I was watching the Nightly News on NBC last night when I twice saw Vice President Joe Biden with a big mark on his forehead. The first time, which was Biden sitting around a table at some kind of meeting, I thought maybe there was something wrong with the TV, or maybe the camera, but when the mark moved along with Biden I thought perhaps he had some kind of cancerous lesion on his forehead.It was, a few minutes later in a completely different story, when they showed Biden standing behind Obama at a podium with the SAME smudge on his forehead, that I understood what it was: Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, and Biden, being the good Catholic that I now assume he is, went to Mass yesterday and had the sign of the cross made in ash on his forehead.
As he stood behind the podium looking smug, it reminded me of a time in my life when I looked similarly smug as a result of Ash Wednesday. During my junior and senior years of high school, I forged notes from my parents that said that--because I was Roman Catholic--I needed to be excused from school in order to attend noon mass at the Good Shepherd. If there had been more Catholics in my school the administration probably would have known that Ash Wednesday was not a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics, and that if it were that there would be mass in the evening as well as at noon, but I grew up in a part of the country where there weren't too many Catholics. There were maybe 140 in my graduating class; three of us were Catholic. So on that day our junior and senior year all three of us checked out of school to go to mass.
Except that we never went. What would be the fun of telling a lie to get out of school only to then go to mass? We went and ate lunch at a local restaurant, and afterwards stopped at the house of one of the girls and dipped our fingers in the charcoal grill in her garage and then smudged the charcoal on our foreheads. We then headed back to school and spent the rest of the day with the smudges on our foreheads, feeling like we'd gotten something over on somebody, and looking a whole lot like Biden looks in the photo above.
Mom and Dad, I don't think I ever told you any of this before, so all I can say is...I'm sorry. I know I've let you down time and time again, and here's another example. I hope you'll forgive me.
2 comments:
There is an analogy here: Biden dropped out of the presidential race becaus of cheating. Moral of the story: Cheaters wear black marks on their foreheads. At least in my sample of 2.
I think I got screwed. My ash cross was not NEARLY as big as Biden's AND it did not last 12 hours. But I guess I should feel better than Pelosi after she got schooled by the pope.
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