Church's Fried Chicken

Bayonne Mike's comments on my earlier post (welcome back, BallBuster!) made me think of how we went to church as a family when I was a kid. First of all, my family NEVER missed a Sunday NEVER! and, unlike the other families that were scattered thorughout the church in whatever pew they'd grab on the way in, we sat in the exact same pew every week: front row, on the right. "Closer to God," my Dad once told me. Hmm. Not once did someone else even attempt to sit in our pew...mostly, I would think, cause we'd get their about an hour before the service started. Seriously, we'd show up before the lights were on. The priest would come in and we'd startle him with our presence "OH! Oh, hey, how are you..." The cast in order of appearance on a typical Sunday at our church would go something like this for the 9am Mass:

7:55am: Wilsons sit down.
8:20am: God brews some coffee, cracks open the paper.
8:30am: Priest walks in, turns on lights. Wonders where my brother and I got our snappy clip-on ties.
8:55-8:59am: Rest of congregation comes piling in.

I don't even know what we did for that hour; if you tried to whisper to each other my father would severely hush us. Even though...there was nobody else in the building. Although now that I think of it when you're in the front row, you're that much closer to God, so you better watch what you say. So we'd just stare ahead for an hour. I've written about my daily whuppings as a kid here; looking back I'm pissed I didn't try to provoke my father into giving me a beating while IN church; it surely would've been my crowning achievement as a precocious youth. IE: yammering idiot kid. Opportunity, blown.

As a side note to reiterate how old shool my father was when it came to being a Catholic, let me be clear that it wasn't as if we were living in San Francisco; our town was pretty psychotically conservative/backwoods to begin with, certaintly when it came to social issues. One Sunday I brought my friend Ryan to Mass (which was odd for us, unlike the fucking Methodists and Baptists in town who treated church like it was social hour, running around with their friends et al. grrrr.) Ryan has a bit of a ponytail going on at the time (referenced before here) and after Mass my Dad got a call from someone asking who that little German girl I had brought to church was. So.

That was every single Sunday, 9am. Then in high school my brother and I got weekend jobs, and he got his driver's license. So he and I would go to the 9am Mass, and for some reason my parents and sister and little brother switched to the 11:30 Mass. I have no idea why. Maybe like the sun, that's when God is nearing his peak for the day? No idea. But unlike everyone else I've ever spoken to in that situation at that age, did we just pretend to go? Slip into town, goof around? Steal some beers? No. Not only did we go EVERY Sunday, just the two of us, but like salmon swimming upstream with no brains we still went to our normal front row pew. Front row, on the right. Closer to God. Every Sunday. Partially out of a combination of familial duty and knowledge of the right thing to do, I suppose. Of course by "a combination of familial duty and knowledge of the right thing to do", I mean to say "my brother was in charge." Tho I suspect it's also that in such a tiny community in an already tiny town, within 30 seconds of Mass being over my Dad would've been informed by somebody on the phone "gee, didn't see the boys in church today, hope everything's okaaaaaaaaaaay..." After which my brother and I would certainly be a lot closer to God, but not because of the placement of a pew.

After my brother graduated, like clockwork I went to the 9am service on my own. Never missed a day, though to rattle my teenage rebellious cage a little bit I relinquished the front row seat. Tucked myself into the corner of the wing, behind the organist. Just off to the side of God. Close enough for me, I reckon.