Rise like Lions

01 / 06 / 14

T  H  E   I  D  Y  L  L  I  C   D  A  Y  S

dubuque, ia

 skyping family

 stray

Every year except one my family has gone to the convent in Dubuque where my aunt Mickey or sister Mary-Ann since she became a nun lives and works and eats and worships and prays and meditates and finds solace in solitude.  She is my grandpa's sister.  My grandpa is the one with the huge white beard and yes he plays Santa Clause so go to santainchicago.com and he'll be right there on the front page.  He's basically the most famous Sullivan to have ever walked the Earth.  His ex-wife is my grandma and sometimes we would all sit around after we fought over who got the rocking chair & she would tell us stories about living in Germany during WWII, all sorts of fantastic and awful tales that make you grateful to not be in a war of any sort.  There is no internet, except at St. Ben's up the hill that sells chocolate & caramels the nuns have made in their shiny new factory, and the only time we really use that internet is when my grandpa hauls in his entire desktop mac with the keyboard and mouse that he brought from Chicago and we skype some of our family members that are all over the globe; they live everywhere from California to Oregon to Hawaii to Australia, and some used to be in Germany too, but I don't think they have skype because we never get to talk to them.

Because we don't have internet or really any service at all we like to have adventures in the fields and woods around, even though it is 80 something usually and humid and we might get chased by a bull and after hurdling a fence or flinging ourselves over it less gracefully we have to find our way back using a "short-cut" through fields of yellow daisies that grow taller than us and then we see the abbey faintly in the distance and rejoice.  By that time we were all dripping with sweat and had drank up all our water and we were so relieved to see weren't going to have sunstroke or heatstroke after all.  There's no doubt these are the idyllic days.

Sometimes we all go into town to go grocery shopping together and one year we saw an overweight transvestite man who had thinning white hair and clearly looked like a man but he was trying so hard with a skirt and heels and lipstick and earrings.  That year I thought, we are never going to top this, this character has got to be such a sight.  But this last summer we at least equaled it with an enigmatic man in a trench coat despite it being in the 80s and humid, oh so humid like we were swimming, and dragging a suitcase around the store, a big suitcase, in one hand while pushing a cart with another.  He smelled terrible but one has to imagine he was really cooking in that jacket.  My dad surmised he could be a train-jumper.  We'll never see him again and we'll never know but sometimes it is more terrific to imagine than to actually know.