Not all is quiet in the North End of the city.
All the shooting and fighting that's going on makes a fellow choose the route for his evening walk a bit more carefully. There's distrust between the folks and the police. A new police chief has his hands full. It's a job no one wants.
I hate to admit it, but we've grown perceptibly more cautious at the parish dealing with the people who come to the door looking for help. It's not like we have a new policy or anything, it's just that the environment has grown that tense...
Happily, not everything is violence. The North End still has time for wierd, too.
I opened the church doors at around 7:15 am and found a bundle of flowers carefully placed on the doorstep. Charming... other than the fact that they were taken from the flower beds of the parish's front lawn. In the middle of each of the eight steps descending from the church doors, both sides, was a violet in a small mound of soil. The violets had previously been in large pots on the corners of the church entrance.
But the icing on the cake, the proverbial cherry on the sundae, was the tiny bird - wings, head and feet extended to form a 't' - in the center of the stone bannister that encloses the landing at the top of the church stairs.The 8am Mass-goers recalled our Valentine's Day beheaded rooster incident. They asked me earnestly, with grave concern, "Padre, what does it all mean?"
It means, my friends, that we need more flowers...
