Life's a West Palm Beach

Greetings darlings - checking in live from sunny West Palm Beach where I'm relaxing, reading, sipping...err WORKING. Curiously stumbled across this gem on my wanders after a day of Florida's clean energy policy:

(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