Friday Night: Now Entering the World of Marco Polo

Friday, July 28, 2006

Thursday night, in the warm summer rain, OLeif treated Collette to Outback and their Chocolate Chocolate Tower cake (the best, in Collette’s rather limited opinion, in the world). He also presented to her (after Rose had finished stringing it together) a necklace of hand-selected beads and bone from New Orleans. Collette decided to call it her cannibal necklace.

Back in Friday morning, work was the usual. Collette managed to dodge the cleaning crew while she printed the bulletin (they seemed to now consistently come at the worst time), a letter in the mail requesting financial and spiritual assistance to the island of Java, a can of Orangina left over from the picnic in the fridge.

For the evening, OLeif went off to party it up with the grand Stan-o, Addicus, Roo, Molly, Magnus, and Augustus at the Ditty Bops, while the Flint River crew entertained the general home schooled public at the coffeehouse.

Meanwhile, Collette had plans to spend the warm evening over the grand Stan-o’s copy of Marco Polo, of terrible things and beautiful things: demons in the desert and lapis lazuli. The cold water was out in the fridge. Spider patrol. Friday nights at their best.

“I do not pretend to see through the mystery of such visitations – wherein God calls away the young, the promising, and those sorely needed for His service here; but this I do know and feel, that, in the light of such dispensations, it becomes us all to love and serve our blessed Lord Jesus so that we may be ready at His call for death and Eternity.”

– John Paton, missionary, upon the death of his wife and infant son while in the New Hebrides