Monday Night Dinner

There was a slight hitch in Dinner plans this week. And by slight hitch what I mean is, we didn’t have a stove on Tuesday night.

Theoretically (hopefully) a new stove is being delivered to our apartment this afternoon and by the time I get home will have been connected to the gas line. However, last night I couldn’t even make tea (the humanity!) so we relocated dinner to our favorite diner and indulged in breakfast for dinner.

The Paschal season gives us Palm Sunday, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday . . . what, I ask you, did Monday and Saturday do to get left off the list*

Dinner this week fell on Shrove Tuesday aka Fat Tuesday aka Mardi Gras.  In the more dogmatic days when Lenten repentance and reflection was reinforced with fast days and a list of foods you weren’t allowed to eat, Mardi Gras functioned as the last hurrah before 40 days of abstinence and penitence.  These days Mardi Gras gets celebrated by a lot of people who aren’t planning on giving up anything for Lent, must less embracing the abstemiousness that’s supposed to characterize the next six weeks. Read the rest of this entry ?

Back when I was in high school – you know shortly after the last ice age and before cell phones became ubiquitous (although they did exist and were in fact small enough to put in your pocket – my father had one he never turned on except to call us from the Immigration line at the airport to say, “The Eagle has landed”) – I used to go hang out in downtown Geneva with friends on Saturday afternoons.

Before I’d leave the house I would always end up having some variation on the following conversation – and remember this was pre-cell phones, because if I’d had a cell phone the entire conversation would have been rendered moot. Read the rest of this entry ?