The Morning of Meals

Saturday morning, Percy had make plans for breakfast. Since I had the car, he reluctantly invited me along. By which I mean, I got to come to breakfast with Percy and one of his friends. I immediately fell in love with her. She was a spunky lady who entertained Percy and me with gossip from the town. We broke our fast at Eat'n Park. I had never been to such a place before, and it seemed, as Percy said, comparable to Shoney's. Steelers merchandise dominated the front of the restaurant and adorned every table. In fact, the sub-theme of the weekend, from decorations to conversations to songs on the radio, was the Steelers.

I knew I was in a small town almost right away. Percy said something to the waitress, and she responded, "I remember you!" We ate and chatted our way through the breakfast buffet. By the time we dropped Percy's friend off after breakfast, she told me to come back and visit -- without him!

After breakfast, Percy had scheduled... lunch. We got out of the car and walked into the Orchard to the smell of pizza. I was pretty much the opposite of hungry, which was a shame, because it was some of the best pizza I'd ever eaten : whole wheat dough, ground turkey, onion and garlic. Two of Percy's friends had lunch with us, both people about whom I had heard stories. I was meeting legends!

Sadly, I had only half an hour to eat (or, more pointedly, socialize) with them. Pretty soon to my departure time, the pastor of the Orchard walked in. My carefully planned timing went out the window. He asked about the school I was visiting, which led to conversations about religion (especially when I had to explain that, no, I wasn't going to be a pastor). As a result, he discovered I was Catholic and working with campus ministry.

He explained that they had bought the building from a Catholic church and had inherited much of the artwork. They had sold and given away much of it, but they still had a crucifix. "His people" did not like to see the body on the cross (they preferred the empty cross), but I might have a use for it. It took me a while to figure it out, but he was offering me the corpus from a crucifix. He was going to hang the cross in his church.

Besides this awkward offer, he sang Percy's praises, including a story of how he was "almost martyred" last year. When at last I had no choice but to pull myself from the conversation, I was running ten minutes late from my last-ditch, no-wiggle-room departure time.