#dunno where they got the lawn chairs but I guess they stole them from home depot or some shit

[ashchoo]

ermmm SPA DAYY 😍😍😍 with the besties (@thelone-copper @clownsuu)

[guyceretti]

A Mousy Priest and the Broken Window

A mousy American priest one day renovated a run-down, long-abandoned, bland-looking elementary school.

“Flood planes and depressions do wonders for property costs,” he’d later explain to friends. “And I swear I’d never seen another building quite like it—so very decent, I mean.”

So, against the diocese’s wishes, this fellow went ahead and purchased the lot, throwing up a homemade sign on its front lawn: “Future home of St. Anthony Church.”

This friar was penniless, friendless, but unconcerned. While awaiting pennies and friends, he lived in the neighborhood—avoiding additional vows of poverty by teaching history at the high school.

From the first, students agreed that Mouse (as the neighborhood quickly rechristened the priest) was quite stupid but also perfectly nice.

“He’s alright, I guess,” one kid told his mom. “He gets off topic all the time and should probably be the art teacher, but he’s alright.”

Teenage and twenty-something-year-old men agreed that the priest was quite stupid but debated the meaning of his niceness.

“I dunno. Guy’s gettin’ under my skin. Too much good idn’t always a good thing,” one of them said.

“Well maybe you oughta shape up, ‘n he’d been outta here in no time,” his mom responded. “‘Bout time we had a good, ‘onest man ’round here. That’s how I reckon’.”

And that’s precisely how the priest annoyed the living hell out of his neighbors, especially the younger guys whose moms still read the King James. These sons would have found Mouse more bearable had he driven a Cadillac or touched children. Sadly, though, after months of careful observation, the men concluded that the priest wasn’t a villain—

“Nah, jus’ a dipshit,” Theo remarked. “Y’know,” he confessed to a friend, “Nowadays I’m kinda startin’ to miss that holier-than-thou crook who stole momma’s retirement savin’s.”

Though held at alms’ length by the younger townsmen, the priest eventually won the affections of older folks—especially from those who still remembered the old baptist hymns, which had been swallowed up alongside the church in the ’89 flood. New churches had sprouted up since then, of course, but their only attendants were little girls, mothers, grandmothers, and whichever men were hitched to or romancing them at the time.

“Hell nah. I haven’ benna church in ten years, jus’ about,” Mr. Franklin, a retired contractor, told the priest. “Least, not since the old lady croaked. They got no soul no more. Don’t need anybody tellin’ me how to be good no how.”

“Well what could we do to change that?” Mouse asked.

“Change what?”

“You said there’s no soul.”

“Ah, well that’s not gunna change overnight.”

“You know that’s not an obstacle.”

Mr. Franklin became quiet. He slowly chewed on his gums as he mulled on the question, a slight and solemn frown on his face.After a pause, he let out a long groan: “Tell you what… Promise me we’ll be singing ‘Swing Low,’ and I’ll build that damn church for you myself. Won’t fix nothin’, but I ain’t busy either.”

“You know I haven’t got the cash for it,” Mouse laughed.

“Then you better thank God you got me as a friend, ’cause I got friends. I’m your answered prayer, son.”

So it was the memory of singing and a modest pledge that recruited the neighborhood’s most talented glass-smiths, carpenters, and landscapers. It also helped that these folks wanted to see something else built besides a gentlemen’s club, liquor store, or crack house.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Franklin justified his commitment to Harvey, a friend of his: “Sure, sure, goddam the Catholics, but goddam the pimps too, I say.”

“Still not seein’ why you give a care,” his friend replied. “Not like pimps are goin’ anywhere, and not like youse gettin’ any wine anyhow, you ole drunk.”

“Shut your mouth, boy. I’ll whoop your ass an’  have it saddled in time for J.C. to ride it inna church come Palm Sunday.”

Amused crow’s feet wrinkled around Harvey’s eyes: “And what’s he gunna do with that tongue ah yours? Guarantee you’ll shit those brave trousers ah yours at the sight ah Him. Besides, don’t you got better things to do?”

“You know full well there’s jack shit to do in this town. Decent things, anyways.”

Whenever he wasn’t scrambling around with chores or visits with friends or the church’s construction or teaching or naps or city permits, the priest would sit in a sofa two sizes too cozy and read books seventy-times-seven sizes too big. Usually he’d just fall asleep while muttering things.

A few months after moving to town, students began visiting his little house to talk about books and music. He knew they didn’t understand his favorite books, which he said were about poverty; and they knew he didn’t understand their favorite music, which they said were about poverty. But they all loved to shoot the breeze.

“Will they ever put ‘Me Against the World’ in the Bible? Maybe then I’d read it,” one of the girls said.

“Well Isaiah’s in there, so maybe God figured there wasn’t any need for a sequel,” Mouse replied.

“Well maybe black people have something to add to the pot?”

One of the boys joked, “You’re going straight to hell, Maggie.”

“Straight to hell?” Maggie hopped to her feet and belted out with musical flare: “Lord, help me chaaaaange my ways!” Perking up to Maggie’s jubilee, the other kids chimed in for the chorus: “Show a little mercy on judgment day! It aaaaiiiin’t me, I was raised this way! I never let em play me for a busta, make it hell for a hustler!” They all collapsed in laughter, rolling around on the floor and shouting at each other.

“Guess we’re all goin’ to hell!” the boy cried.

Mouse sat in his big chair with a big, embarrassed smile.

Eventually the day came when the building was restored to perfection: stained-glass windows to shame the New Jerusalem, towering wooden beams upon which God Himself could sit, raised flower beds brimming with foul-smelling compost. For years to come, whenever they accidentally wound up in “the wrong side of town,” rich people from up north would be stunned to see the church in the middle of a ghetto.

“How hasn’t that thing been burnt to the ground?” a man wearing Ray Bans asked his wife, who was frantically scanning her map for escape routes.

“Focus honey: where in God’s name are we?”

But on the eve before the church’s first mass, the friar stood in the church’s courtyard. In solitude, right at the foot of the steeple, he saw how good everything was.

And after a year of constant letdowns—arrested fathers, pregnant little girls, denied construction permits, offhand insults—a quiet and easy joy welled back up in him.

For enough seconds, he could remember why he was there.

So this content little man grabbed a brick and wordlessly threw it through the facade’s largest, most marvelous stained-glass window.

To Mouse, the sound of it was immense. Like a waterfall of crystals, he thought.

However many minutes passed, Mouse eventually smiled and thought again, Or like the rumble of a coming stampede.