Thursday. Good bye, Ruby - Thursday?

On Tuesdays I have one meeting or another every week. First Tuesday of the month: St. Mary's Core Group for Justice. Second Tuesday: Quad City Interfaith Board meeting. Third Tuesday: St. Mary's Pastoral Council. Fourth Tuesday: Immigration Task Force for QCI. On those months that have a fifth Tuesday, I have no meetings but I spend the whole evening wondering what I'm forgetting.

One Saturday a month I spend the morning at St. Mary's Monastery in Rock Island. It has no direct relation to our parish, but if you have a Catholic something - anything -it's as likely as not that it's named St. Mary's.

We had a deacon at our parish named Julian Gutierrez. He's retired now, and moved to the D.C. area because he has family there. If you wanted to know what it was like to be a Mexican-American in the Quad Cities over the past fifty years, Deacon Gutierrez was the walking encyclopedia. He'd lived it all. Something I learned from him that I hadn't thought of. If a Spanish speaker is travelling and is lookng for a Spanish Mass in a town unknown to him, he'll look for a St. Mary's. It holds true in the Quad Cities - the only Spanish Mass in Davenport is at St. Mary's. Bettendorf doesn't have a St. Mary's, and also doesn't have a Spanish Mass. Rock Island is an exception; they have a St. Mary's, but no Spanish Mass. Moline has a Spanish Mass - at St. Mary's. East Moline had a Spanish Mass, at St. Mary's, until it closed. The Spanish Mass in Silvis isn't at St. Mary's. It's at Our Lady of Guadalupe. For the unitiated, Our Lady of Guadalupe is Mexico's patron saint. Our Lady of Guadalupe is St. Mary.

I occasionally moan and groan about the amount of stuff on my plate, until the realization creeps in that every dang thing that's on my plate is there because I put it there.

But Thursday is usually a night when I have no deeds to do, no promises to keep. I start thinking about the Sunday School lesson for the coming weekend, but only in a very general way.

I'm ready for a good night's sleep. That's another typically Thursday thing.

Niters! Thanks for hanging out for a few.

Then there are the Saturdays that