One Last (?) Vacation Article

From the Pastor:    One Last (?) Vacation Article

       Yes, this is the third week you have to read about my vacation. I wasn’t even gone two weeks, yet I am managing to drag it out at least on paper for longer than it lasted. Anyway, here goes. Last week I left off by saying goodbye to Kentucky and hello to Ohio. I have some friends there whom I have known since before I was a priest but I haven’t seen them in many years. How many years, you ask? This time I got a chance to meet their grandson who, now that school has started, just entered into the third grade. It is the first time I have met him, for I haven’t seen his mother (who I knew from her birth) or grandparents (the friends I mentioned) since before he was conceived! Fortunately, old friends, even when they are distant, are still good friends, and we simply met as if we had never been apart. One notable thing we did, which shows how much of an old geezer I am that I think it is a notable part of my vacation, is take the boy to the local library. Not to read books, for libraries have evolved past that quaint purpose, but to create things with Legos. This was a very child-friendly library and one of its regular activities is a Lego hour for the youngsters. They all piled into a room where they had access to tons of Legos and could not only create anything their imaginations could conjure but also then leave them on display with their names and descriptions of the creation for the whole library world to admire. The descriptions were absolutely necessary, for I would have never known what most of them were even once they were “completed.” Of course, there were some general trends. Boys made machines and robots. Girls made houses, trees, and flowers. Or so the descriptions stated.
       Unlike when I was growing up and the only things we could check out of libraries were books, over the years libraries started offering videos and then other non-readable things. At the local Seminole Heights library wifi hotspots seem to be the most popular non-book item and there is a waiting list a mile long to borrow one. At this particular Ohio library, along with wifi hotspots (all of which were already checked out—it must be a trend), they had a whole wall full of musical instruments, camping gear, science lab tools (microscopes, telescopes, and related items), sports equipment, and more, all available to be checked out. But in a separate spot, there was the largest collection of all: bakeware. Muffin tins, bundt cake pans, cheesecake pans, and other things that you may not need regularly were all lined up for patrons to take home, use, clean (I hope), and return. But the most amazing sight was the row after row of specialty cake pan molds. You could take home a mold for baking a cake in the shape of Batman, Wonder Woman, a rabbit, a castle, a flower, and probably a hundred other things! Does your library have such a collection of items to be borrowed? This one also had tables set up for chess with an invitation to find a partner and play a game, an arts and crafts section complete with scissors, glue, glitter, and “projects” packages. Children, mothers, grandmothers, and a few fathers (and one Father) were all over the place. It was like a theme park without the exorbitant cost.
       Alas, I had to head back south, so off I went, setting the GPS once again to take the backroads to North Carolina. In that section of Ohio, the backroads were pretty straight, flat, and boring. Farmland, mostly with corn and beans, as far as I could tell, went on for mile after mile after mile. One road threw the GPS off with the unexpected sign saying, “Road closed six miles ahead. Use detour.” The next road was miles away and it, too, as well as the next two isolated roads, had the same sign. It took me so far out of the way that, instead of getting there through Kentucky and Tennessee I wound up traveling through West Virginia and Virginia, an unexpected but happily beautiful change to my route. But at one point I was on a four-lane road when I passed by an electric company truck stopped in the middle with a large pole lifting the overhead wires crossing the road. Then I passed another one and another. Every electric wire stretched across the road for miles was being lifted. Dozens more electric trucks kept driving past to lift the next successive line on the road behind me. Something BIG was coming and they were clearing the way. And then I saw the police cars. Everywhere. Blocking the road and the crossroads. And traffic came to a stop. A massive “thing” was being trucked up the mountain in front of me and just as the top of it came into sight over the hill it stopped. For the next hour or more only cars with lift buckets or flashing blue lights moved in either direction. But finally, they let the traffic that had piled up behind this thing use “my” lanes to go around it. For a full hour, the traffic kept coming. Then, for whatever reason, they started moving the Big Thing again and I was allowed to drive toward and then past it. Even seeing it didn’t help me figure out what it was. But it was massive. And the traffic behind it was still backed up for many more miles. I wound up in a hotel that night, not wanting to drive mountain roads in the dark. And, boy, was that a good call...

With prayers for your holiness,
Rev. Fr. Edwin Palka

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