Thursday 2 Mar 06

You might have noticed that my mother likes to drag me around wherever she goes, and i usually don't mind. During the 12 years she lived in Muncie, if i happened to be visiting while she had her prayer breakfast, she would drag me along, i would join the ladies for the breakfast part at 9am but then discretely leave when it came time for the praying part. (My attitude towards prayer echoes the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair when she said "a billion teenage-hours of prayer every year and he still hasn't cured acne!") Mother understood as we had discussed religion occasionally over the years.

My father and i, however, had not particularly talked about religion, so when he invited me to his prayer breakfast this morning, i was somewhat nervous. how would he react to my walking out? how will the preacher react, since he already knows? then it gets even worse: it is at 7am after a 35-minute drive! dad says he'll wake me at 530am! hey! i'm on vacation! i don't even get up that early on workdays!

well it went okay. his fellow pray-ers are a great bunch of guys, i enjoyed meeting them. oddly enough, all but one member and the preacher were retired so there is no reason why they should get up so early. when the breakfast part was over, i had to leave to find the smoking area...which was outside. so i walked around. Port St. Lucie's Community Center was next door and City Hall was right across the street, and both had ponds with signs saying "beware of alligators" but i didn't find any.

I get a little nap in the afternoon and then they are dragging me to the St. Lucie County Fair, where they volunteered to man a booth for the Sheriff's Dept. for 5 hours. They are members of the sheriff's neighborhood crime watch called Civilian Observation Patrol or C.O.P. and actually get to ride a patrol car around their neighborhood for 3 hours on monday nights, plus my father takes a solo shift late-night friday/early saturday 1-4a (and if years ago anyone had predicted that he would voluntarily be up at 4a under any circumstances, i'd have said they were crazy!) unfortunately fairs aren't as fun by myself, i walked all around the fair in an hour. thinking i would get my book and find somewhere to read, i go to m&d's booth, but dad needs to take a break, so we walk around together, then mom needs one so we walk around together and get candy apples and a funnel cake--the sheriff had provided subs for dinner--and listen to the country band for a while. so the remaining hours of their shift go pretty fast. a credit union booth in the same building had sticky-notes so i helped myself!