(Sloane's Ice Cream and Candy Bar in downtown West Palm)
Savored some delectable oatmeal raisin ice cream. Raisins + ice cream = two of my favorite things. Let's face it -- you could put raisins in damn near anything and I'd eat them. Enjoying the travel time to catch up on my much-neglected personal reading list. Here's a sweet treat for y'all tonight from my current read:
I lay back and tried to invent a story about why my mother had owned a black Mary picture. I drew a big blank, probably due to my ignorance about Mary, who never got much attention at our church. According to Brother Gerald, hell was nothing but a bonfire for Catholics. We didn't have any in Sylvan -- only Baptists and Methodists -- but we got instructions in case we met them in our travels. We were to offer them the five-part plan of salvation, which they could accept or not. The church gave us a plastic glove with each step written on a different finger. You started with the pinkie and worked over to the thumb. Some ladies carried their salvation gloves in their purse in case they ran into a Catholic unexpectedly.
The only Mary story we talked about was the wedding story -- the time she persuaded her son, practically against his will, to manufacture wine in the kitchen out of plain water. This had been a shock to me, since our church didn't believe in wine or, for that matter, in women having a lot of say about things. All I could really figure was my mother had been mixed up with the Catholics somehow, and -- I have to say -- this secretly thrilled me. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
