Friday the 13th - a Saturday feast transferred to Sunday the 14th

 O.K., O.K., I know.  It's not a feast.  It's not even a very good superstition.

But Sunday did seem like a carry-over from yesterday.

RLS again so missed our own Mass.  And even the 1:00 p.m. traditional Mass at St Theresa's.

Had to go to the one remaining evening Mass locally.  Piano.   Girl altar boys.  Young cantoress ("cantatrice?") with lovely voice and no taste in music.  There was more but you get the idea.  And the pièce de résistance: about offertory time a family arrived and ensconced themselves in front of me with a little tyke rejoicing in a chronic cough that would not stop.  Too young to use a handkerchief.  Too young to even clap a hand over her mouth.  The heart sank.  If I come within 10 feet of a little kid with some sort of misery, I get it.  Even if it's non-communicable, I get it.

So:  do I become one of those ghastly people who are rude to families with small children and ostentatiously move?  Or just stay there and get covid 1984, tuberculosis, measles, leprosy or whatever it is that that kid has?  I chose to mostly stay but as surreptitiously as possible I scooted down the pew away from the little germ factory.  A few inches at a time.  At intervals.  I was rather proud of myself.

Leaving Mass a woman asked me if I'd had my booster shot.  Oh, Lord.  Is this the resident medical busy-body?  No.  She smiled and said she was behind me and was also trying to avoid my coughing nemesis.  So perhaps the scooting was not as surreptitious as I had supposed.

Silver lining:  a fine sermon whose theme was Memento mori and being prepared therefor.   Couldn't argue with that.