Cathy in the Wright

For My Penance, I'll Say!

With The Chairman returning Tuesday, this is my final chance to offload a burden of guilt that’s been resting on my shoulders since I was 7 years old. I was a lawbreaker, along with my uncles and cousins on my mother’s side of the family.

This lawbreaking occurred after Sunday mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Terrebonne, Minnesota. From the name, yeah, it’s a French community of Canadian farmers who planted themselves and their crops south and east of Red Lake Falls.

After mass, most everybody walked next door to Sauve’s Store, a wonderful place where crackers and cookies were sold in bulk and everything was available from canned soup to work shirts and straw hats. Sorry to disappoint, but the store didn’t have a pot-bellied stove to lounge around. The lounging was done in the other half of the store, which was a bar where—zut allors—beer was served on Sundays. That was highly illegal at the time—the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.

This illegality was ignored so routinely that, darn, there was no sense of illicit excitement. The criminals just sat down and drained a few long-neck, brown bottles of Hamm’s beer. I became an unindicted coconspirator when my cousins gave me tiny sips—same as they did at home with dandelion and chokecherry wine. It didn’t dawn on me for years that all those fun Sundays were rife with law-breaking..

What really set the stage for beer drinking was when my father, not Catholic, attended mass at St. Anthony’s. The priest, Fr. Paquin, broke into a smile when he saw Dad sit down with the family, but the congregation sighed with resignation. That’s because Fr. Paquin was given to lengthy sermons—in French—and everybody knew he was going to repeat the day’s talk in English, for my father.

If The Chairman thinks that The Crazyweiler is one tough dawg, she never met my uncle’s two mutts. One was named Rover and I forget the name of the other. I learned enough French to get the dogs to do what I said, which was important, if you wanted to cross the field that was home to my uncle’s particularly irritable Holstein bull. This two-ton terror once overturned a hayrack, but he’d only paw the earth a safe distance from those dogs, which would leap up to nip him on the nose. The dogs were never in the house, in part due to their habit of hunting skunks. That, as they say, is another story.

I think the statute of limitations has expired on Sunday drinking at Sauve’s store. In the off-chance that it’s not, I promise not to resist if they surround the house.

Posted by Professor at August 12, 2003 12:06 AM