they were both dressed in period garb. As I said, I hadn’t seen her in quite a while, and she had put on some weight. A disproportionate amount of that weight was in her stomach and I jumped to the conclusion that she was pregnant. I asked her when the baby was due and was wishing for the earth to swallow me up when she responded: I’m not pregnant, I’m just fat. That’s a mistake you don’t make twice!

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    1. Was just at the pharmacy. A favorite tech who got married five months ago who tends to thickness, not so much fat, has a fuller middle. I bit my tongue. Will wait and see.

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  10. Wow! You all have been busy this morning!
    Will have to read comments later.

    I was the new guy on an electrics crew at a theater. I made a couple ‘rookie’ mistakes but I held me own. At the end of the day the guy I was working with thanked me for “…not being a complete ass-hole.”.
    It was the best compliment I’d gotten in a long time; I wasn’t a COMPLETE a-hole!
    Ha!

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  11. “You’re in great shape FOR YOUR AGE”. Another one – a year ago a woman l thought was a close friend emailed me saying everything she never liked about me and ending the relationship. l responded by emailing her a bullet point list of absolutely everything she’d contributed to my life over the four years l’d known her, saying l’d be forever grateful. She wrote back, “Thank you for such a gracious note; too bad your list is 10 times longer than mine or we’d still be friends!”

    Reminded me of a St Bernard licking your face while peeing down your leg.

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  13. All I can remember is: Sister Mary Alberta (I was teaching in a Catholic school for my first job) told me I was a “be-different” when I wore, instead of the usual mini skirts the other lay teachers were wearing, I wore a “midi” length dress, which came just below the knee. I took it as a compliment, since I wanted to do exactly that, but I doubt if she meant it as one.

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  14. I once had a supervisor who told me in my performance review that he didn’t really know what exactly I did, but that I must be doing okay since there didn’t seem to be any major problems in my department. Still, better than a bad review. I got a raise….sort of.

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    1. You must have been doing your job very well indeed, Linda. Otherwise he would have known what you did – or didn’t do.

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  15. I know I’ve gotten lots of watered-down compliments, but the only example I can think of was really not a compliment, even watered down.

    Back when I was young and had longer hair, I was chatting with a couple and another person, and I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember the woman of the couple said, “I have to get perms because otherwise my hair would be like littlejailbird’s.” Well, what could I say to that? Her husband looked carefully at me and said he liked my hair, but I was stupefied and couldn’t find words to thank him.

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  16. When Joel was about 5, I lost about 30#, and somehow the topic came up one day, so I asked him if he could tell that I’d lost weight. He considered, and then said, “Yeah, you’re not out so far.”

    OT: Dale, I am coveting that cast iron pot in the photo.

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    1. I used to have that cast iron pot but upgraded to an enameled cast iron pot. (Found a good deal, in case AA is wondering.) Figured it was easier for the other people in my household to take care of the enameled one. Those dutch ovens are great for so many things.

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  17. Sandy looked at a low key painting I just finished of Mt. Rainier. She said. “You always make your paintings look better than the photograph.” I said that was kind of the point. “She said, “But it’s really amazing that you do.”

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