Father’s Day 2013

We are loving these leisurely summer Sunday mornings when we don’t have to leave the house until 8:15 or 8:30, and we can all go to church together in one vehicle, and sit together as a family.  Yesterday was, of course, Father’s Day, and appreciation was shown for all the fathers, as well as the Fathers.  The music yesterday was like a greatest-hits parade:

• Prelude – Canon in D by Pachelbel on the organ, courtesy of our wonderful organist, Dr. Sather
• Processional Hymn – Praise My Soul, The King of Heaven. Magnificent and roof raising – could only be improved by a real pipe organ.
• The usual chants for the Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, responsorial Psalm, Alleluia, Offertory and Communion
• Communion Hymn – Beautiful Savior. A longtime favorite from my years in choir at Oak Grove Lutheran High School  (where I even got to sing the solo verse as a senior!).  I always feel a dangerous compulsion to sing the big ending on the last verse, but restrained myself after considering that a) Dr. Sather’s organ accompaniment would not have jived with the old F. Melius Christiansen arrangement,  and b) by then I was nearly to the front of the communion line, and it would have just been awkward.  Here’s the 2011 Concordia Choir and alumni upholding the grand tradition of closing the Homecoming Concert with this great hymn.

• The after-communion anthem — oh glory!  Ave Verum Corpus.  Listen to these two great performances – the first, “Just having some fun with a few talented friends” is what it says – but don’t let the slouchy clothes fool ya, these are not your ordinary blokes jamming out in the living room.   The counter tenor is Nick Zammit, and he is mind boggling. The second is the Tallis Scholars, and hardly anyone does Byrd better (although our SSJ schola cantorum comes awfully close).

• And the closing hymn… Thaxted!  My joy was complete.I tried to make it start right where the tune begins, but it didn’t work, so if you want to hear just the Thaxted tune, skip to 23:03 and it finishes at 24:48.  However, if I may be frank, (and this is my blog, so I give myself permission) since The Planets by Gustav Holst is one of the MOST funnest of fun orchestral works to perform, you should feel free to listen to the whole thing. 🙂

Now, of course there was more to our day than the music of the morning worship, although it has already taken up an exorbitant amount of bandwidth to share my obsession with you all.

We had a plan in place, but while we stood outside in the heat chatting with friends after mass, Paul received a call from the shop where Blue was being repaired to say that the job was done, and could he please come right away to pick it up so they could go home.  I’m sorry they were working on it at all on Sunday, so of course we made tracks out of there and I dropped Paul off there to drive Blue home.  We now have (glory and praise to the Lord) ALLL the vehicles, home where they belong AND in excellent working order.  I never did go into what was wrong with the white van, so I’ll just recap here that after more than a month in the shop in Show Low where they charged us half-a-grand to make it worse, the cheating bums, and another week and a half down here, our local guys fixed the timing for $80.  It purrs like a kitten now.  And even without air conditioning, Laurent is still happy to have her own wheels at her disposal once again.

Anyway, having settled up with the auto shop, we all arrived home and began assessing the afternoon plan.  Plan A) was that alllll the Gonzales family, including mama and baby Joanthony, would come over for a BBQ and then go to evening mass so Joanthony could receive anointing for the sick before he goes in for surgery this week (more surgery, poor little precious… – he needs a heart surgery, but can’t have that until he gets stronger, and he isn’t able to take in enough food, so this week they have to help him breathe through a tracheotomy and then put a feeding tube directly into his tummy so he can gain some strength).  However, that was scuttled when the baby was not doing well enough to come over.  Enter Plan B) Paul went to pick up as many as could come.  That turned out to be seven.  While he was gone, I whipped up an epic cole slaw and Laurent whipped up 7 pounds of hamburger into burgers, and upon return, he fired up the grill.

And then, there was fun.  There was indoor roller blading, lots of computer fun with skype pictures and facebook and music and spilling slushy on my keyboard and iPod docking station (no bigs, I have been needing a new keyboard for a while anyway!) and legos and coloring Geneva’s manga drawings — and my camera and Megan’s both made it into unknown hands and pictures were taken and below you see the results, which turned out pretty well.

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The only ones I know for sure that I took were the grand finale pics with Paul on the couch, right before they all went to evening mass.  Paul and his kids and his godchildren (well, a few of them).  It was a good, good Father’s day.

UPDATE:

How could I forget the ending of our day — Jeff, Mom, Jacob and I climbing into his tiny little Nissan Versa and racing over to the Christown Harkins Theater to meet up with the three girls (who were supposedly getting out of mass around 6pm) so we could all get in on the 6:20 show of Man of Steel.  It was a little time crunchy since Fr. Lankeit always feels freer in the evening, without the time constraints of being televised, so they didn’t get out of mass till 6:18… but they only missed a tiny bit at the beginning.  Though I saw it on Friday night with Jeff, it was every bit as AWESOME the second time.  I take that back — it was even better.  It was obvious that they completely embraced the whole “Superman is Jesus” theme and yet it wasn’t strained or tedious or preachy or any of the things you hate in a “message” movie.  It’s a fantastic, gorgeously filmed, heart-racing, and (for me) tear-jerking superhero movie, maybe the best one I’ve seen.  I just couldn’t possibly love it more.  I only felt bad when afterward, I realized Paul was not aware that we had been planning to go to the movie, so he got home after driving the Gonzales kids home and the house was empty.  However, he was happy for the quiet time at the end of a full day of blessings, so it worked out well anyway.