Saturday - -

- - dawns bright, clear and beautiful, if chilly, in the forties. I'm waiting for the more springlike mornings when comfortably I can take my coffee up to the fifth floor roof lounge and enjoy day's dawning while looking out over the Gulf of Mexico.

Even though it is, and in my life always has been, a work-harder day not a day off, Saturday is still my favorite of the week. As a boy in my schooldays, I never - - well, only once or twice, not as many as three times in all the years - - had Saturday morning off to go to the Ritz Theatre for Bud Davis' kiddie matinee and the movies, newsreel, cartoon, comedy, and the cowboy movie; but working for my father in his seafood business was a good thing, helped me grow up serious and with a sense of responsibility, and I made money at it and learned to use a bank account and save and economize and hardly ever spent a penny of it, and I was out of school for the day, and in the later part of those years I got to be with my brother as we worked together, and so Saturday was still my favorite day.

Sometimes our father drove the three of us home for dinner, in the 1936 Pontiac business coupe that our father had converted to a pickup truck; sometimes we went next door to Mom's Cafe with 75¢ each from the cash drawer (that was our father's direction, and sometimes, depending on his mood, mid-morning or mid-afternoon take a dime and go to the drugstore, or maybe it was Mom's Cafe for that too, to buy a coca-cola and a package of peanut butter crackers) for dinner - - iced tea, two pieces of fried chicken, a serving of mashed potatoes with brown gravy, and a green, maybe beans. You never even thought of, much less dared, to take a dollar and a quarter out of the cash drawer to have the steak on the menu. 

Saturday nowadays is still a favorite because mostly in life I'm doing what I like to do. Usually I spend Saturday getting ready for whatever is on schedule for Sunday morning. As today, prep for adult Sunday School. The three lessons are call stories but with various factors included that are not at all coincidental but as agenda-driven as the call story. I'm enjoying working on that. Next Sunday there's no Sunday School because a visiting priest will be having a forum for the congregation at SS time, and the Sunday and another after that we'll be having confirmation class prepping for the bishop's visit next month. 

SS is still in Battin Hall, not in the library, that the hurricane ruined. Life these days is an exercise in patience and innovation but above all is still and always worth living, with thanksgiving.

T