It's getting easier. The Baccalaureate was a breeze...any pre-graduation ceremony that is under an hour rates pretty high in my book these days. The added bonus was this was held in a church, with actual chairs made for big people and no bleachers. I think it's the first event I've been to in three weeks that wasn't held in a gymnasium or civic center and where the chairs were padded.
We did have some initial moments of dread. We thought the priest delivering the sermon was the same one who spoke at Joey's baccalaureate. Amy and I don't specifically remember why he inspired such dread, but we both seem to retain some lingering mental scarring from him in any case. I've heard the mind uses amnesia as a mechanism of defense in the event of torture...and evidently sermons, not that those two are mutually exclusive of each other.
Amnesia apparently does not kick in for alien abductions by the way, since everyone who claims to have been abducted by E.T. seems to remember every probing detail, but I digress.
Anyway, this was a different priest (I can't discern the differences between Catholics and Episcopalians from a distance). His remarks weren't very enlightening, but he had an Irish brogue which adds charm to almost anything with the possible exception of the jingle for that deoderant soap.
Lisa delivered the benediction.
She was brief and still inspirational. No brogue necessary. There's a reason she's in the top ten of her class.
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Speaking of Irish: I saw this today in a column written by Peter Laurie (not the dead actor with the big eyes) in a Barbados newspaper (I don't know why I was reading it either so don't ask). Anyway, I thought it was cute...it'll probably get circulated in ten zillion emails eventually, so you might as well see it now:
Was Jesus Black . . . Or Irish? Go As You Please
I feel Jesus was black.
Look, he called everyone "brother", he liked Gospel; and he couldn't get a fair trial.
On the other hand, you could argue he was Jewish. He went into His Father's business; his mother thought he was God, and he thought his mother was a virgin.
But there is also compelling evidence he was Irish. He loved green pastures; he was a great storyteller; and he would turn water into alcohol at the drop of a hat.
But my wife dismissed all that as nonsense. If you go by the evidence, she said, he was clearly a woman. He had to feed a crowd at a moment's notice when there was no food; he kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of stupid men who just didn't get it; and even when he was dead he had to get up because there was more work to be done.
