The day I discovered the truth about priests

Warning: This column contains asterisks, exclamation points, pound signs and other symbols denoting a few fairly impressive curse words. If you’re easily shocked by phrases like “@#$!!” and “son of a $#%&!!,” you should probably skip ahead now to the sports section or comics page.

Also, it may seem to some that I’m poking fun at priests here. I’m not. I was raised in a home that boasted framed portraits of the Pope, John Kennedy and Jesus (in that order); priest-bashing is not in my repertoire. But if you’re the sort appalled by the mere notion that priests may occasionally fall short of perfection, please oh please, just give my column a pass this week; I’m far too delicate to field a lot of hate mail.

That said, I know the church has changed a lot in recent years and is no longer the stodgy, monolithic dinosaur it was (or seemed to be) when I was a kid attending St. Isidore Elementary School. Back then, our parish priests — one old (Father Czechowski or something equally Polish), one young (Father Pat or something equally Irish) — seemed nothing less than divine.

The nuns, who in those dark ages still served as teachers, encouraged this delusion and did everything in their power to indoctrinate us into the dogma that was old school Catholicism. So it was tough when, in fourth grade, I learned the truth about priests.

As a reward for having not driven any nuns crazy for an entire week (this was, for me, a major accomplishment) I was chosen — nun-speak for “drafted” — to help out in the rectory for an entire month. (For the unwashed heathens among you, a rectory is the home in which priests live.)

Serving there was a distinction usually reserved for goody-goody alter boys, so I felt appropriately honored. My duties consisted of arriving at the rectory before sunup and lugging in enough firewood that Father Czechowski could raise the sitting room’s temperatures to tolerable levels.

On some days, though by no means all, the Father treated me to a cup of hot cocoa once he had the fireplace blazing cheerily along. So it was that on one late December morning, just a few days before Christmas, I found myself perched on a footstool near the rectory’s fireplace, snow melting from my hair and eyelids as Father Czechowski prodded the embers with an ancient, iron poker.

Now, let me just reiterate, in those days we Catholic schoolboys held priests in the highest regard. The Bing Crosby movies alone had elevated the Fathers to near-mythical status in our eyes.

So I was more than a little surprised when Father Czechowski leapt back from the fire cradling his burned hand and exclaimed (get ready for the stylized profanity), “#$%!!! That @#$%!&!! fire is hotter than #@$!” followed closely by “Son of a @#$%!!.”

The Father had taken the Lord’s name in vain!!

He could not have shocked me more had he suddenly sprouted wings and flown off to Heaven. In fact, of the two scenarios, I would have considered the latter more likely.

Father Czechowski peered at me from beneath formidable, white eyebrows. “Forget you heard that,” he said.

For nearly 50 years, I did; until just now, I kept secret my knowledge that priests are people.

Coming up next week: you won’t believe what Soylent Green is made from.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

When it comes to cars, nothing will ever top Blooey

I was talking last week with my son, the Chrysler rep, about cars we have owned over the years. He makes more money than I do and he has expensive tastes, so most of his cars have been nice ones.

Mine, on the other hand, have all been entrants in one long parade of rolling wrecks; the kindest thing you could say about any of them to date is that none have killed me.

The Van of Death, which finally gave up the ghost last week, was just the most recent in a line of unsafe, under-insured, rusted out heaps that have transported me from Point A to Point B since my 16th birthday. But driving wrecks has never bothered me. I’m not a “car guy” and never have been. I don’t define myself by what I drive and have never felt the need to compensate for anything, even during my mid-life crisis years.

Still, I am an American boy and we’re genetically predisposed to love our cars. So there have been a few over the years to which I grew attached. A 1965 Beetle with a top speed of 45 mph was one. An old Galaxy 500 — previously owned by my grandmother — was another.

But my all-time favorite was Blooey, the 25-year-old Volvo sedan I drove back when my kids still attended elementary school. I purchased Blooey (named for its color, by my daughter) from a guy’s front yard. She cost $68.22, all the cash I had on me at that moment. The car was worth more than that, but it had belonged to the guy’s daughter, long since moved away to school. He just wanted it out of his driveway.

I drove Blooey for four years — that worked out to monthly payments of $1.42. Factor in the fact I rarely carried viable insurance or purchased up-to-date license plates in those days and I was practically driving for free. Occasionally, a cop would notice the expired plates and I’d be forced to pay a fine and “go legal” for a few months before returning to business as usual. Even so, Blooey was a cheap ride.

Dinner trays liberated from one of my old man’s restaurants covered most of the rust holes in the floor, the ones big enough for my kids to fall through at any rate. Aubreii and Jordan would occasionally slide the trays aside to watch the freeway speeding by beneath their feet. My kids were thrill seekers.

I probably could have fixed the floor-holes permanently, but they came in handy at least once. It was during a fierce, summer squall. While newer, safer cars bobbed helplessly in a huge puddle that had formed in a dip in Alpine Avenue, Blooey immediately sank to the bottom where her wheels found purchase and drove us right out again.

Sure, toward the end of Blooey’s long and storied life it took about half a block to bring her to a full stop and she was leaking oil so bad I purchased 10w30 by the gallon, but still, she was a great ride.

A car, I think, is only as good as the adventures you have while driving it, only as good as the places it takes you.

At that, Blooey excelled.

If my new girlfriend loved me she’d move to a paved road

I love my new girlfriend, but I’m not crazy about the road she lives on. It’s a tough call as to whether the relationship will work, considering the shape of the road, but I’m hopeful.

She’s real cute, and she seems willing to put up with all the nonsense that seems to accompany me regardless of the efforts I put forth to stem the nonsense tide.

But … that road.

Calling it a road is actually a bit on the kind side. What it is, is a field with a couple trenches run through it. Trenches laid down long, long ago. Seriously. Her place makes the Little House on the Prairie look like downtown Manhattan.

As Susan Sarandon said in “Thelma and Louise,” it’s not the middle of nowhere, but I can see it from here. It is about as close to life on Mars as you can get without actually running out of usable oxygen.

Her house is nice and reasonably civilized. The toilets flush, the water runs; when you flick a switch, lights come on.

But there’s that road.

It looks like something German tanks rolled over on a wet day on their way to invading Poland.  

It’s bad.

I wouldn’t mind so much were I still driving the Death Van. The Death Van was (so I assumed) indestructible. It had been through nearly 300,000 miles of inept brake work (my own), oil changes that came only five or six-thousand miles after the little sticker on the windshield said they should come, and tune ups that … well, I’m kidding, it never had a tune up.

It was a piece of junk, but a piece of junk I honestly imagined would last me for several more years.

But it didn’t. It died. In part, because of my new girlfriend’s dark side of the moon road.

The strut broke. For those of you non-mechanical types out there (like myself) the strut is (apparently) that big springy thing behind your tires that looks like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. If it breaks, driving your car (or the Death Van) is (apparently, again) unsafe. It can literally kill you.

So I sold the Death Van.  Which was, as I mentioned, a piece of junk before so no great loss.

No problem there.

The problem is, my new car is really kinda kewellll (I spelled it that way on purpose).  It’s red and shiny. The tires actually have a little tread on them, which I am not used to. It doesn’t make embarrassing noises when you accelerate on the highway. Parts don’t fall off on bumpy country roads.

Except for Lori’s road. My girlfriend’s road would cause parts to fall off a Russian tank. It’s that terrible.

I’m not sure if it’s a county road, a city road, a township road, or just one of those roads from an old “Twilight Zone” episode where you get on it and never get off again. But it is terrible, and it’s doing terrible things to my new, shiny, red car.

I would say it’s a dirt road, but most of the dirt has splattered all over the side of my shiny, red car; there can’t, at this point, be much dirt left.

Still, I’m really fond of Lori and the only way to see her (without seeming like a complete wuss) is to drive to her house in my new, shiny, red car. 

I don’t know why love needs to be this complicated. Lori could just as easily own a townhouse in Manhattan. 

Poison apples may be my best shot at the Best Writer award

I’m not the best writer in the state. I’m not even second best. 

I’m third.

Considering how many writers live and work in Michigan, third place doesn’t seem too bad, right? That’s what I keep telling myself.

But somehow, at the Associated Press awards banquet I attended with co-worker Cory Smith earlier this week, that third place felt like the “Almost Winner” prize on the old Bozo television show; you know, that prize they gave to the spazzy kids who couldn’t get the ping-pong ball to land in a bucket from 14-inches away. Not exactly a mark of distinction.

My Reality Check column (the one you’re reading now) got a Big Number One, all the proof I needed that the AP judges are brilliant discerners of talent and excellent arbiters of all things literary. So why didn’t I win the Best Writer award, the one I was lusting after like a teenage boy lusts after the head cheerleader?

Well, apparently, there are two writers who are better than me. This is difficult for an egomaniacal narcissist such as myself to accept. Suddenly, I understood exactly how the Wicked Queen felt when her magic mirror informed her that Snow White was not only fairer, but also younger and more likely to land a handsome prince.

If I knew how to make poisoned apples, I would send a couple to the two writers who placed ahead of me, thereby increasing my chances of taking the top spot next year. But I don’t have that recipe.

Oh, sure, I could try to write better this year than I did last, but that seems like a lot of work and anyone who knows me at all can tell you “a lot of” is exactly the type of work I avoid whenever possible. Besides, what if I did work really hard, wrote my little heart out, and then STILL lost to those other two writers? 

I’d be tempted to try that apple myself. So that’s out.

To compound the anguish I felt over my Almost Winner status, my co-worker took home an unheard-of FIVE out of six first place awards for things like Best Multi-Media Journalist, Best Feature Photo, Best Video, and Most Inflated Head of Any Journalist in the Room.

Cory’s a hard guy to hate, but I did my best anyway, as I sat there clutching my third place certificate in my sweaty little hands, all the while worrying that his stack of engraved plaques might tip over and crush me beneath their ponderous weight. 

Yeah, yeah, I did get a first place for my column and any rational, normal person would be thrilled with that. Maybe if I hadn’t been sitting next to Cory — who basically pulled off a coup unseen since “Lord of the Rings” swept the Academy Awards — I might have felt better about things.

He’s my bud, though, so — as I did with the two writers who edged me out — I feel I should congratulate him. 

Here, Cory, have an apple.

Committing mouse murder should be quick and unacknowledged

There’s an old saying to the affect that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Like a lot of old sayings, this one is full of it.

A penny saved is still just a lousy penny. A bird in the hand is likely to leave a little “surprise” on your palm, while the one in the bush will never be a problem. All work and no play make one Bill Gates and filthy, filthy rich.

Old sayings are dumb.

But it’s the one concerning the mousetrap I find most disturbing, mostly because a few manufacturers (of mousetraps) seem to have taken it to heart, inasmuch as they keep trying to build a better mousetrap. When there is NO need.

The perfect mousetrap was perfected long ago. It consists of a small, wooden rectangle upon which is affixed a spring-loaded thingy that — when activated by the force of a mouse trying to chew stale peanut butter off another thingy (I apologize for the technical jargon) — snaps closed and provides said vermin with a quick and (I hope) painless demise.

It’s one of the world’s most elegant and lethal machines and I’m surprised it hasn’t been enlarged and implemented in human warfare. It’s doubtful a well-trained soldier would go after a suspicious dab of peanut butter, but put an apple pie or falafel in that thing and who knows? Wars could be won or lost according to which side had the better bakers.

But I digress, especially when I try writing these columns after my second glass of wine before dinner.

My point is, there’s no reason to improve on the “classic” mouse trap. It works, you can get four of them for a buck if you know where to shop and mice, for whatever reason, haven’t yet evolved to the point they can’t see the danger coiled up there like a python in that little spring.

Still, manufacturers, being the greedy jerks they are, keep trying to find more expensive, less effective versions of the mousetrap to sell to unsuspecting rubes like me.

Because of my cat, Friday — who is to mice what Arnold Schwarzenegger as “The Terminator” is to women named Sarah Connor — I have no rodent problem. But I did at my last house, which was over 100 years old and rife with rodent-friendly entryways.

So I set out traps. But not the good ol’ tried and true traps — the new-fangled “be merciful to the mouse” traps. The kind with glue, that capture the mouse but don’t kill him. (Or her. I prefer to think of mice I’m trying to kill as “him” rather than “her” because of my upbringing. In my family, we did not kill girls of any species.)

At the store, that seemed merciful indeed. In practice, it left me with a squiggling, wiggling, panicky, screaming (yes! mice scream) rodent that I was forced to dispatch myself. In person.

I am not emotionally equipped to kill a small, helpless critter unless driven to it by great need or great hunger of which I have neither.

I wound up taking the one mouse I managed to catch in a glue trap out into the woods and freeing it by cutting away the glue trap around it’s tiny, mousey feet. I have no idea if the thing lived or died, slowly and painfully out there in the woods with little pieces of glue trap still clinging to its feet, but the guilt will haunt me forever.

If they really want to make a better mousetrap, they should come up with something that completely atomizes the rodent to the point that the user (me) is unsure if a critter ever was even caught.

I want to kill mice. I just don’t want to know I’m doing it.

Between Obama implants and invisible paint, I don’t know what to believe anymore

There was a time I considered myself a gullible guy. I thought that compared to most folks I was a wide-eyed doofus willing to believe pretty much anything.

Then came Facebook. Now I realize that not only am I NOT gullible, I’m a closed-minded, cold-hearted cynic. By comparison.

I base this realization on many things, not least among them the FB “tests” that promise an exhaustive psychoanalytical profile based on one’s answers to five questions from the Disney hit, “The Little Mermaid.”

I’ve noticed many of my FB “friends” are willing — eager, even — to believe absolutely any “fact,” no matter how preposterous, so long as it coincides with their previously held beliefs and/or prejudices. For example, if I posted a completely fictional article stating that President Obama not only wasn’t born in the U.S., but that he is, in fact, a space alien from the planet B6-12 sent to Earth to implant mind-altering microchips into all humans in preparation for the Big Invasion, somebody would immediately re-post that along with their own “See! I told you so!!” comments.

This, of course, is ridiculous. Everybody knows it was W who was the space alien, and whose mission — sadly for the B6-12’ers — failed miserably. Hey, don’t blame me; I read it on Facebook!

My favorite “gullibility posts,” however, rarely have anything to do with politics. They’re the intentionally absurd posts put up by users anxious to see just how gullible people really are. You know the sort: Bigfoot sighted in Kalamazoo; Underarm deodorant causes cancer; If you leave an onion in the refrigerator overnight it becomes more poisonous than drain cleaner. Stuff like that.

The best of these I’ve seen so far — and one that actually “got” me for a second — was the invisible paint. The post was entirely convincing; it featured video from the laboratory at which the invisible paint was developed, complete with scientific diagrams and jargon explaining exactly how the paint worked.

Had there been a “buy now” button, I probably would have clicked it before realizing the post was tongue-in-cheek satire.

In retrospect, I’m glad — very glad — that it was nothing more than a joke. Someone like me could not be trusted with invisible paint; I’m guessing others could say the same.

Sure, invisible paint would have some great applications. I could spray it on my piece o’ junk van and tell my dates they were riding in an invisible Maserati. I could spray it on my love handles when I went to the beach and then draw a six-pack over that with crayons. Fabio in a can! I could coat myself with it whenever my editor started hunting around the newsroom for somebody to go out on a rainy day to cover a rollover accident.

But that mischief is nothing compared with the uses I would have devised back in high school, back when the boy’s locker room was located right next to the girl’s. 

Like I said, it’s probably a good thing that invisible paint posting was a hoax. On the other hand, maybe I only think that because of my Obama implant.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

It’s hard to get things repaired in a throwaway world

Shoes can be repaired.

This was big news to a few of the younger folks in my office (and by “younger” I mean “everybody but me”).

The topic came up the other day while I was trying to find a local shoe repair shop. When I was a kid — back when Jesus was still doing carpentry work in His stepdad’s business — every neighborhood had at least one shoe repair place.

If my shoes wore out before I outgrew them, I didn’t toss them away and get a new pair; instead, I wore my sneakers for a few days while my “good” shoes were being cobbled back together. 

To pass the time while waiting, my old man would volunteer to deliver his stock lecture on how hard I was on shoes, slacks, jackets, shirts and my mother’s nerves.

These days, the idea that something might be repaired rather than replaced is an utterly foreign one. I’m surprised people keep their cars beyond the date the first oil change is due! Wouldn’t it be easier to just buy a new one?

OK, I’m ranting. We old guys do that from time to time, when we’re not busy yelling at kids to get the hell off our lawn.

The shoes I dropped off this morning aren’t crazy expensive John Lobb oxfords, but they aren’t exactly ten buck Wally World Wonder Walkers, either. (Try saying that three times fast!)

You tried, didn’t you?

I paid about ninety bucks for them just a couple years ago. They’re casual deck shoes, but they’re dressy enough for the office and comfortable enough to wear every day. Most importantly, they’re shoes I don’t have to think about.

Thinking about what I’m going to wear is, far as I’m concerned, the most tedious process imaginable. That’s why, whenever I find an article of clothing I like — a shirt, a pair of jeans, whatever — I’ll buy half a dozen identical items and then wear what is essentially the same outfit every day for the next few years or until the fabric starts developing holes or an excess accumulation of salsa stains.

I can’t afford to do that with shoes, though; one pair of “work” shoes, one pair of fiercely uncomfortable dress shoes, one pair of cowboy boots for those occasions when I’m dating a girl who’s taller than me, and a couple pair of old sneakers; that’s it.

I have to replace the sneakers from time, but the leather shoes? They last practically forever, as long as there’s someone around who knows how to repair them.

And, as Shakespeare once wrote, “There’s the rub.” There’s one guy around here who still fixes shoes. One. When he’s gone, there will be none. 

I suppose when that time comes, I’ll fix my shoes myself. Though with my skill set, it’s likely duct tape will figure prominently in those repairs.

Sigh. It’s hard to be a saver in a throwaway world.