Yesterday Ginger took the day off from her day job and we drove down to Mesa to spend the afternoon and her folks' place in the RV Park. Her niece was in town, during the last spring break of her high school years. Last year she hadn't been able to come down because of the shutdown, and it had been over a year since Ginger had seen her niece. They had gotten together earlier in the week, and this was the second and last opportunity as her niece was to fly back East the next day, Holy Saturday.
Ginger had told me we were having a Good Friday dinner, or something like that. I joked about whether we were celebrating Jesus' death. But since it was the last chance to see her niece, essentially we had Easter dinner two days early. The Ecclesiastic Calendar is like that these days. In fact I have't even done a good fast from food this Lent at all. Having done that in the past, somewhat successfully, I chose to concentrate on other self mortifications this year, which were more challenging but less overt to my life.
Since Orthodox Easter falls so late this year (May 2), I may take the opportunity to fast during April, in what is nominally the Easter Season of the Catholic Calendar (and therefore a celebratory one). I believe this is permissible so long as I wait to start fasting until after Divine Mercy Sunday, which is the Sunday one week after Easter, and thus the last day of the Octave of Easter (8-day holy celebration). Divine Mercy Sunday has emerged as one of the most popular modern-introduced Catholic holidays, being celebrated by many neo-traditionalists, in part due to the tireless efforts of Mother Angelica.
We had our anticipatory Easter dinner and farewell to Ginger's niece in the permanent home in the RV Park in Mesa where Ginger's folks live. The park had held its own Easter Egg hunt that morning. Fred talked about the scramble to find the eggs by women the park, all of whom are off Fred's generation, which is to say Boomers. It seems to be the thing to do here, to have a celebration on Good Friday, as I had learned from Reddit that there is a long tradition in the Phoenix Valley, held by one of the local broadcast stations, of hiding empty beer keys as "Easter Eggs" around the valley and leaving clues to it for listeners to locate them and win prizes.
During the meal Fred kept the live feed on their big screen television from their built-in Youtube app, showing the live view of the volcano in Iceland. Ginger had been running this all week in our living room, which doubles as her office during part of the weekday. Live streaming is the new way things are done.
After dinner, at my suggestion, we took a break from the volcano for a while and watched other short recorded Youtube videos made my students at the small liberal arts college in Illinois where Ginger's niece has been accepted as a freshman for the fall term of 2021.
She did theater all through high school in City-on-the-Ohio-River-Downstream-from-Cincinnati (as much as theater could be done this past year). She specialized in costume making and through her research she found exactly the right place where she could go and jump right into costume making in the theater department, which has a reputation for its ability to place its students in professional theater positions in the technical areas, and even acting on Broadway.
She has a strong sense of what she wants to do, which is what young people must have these days, if they are going to go to college. I told her and Ginger's folks that this was so different than how I approached things, in an era when students had the luxury to go to school with an open-ended plan for their education, and to find out what they wanted to do. Now it is probably worth going to college only if you have a specific sharp-focussed goal like Ginger's niece. I told her she was going to rule the costume room of the theater department if not by her sophomore year, then at least by her senior year. Half of life success consists of just sticking around.
The videos we watched on Youtube included students showing off their campus, and the dorms, as well as a tour of the new theater building by the department head. We got to see the rooms where Ginger's niece was going to ply her craft. This kind of thing---showing off where I was going---would have mortified me when I was eighteen but Ginger's niece didn't seem to mind. She's very grounded that way.
We watched a few videos that were produced by the university. These could not be compared at all to the homespun ones, made by students walking around the campus and buildings. They were much slicker but they told me nothing about the campus. The other videos had made me feel as if I had actually been to the campus in person. I could extrapolate so much of my knowledge of other campuses into it, and it had become a virtual reality experience. I had even joked with Ginger the first time we watched them that I felt I had actually been to the university in the sense of having attended it.
No comments:
Post a Comment