Mission Sunday

This weekend is Mission Weekend at my parish, so we have a guest celebrant from somewhere in Arizona who - I believe - does evangelization among indigenous tribes.

I've been resisting the countdown mode the entire summer but now it's official, 35 days left of "pre-postulancy" (so to speak).

Went out to lunch today at the Halfway Cafe in Marlborough as a late birthday meal. I'm going out tomorrow with my dad to do something similar, although I'm not sure where we're going.

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I also went to the Longfellow Wayside Inn again this afternoon before lunch. If you know much about poetry, it was made famous by Henry Longfellow, who wrote a well-known poem called Tales of the Wayside Inn in 1863:

"One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves
Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves
Their crimson curtains rent and thin.
As ancient is this hostelry
As any in the land may be,
Built in the old Colonial day,
When men lived in a grander way,
With ampler hospitality;
A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall,
Now somewhat fallen to decay,
With weather-stains upon the wall,
And stairways worn, and crazy doors,
And creaking and uneven floors,
And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall..."

You can read the full text of the poem here. Every time I visit an old colonial site - of which there are quite a few in this area, given its history - I get the sense maybe I was born in the wrong century (although I still do prefer more modern sanitation, hygiene, and medical practices to 18th century ones).


Pax tecum.