Lucky Charms
The girl was in the kitchen, alone, sitting at the table reading something, when Father Henry descended the stairs again. She rose when he came through the door. “Sit, sit!” he said, motioning with his hands the way he’d motioned to the children who had always scrambled out of their seats when he entered a classroom at the parish school. He sounded to himself now as if he were commanding a dog. “Don’t get up, I mean,” he said.
He poured what coffee was left into his mug. “Oh dear,” he said. “Karen, right? I’ve used it all. Did you want some more?”
“Oh, no thank you,” said Karen. “I’m waiting for the tow truck, to get my car. It’s pretty smashed up. Someone’s coming from the dealer in Pottsville. It will take some time. Father McKenzie said I could wait here.”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “Are you hungry? I surely am.” He opened the refrigerator and looked in, although he knew that was a fruitless endeavor. Nothing but ingredients in there – eggs, milk, raw vegetables, maybe some meat or lean fish, whatever was being touted in the latest booklet from Father Tom’s weight loss club. “We used to have a cook, you know. Helen. She made baked oatmeal, pancakes, waffles, sticky buns for the weekend. With bacon. Tom says most of that stuff wasn’t good for us. He wants to lose weight. He’s learning to cook, but, well, he’s not Helen.”
“I know,” said Karen. “Helen died. Father McKenzie told me. I’m sorry.”
“Yes. Yes. I miss her,” said Father Henry. “Not just the food. I miss her. She was with us for a long time.”
He opened the cabinet beside the refrigerator and drew out two boxes of cereal. One was plain rice squares, the other a snarl of brown squiggly things that looked like a pile of dried worms. Where were his Lucky Charms?
“Tom won’t buy Lucky Charms,” he said. “He says it’s nothing but sugar. I like the marshmallow bits, the way they pop between my teeth. I can’t go to the store myself anymore. To get my own.”
The quotation is from Fields of Gold, a novel I have been working on for a very long time. In the scene above, Father Henry Ehrhart, an elderly Catholic priest and pastor emeritus of the parish he used to lead, is looking for his breakfast cereal. He lives with Father Tom McKenzie, once his young curate but now the official pastor. Karen, the young woman he is addressing, has had a car accident on the church property, and has been invited by Father Tom to wait in the rectory for her roadside assistance.
I came upon the passage today as I brought up the manuscript to prepare it for a conference application. As it happens, today was St. Patrick’s Day, celebrated in the Catholic diocese where I live as a minor religious observance and in the secular culture as a great whoop-de-doo full of stereotypes about Irishness and drinking. I had to laugh at the juxtaposition of my cringiness regarding the caricature that the cereal promotes against my fondness for Father Ehrhardt and the way I have used food to characterize him.
I have been away from this manuscript, and all of my writing work, for so long that I momentarily forgot which spelling of Father Tom’s surname I was using. (Lennon and McCartney use McKenzie.) I had to send 25 pages for the writing sample. A full 250 pages is due May 1 if I am accepted. I have only about half of that, really, the rest in fragments that do not necessarily fit well as a traditional novel.
Working up the first 25 pages and formatting them to fit the requirements of this particular application reminded me why I started this project in the first place. It’s a response to my efforts to write about how faith works (or can work) in secular fiction, to write about three people who can no longer be who they always thought they were (Father Tom is questioning his vocation, Karen is a young widow, and Father Ehrhardt is sliding into dementia). I remembered how much I like these people, even when they do unwise things, how much I enjoy the process of discovery and invention. I need this work.
I went to the grocery store this afternoon. Grapes, cut fruit, laundry detergent, the Boar’s Head Italian sandwich Ron likes, and BOGO strawberries fat and fragrant. In the cereal aisle I chose the plain rice squares that would be just the right base for the strawberries. I hesitated about which snarl of healthful fiber strips, but then my eye was caught by a single-serve plastic tub of Lucky Charms, 48 grams of sugary delight. I ate it tonight, squishing the marshmallow bits the way Father Ehrhardt, and I, like them.
I think I will rinse out little tub and keep it on my desk for a while.