Wholesome Gossip: In Which I Share Snippets of Life And Various Amusing Incidents (a collab)

Hello wonderful peoples of the internet! Today, I have a slightly unusual post for y'all, published at a slightly unusual time of my Friday! Due to a discussion that was going on in Christine's FicFrenzy Discord server, Grim and I came up with the idea of doing posts (together) that are full of "wholesome gossip", in other words funny, cute, or beautiful stories from our lives and from watching other people that we want to share with y'all! (These don't fit the technical definition of gossip, because that is telling other people's weaknesses/bad things about them/&c, which we've tried to avoid, so don't worry...you can read this post without worrying about the sin of gossip!) 

I do wish to note that all of the names in this post have been changed to protect the innocent and the (mildly) guilty.

You can find Grim's post here, and I hope you enjoy some episodes of wholesome gossip from my recent life! 

On the bus ride from the O'Hare airport down to school, we drove by a cemetery, and there was a man sitting by a gravestone in a folding camp chair, with an umbrella and a drink, just sitting and reading there.

***

I try to spend half an hour in the library chapel every morning pretty early before I go do stuff, and almost every morning one of the RAs comes into the chapel in in his pajamas with a cup of coffee and just sits in the very back of the chapel and looks at the tabernacle and sip his coffee. (It's gotten to the point where I know he's there because I hear the door open and close, and then I smell the coffee.)

Rita's best friend Jenna graduated last semester, but Jenna's boyfriend, Sean, is still in college and living at Newman. So, Rita was on facetime with Jenna in the cafeteria at one point when she saw Sean walking by, and RAN over, playing dumb like she was just going to say hello to him, and then held up the phone with Rita on it, and the look of sheer shocked DELIGHT on Sean's face...

One of my acquaintances who converted at Easter was in the same room as I was, talking with some other friends, when he started aping one of the prayers for Mass--I don't remember what it was--in a fairly innocent way, but I looked up and was like "Ben, I don't think you should be doing that", and he was like "Oh, yeah. But I'm playing Mass, like I'm a little kid, and I'm really only four months old, so it's okay!”

There are several Army (and Navy) ROTC students who come to Newman, and the thing that strikes me most is when I see them at Mass. The other day, I saw one who I know slightly at Mass, and sitting beside her on one of the chairs was her army cap, with her breviary on top of it.

On my first Sunday back at Newman, a couple who is in our choir (who met in choir, back in ye olden days, and then got married) brought their second-born baby to Mass (he was less than a week old) and I got to hold him! He was the youngest baby, besides my siblings, that I have ever held. Also, his name is beautiful--his first name is one that follows me around a lot (I have a very close friend and an honorary fictional godson also by that name), and his middle name is after one of the Church Fathers. (His older sister, who's about two, has re-warmed up to me since I got back, after me helping her push very fun buttons on the choir loft fan. Her name is a beautiful one, as well--it means resurrection.)

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Father H is really close with a lot of the FOCUS missionaries, and I was at brunch at the female missionaries' house with a bunch of people including him, and he had to head out, and was saying his goodbyes, and one of the missionaries leaned around the corner and called "Bye, Dad!"

The male FOCUS missionaries sent the female FOCUS missionaries flowers as a thank-you for being good teammates.

We had a SEEK Hype Night (SEEK is a big Catholic college student conference, run by FOCUS), and all of the FOCUS missionaries wore cow onesies.

***

One of my siblings called me the other day and among other things asked if it's 'cuffing season' at Newman yet. (For those of you not familiar with cuffing season, an explanation may be found HERE.) First of all, I found it funny that they were asking, and second of all, there have been a number of new tentative couples forming and starting to hang out together a lot and sit together at Mass, and it makes me want to squeal on the regular. (But I don't because that would be weird.) (Or at least, I don't do so in public.)

Speaking of cuffing season, I think that two of the people in my studio class (who are in my cohort, so I have classes with them every semester) have started dating, and I wouldn't have figured it out except that I saw him holding her umbrella for her during one of our tree labs...and then I started watching. And they have desks right next to each other and will come in and work together in tandem. And he'll walk her wherever she needs to go. And, of course, umbrella holding.

***

In the process of writing this post and collaborating with Grim on it, I’ve been reminded that a lot of the things that I think are normal about my life at Newman count as wholesome gossip.
For instance, the way that almost every night from 8-10:15 on the dot, Father M has “Night Office”, which is where he has tea available in a samovar, and violet drops, and lifesaver mints, and sometimes Turkish Delight or some other such thing, and anyone is welcome to come and talk about whatever is on their mind, be it a dilemma (“how late can you get to Mass and still have it count for the Sunday Obligation” was a recent one) or just a silly thought, or whatever it is. The lights are down low in his office, and the samovar bubbles, and almost every night so many of us pile in there. So many that sometimes there aren’t enough chairs, which is how we discovered that two of my guy friends can sit on one of his chairs with a pillow in between them and have plenty of space, but one of my best female friends and I can’t fit on one of the chairs together without being on top of each other.
(As one of my Newman friends would say… "birthing hips”.)
And we do talk about the most ridiculous things. Just a sampling from the past couple of weeks…geep (aka sheep-goat hybrids), bioethics, how awesome capes are, quantum mechanics, fingerless gloves, and whether you would sacrifice chickens or cows at the dairy shrine.

Incidentally, the reason Night Office ends at 10:15 on the dot is that Father M has a curfew imposed by the head chaplain, Father L, because at 10:15 begins Mandatory Boy’s Time in the rectory, where all the priests watch Sport Center (and apparently catch up on the cuffing season gossip).

During one of the Night Offices this past week, someone asked Father M where the verse numbering in scripture came from, and he explained it (Erasmus, apparently? Something like that?) and then was expanding on how scripture used to be written with no punctuation or spaces in between the words. He was demonstrating this by writing out John 1 on his whiteboard in Latin with no punctuation or spaces, and he left out a phrase! So, without even thinking, I blurted “Father, you left out ‘et Verbum erat apud Deum’!” At which he gave me the most exasperated amused look, because the only two other people in the room could not read Latin, and I totally sounded like I was showing off. But I wasn’t! I hadn’t even thought about it!

At that same Night Office, I had made an apple crumb cake and brought it to share. Father M had said he didn’t want any, but once a whole bunch of other people were eating it, he tried it, and shortly after his first bite, without saying anything to me about whether he liked it or not, he spotted Father H, and called to him “Father! Come try this apple cake!”
I had let Lewis know that I had made apple crumb cake, because he LOVES it every year (one of my first memories of him is him eating four servings of it when I made it my freshman year), and instead of texting me back, he texted Father M “DON’T LET SAM LEAVE.”

There’s a long-running joke…well, actually, there are two that you’ll need to understand this.
Number one: There’s a joke that Father M would be an excellent bishop. He would, but he really doesn’t want to, which, if you consult Chesterton, is the perfect reason to make someone a bishop. Ergo, Father M is going to be a bishop someday.
Number two: Ben, of the above “I’m only four months old!”, loves having alliterative activities for days, or at least ones that sound alliterative. So, “Swimmy Saturdays”, “Cinema Saturdays”, and so on. (Many jokes, of course, about “Mortal Sin Monday”, etcetera, because we all have a slightly morbid sense of humor here.) One of the very short-lived alliterative days was “M----- Marriage Mondays”, the theory of which was that Father M would marry one off each of the Knights of Columbus, one per Monday, so that they could form a Dames of Columbus chapter (because in order to be a Dame, you have to be married to a Knight). A lot of hilarity ensued; no marriages were actually celebrated, because, in Father M’s words, “I would never be allowed to be a pastor again”.
So, the actual story…for the Newman Retreats, we write ‘bag letters’ for all the participants and team to open on Sunday morning, with encouragement, and jokes, and prayers, and kind words, and all that. My friend Thomas and I were messing around while writing these bag letters, and there was a triangular piece of paper that he was fiddling with, and he turned it into the shape of a bishop’s mitre. And because of Joke Number One, I was immediately like “STAPLE IT AND PUT IT IN FATHER M’S BAG”. Not only did he staple it and put it on Father M’s bag, he wrote on the inside of it “M----- Mitre Mondays—More likely than you might think!”

Father M has a variety of interesting office decorations, from the painting of the Corpse Synod to the stuffed boar from Assisi that he won’t let anyone name, but everyone’s favorite is T. Paine, a plastic duck skeleton named after Thomas Paine. One of my friends, Mary, is an RA, and so has the keys to Father M’s office, so during the retreat, she stole T. Paine from his office, and gave it to the retreat cooks, who hang it up in the dining room of the community center.
Which was hilarious.
But when the retreat was over, Father M totally gaslit Mary and her boyfriend (who had aided and abetted the theft) into thinking that they had lost T. Paine, and it was all their fault that T. Paine was never coming back. He strung them on in this way for quite a while, and then sent them a picture of T. Paine buckled into his passenger seat, with the M---- Mitre Mondays paper mitre on his head. T. Paine is now safely back in Father M’s office, and he still has the mitre on.

Apparently one of the sacristans, Kay, who's very close to Father M, used up a ton of matches over the summer trying to learn how to light a match with one hand. One day, Father M was unpacking a set of striking-surface stickers (stickers you can light a match on but can stick anywhere for match-lighting purposes) when I was in his office, and I pointed out that they looked like the pattern on his teaspoons. You could see the light bulb go on over his head, and we proceeded to a) cut one of the striking-surface stickers so it would fit and look convincing on the spoon, and b) film a video of him lighting a match on one to send to Kay and then c) when Kay came immediately to see what the heck was going on, troll her by giving her a regular spoon to try to light a match on.

I don’t remember why, exactly, this was done, but when the bishop came to visit to bless our renovated chapel, at the brunch afterwards Mary and her boyfriend went off, snickering, and came back with a plate full of Jell-O, in the middle of which was suspended one of Father M’s spoons. Father M, nothing fazed, reached into the Jell-O and plucked the spoon free, then proceeded to use it to eat the Jell-O.

When Father M's mom was visiting, she wrote "<3 --love, Mom" on the corner of the whiteboard in his office, and even though he's had people erase the entire contents of his board multiple times since the start of the semester (because people are constantly drawing things on it, like, oh, diagrams of roads, and different classifications of uteruses, and Latin quotes, and anime characters) (to be fair, that second one was just me), he won't let anyone erase that little message. It even has a border drawn around it now, so no one erases it by accident. The only other thing no one is allowed to erase on his whiteboard is a picture of a snail that one of the graphic design majors drew.

***

Because of being on the dairy cow judging team, I've spent a lot of time this semester hanging out with 'livestock people'--farmers, animal science students, animal science professors, country-dwellers. And I'm come to the conclusion that country people--farmers, especially--are some of the best people. They may be tough, the men may be taciturn and the women blunt (but hey, who I am I to talk about being blunt, lol), but they are absolutely wonderful people. For example:

-The guys I've met through dairy judging will always hold the door for the ladies.

-We've had judging practice on multiple family farms, and on multiple of those occasions, the families have not only welcomed us to their farm and taken time out of their day to show their cows for us but have also fed us.

-The first time I met one of my future teammates, she not only offered me a ride home, but also paid for my iced tea when I'd forgotten my wallet. (Overall, of any set of people I know, they're the most likely to welcome new people into their circles. I don't think I've ever been part of a team that got through the "forming, norming, and storming" stages so fast.)

-At every single awards banquet I've been to so far, they've said grace before the meal. And not a wishy-washy grace, but starting with "Heavenly Father..."

Going with the above, two of my teammates, Calvin and Jolene, are dating, and although they're a cute couple, they generally don't act like they're dating in public, or at least, not like I'm used to people acting like they're dating. They don't hold hands, engage in any PDA, etcetera. Imagine, then, my surprise on our most recent judging trip when I looked back into the back of the car to see Jolene asleep on Calvin's shoulder. And imagine again how cute it was when I looked back later to see them sitting on opposite sides of the car, both asleep, but holding hands across the middle seat.

***

One of the things that's been striking me about being in the Newman circle this year is the sheer reverence and love everyone has for the Eucharist. (For my non-Catholic readers...this section is going to be unapologetically Catholic. You've been warned.) It's such a gift to be in a community that has such a fervent belief and reverence for the Real Presence, and it shows itself in so many ways, both subtle and dramatic, and I wanted to share a few of those as a part of this post.

Our altar servers, during communion, will always kneel on opposite sides of the altar, angled toward where Father is distributing communion, each watching one side, so that if someone walks off with the Eucharist, they can go after them. (This has happened a few times.)

There are always so many people at Adoration. There are often as many as thirty people there at once, if not more, and that's every day.

We had a weekend retreat at a community center, for which, back at Newman, there was 24-hour Adoration. There were a set of five people who were in charge of coordinating this, and they took many of the hours themselves, although other people also helped. The person who was the head of the five-person team left a note on the team whiteboard that simply said, "If I sleep and Jesus is alone, wake me!" with his phone number and room number.

At this same weekend retreat, we had the Living Stations of the Cross that I talked about in my last post. One of my close guy friends was Jesus, and I COVERED him with fake blood. To the point that when he was stripped of his garment (an alb, and don't worry, he still had a loincloth on), a large amount of his arm hair came with it. (TMI? Sorry. We laughed pretty hard about it afterwards.) The last part of Living Stations is a 'surprise' Eucharistic procession, leading into an hour of Adoration & Confession, and after Father has everyone's attention on the Eucharist, generally all the actors who have gone 'off-stage', (aka into the locker rooms) come back up for Exposition, staying in the rear of the retreat participants so they're not seen.

For this Stations, I was singing with the choir in addition to coordinating, so I was sitting off to the side with the choir. I knelt for Exposition, and looked behind me, and to my surprise, kneeling with all the other actors, his head bowed before his Lord, who he had just finished portraying, was my friend, still stripped to the waist and covered in sweat and fake blood. He stayed for all of Exposition and a bit of Adoration before he showered.

(All of the above is not to mention the stampede that ensued when I told the actors, who had been eating snacks in the kitchen of the community center, that we could go back up for Benediction at the end of Adoration.)

***

I asked my roommate from last year to take care of my pothos plant over the summer, and somehow, it just…didn’t thrive for her. So, when I got it back, a mess of limp yellow leaves, I was worried it wasn’t going to make it, and I was unhappy about that, because it was a 16^th birthday gift from one of my favorite people from home. Father DD, our pastor at my home parish, has a green thumb for houseplants, so I texted him a picture and asked him what to do, but because I texted him on a Sunday, I added “this isn’t urgent, so don’t worry about texting me back until you have time!”
Reader, he texted me back twenty minutes later with a bunch of suggestions and finished by saying “Looks pretty urgent to me! :)”
(Incidentally, the suggestions all worked, and my pothos is now doing much better.)

***

Our music director at my home parish has started dating one of the parishioners who also happens to be in the choir, and they are the CUTEST. They're not being obvious about it in general, but there have been several cute and/or telling moments. For instance, he was playing the organ while she directed the choir for one of the pieces, and we were being difficult for her, and he totally leaned around the organ and brought us to heel way harder than he ever does when he's the one directing us. Or there was the time he finished playing a recital and the two of them asked my mom "so...can you take a picture of us? Because we don't have any pictures of us together." (Plus, the way we found out about them dating was that they arrived together to a party and then sat on a couch together. And then started holding hands. I'm pretty sure everyone's eyes were about to yeet themselves out of their skulls, as the kids say.) (I...don't think the kids actually say that.)

That same music director mentioned, one morning, before choir camp, that he was thinking about buying a new car, and then every single metaphor he used in rehearsal was about cars. ("Was that a Tesla sound? No. That was a Ford Focus. We need Teslas.")

***

One of my best friends at Newman, Irene, is a fantastic swing dancer, in both East Coast and West Coast styles. (She also knows all the line dances and is considered by my siblings to be their “Cotton-Eyed Joe Grandma”.) She’s taught a large proportion of Newman boys (and girls!) how to swing dance. I recently had the privilege of going to a barn dance with her and her boyfriend (and her boyfriends’ roommates, one of whom was technically my date, but we don’t talk about that). And watching the two of them swing dance! They dance like perfect partners—they never miss a catch, they communicate perfectly, they balance each other’s weight, so that the whole thing looks effortless. They’re fast, and perfectly in time, and you can tell that they are enjoying the joy of doing something hard with precision and accuracy. And the number of tricks they know! They’re hardly ever just swing dancing—they’re dipping, or spinning, or lifting, or belt-looping, or he’s lifting her… It was one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen this semester.
(And then Irene came over to me and was like “dance with me!” and she danced the guy’s part, and I danced the girl’s, and we did miss catches, because her hands are small, and she Tornado-spun me until I was dizzy, and I almost knocked her over when she tried to dip me, and it was joyful in an entirely different way.)

The barn dance that we went to was run by a frat (loooooong story), and…let’s just say I didn’t expect the amount of alcohol that would be involved. (I didn’t, for the record, drink at all, and neither did any of the people I went with.) And it looked like the typical “people stand and sway and yell and drink” sort of dance…until the Cotton-Eyed Joe came on, at which point, literally everyone got in lines and danced the whole song. There is NO feeling like dancing the Cotton-Eyed Joe with a barn full of people, even if they’re somewhat drunk. (And then Footloose came on, and I learned how to dance that…more or less.) I’m always blown away by the fact that almost everyone in the Midwest knows these dances? I can’t think of a single dance that everyone in the PNW knows.

***

I got to go to an apple orchard/pumpkin patch with Irene and Mary and Thomas, and it was a beautiful Autumn day—overcast, crisp, with a hint of drizzle. The orchard was the perfect place to be, with the smell of popcorn and apple cider donuts drifting through the air, and the smell of the dirt and the plants once we got back to the pumpkin patch, and the tall plants to hide behind, and the apples and pumpkins to pick (and eat, in the orchard, because why would you not sample the produce while U-Picking, I mean really), and the squish of the mud underfoot, and all the laughter.
-Thomas was carrying a pumpkin on his head, back over to our pumpkin wagon, and Mary and Irene and I all ran and hid in one of the patches of tall burdock, and it took him ten minutes to find us. When he did, Irene threw a ball of dirt at him. She reminds me a bit of Captain Jack Sparrow at times.
-In another Captain Jack Sparrow-ish move, Irene led us through an employees only area, assuring us that it would get us where we needed to go. In fact, instead, it got us in trouble with the employees, at which point we all played dumb and said we’d gotten lost. (Which was, strictly speaking, true.)
-Mary is a nursing student, and Thomas found her a pen shaped like a syringe…turns out she’d spent the last week doing flu shots, and spent a solid two minutes messing around pretending to give him a flu shot.
-Thomas got four pumpkins, in the hope that one of them will keep long enough to be the Paschal Pumpkin—the pumpkin that we carve for Easter—and as it happens, one went bad within days and created a massive stink in Lewis’s room.
-Irene kept grabbing worms and pretending she was going to make us eat them.
-Thomas wouldn’t believe me that the ‘goat’ in the famous screaming goat video is actually a sheep, and further that most goats don’t actually scream. At least, not like that. (There were goats at the orchard, which is why this came up.)

***

As I’m writing this post, I’m at the municipal library studying with Mary (okay, well, I guess I’m not studying currently, technically speaking, I’m writing a blog post), and she just got news that she got an A on a midterm that is 50% of her grade for that class (or something crazy like that), and that she’d thought she might have failed, and after a minute of excitement, she was like “I’m going to go call my dad!” and ran off.

***

My friend George is usually Herod in Living Stations (and he does a wonderful job) but for this next Living Stations in November, he’s going to be Jesus, so I had to get another friend of ours to be Herod. We were all at an event together when George’s girlfriend Luna heard that Matthias was going to be Herod, and she was like “okay, I’m going to go troll him”, and ran over to Matthias with George and me trailing behind, unsure what was going on. Luna gets to Matthias and immediately starts spouting the Herod lines at him, perfectly, and then George gets this big grin on his face and joins her, and they’re in such freaky unison, down to the gestures, that it looks like the two of them are possessed or something. They finish, Matthias looks rather shellshocked, and Luna asks him “guess how many times I’ve run over George’s lines with him?”

***

So! What was your favorite piece of wholesome gossip? Have you ever had apple crumb cake? Had you heard of cuffing season? How's your October going?