I am not an overly religious person. The amount of praying I do usually involves some dire circumstance, and I often refer to God or Jesus in a four-letter context. Sometimes I throw Mary and Joseph in for emphasis. I’ll even use Jesus’s full name, with a few colorful nicknames for clarity.
I don’t begrudge anyone’s religion nor do I deny it. Hey, I’m a borderline agnostic, but atheism is downright heathen to me. I view religion with a splash of Johnny Cash: I walk the line.
But, you had better believe that Shrove Tuesday is celebrated in this house. That’s right: Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday. The day before Ash Wednesday. The day when it was originally meant to use up all of the animal products in the house, including meat, cheese, milk, butter, eggs, etc. At one time, I’m reasonably certain that meat wasn’t eaten at all during Lent, not just on Fridays. I can’t imagine subsisting on veggies and fruit for an entire forty days, so maybe that’s why the masses eased up on the restrictions.
What do I know? My first best friend was Schwartz next door, a Jewish boy who taught me to sing “Burn Little Candle” at Hanukkah. I’d never even heard of Lent until five years after I moved to a village in New Hampshire and became buddies with a Catholic girl next door, one of the few Catholic families in an otherwise tight Protestant town – again, of which I knew nothing since my parents weren’t religious.
Oh, sure, we’d been to church once, but we got thrown out. I tried to toss a kid out the second story window of the Sunday school nursery when I was four. That probably puts me in the column of the damned and unsalvageable.
I know, I know. I’m told I have to give up something I covet for Lent. Honestly, I’m giving up answering parent and student emails on weeknights and weekends. It may not sound very appropriate, but, believe me, it has become an addiction, and it needs to stop. You know how some of you are addicted to your phones and can’t go ten minutes without checking your email or social media? That’s me with my work email.
It’s a vicious circle. A circle. Like a pancake. That’s a circle.
And it was Shrove Tuesday, and it is Lent, and I did make flapjacks (the true and real word for pancakes, and I will fight you to the death over it, and, no, flapjacks are NOT made with oats here in America – we earned the right to separate from that label in 1776). So, here’s to circles and flapjacks and Mardi Gras and getting fat on Fat Tuesday and eating the Shrove Tuesday traditional meal with Vermont maple syrup.
Yes, Vermont syrup. But that is an argument for another day. If you want to debate the best varieties of New England maple syrups, email me at work – since it’s Lent, I might answer you never.
