family

Gofer-Vision, or the Search for the Quintessential Tool

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Yesterday I was completing a couple home projects in our basement and reminiscing with our teenage son, Trevor, as I worked. In the course of the conversation, a shared memory surfaced: Once when I was working on a different project (the kids’ treehouse, I think), I sent Trevor to the garage to get the orange carpenter’s square.

“Big, flat piece of steel, like two rulers at a right angle to each other. It should be hanging on the peg board over the work bench. Bright orange—can’t miss it.”

He was gone a long time.

* * * * *

When I was old enough to read the fractions etched into the sides of sockets and wrenches, I became my Dad’s “gofer” (as in, “Go fer this; go get that.”)—and I had an uncanny ability to look squarely at the tool my father asked for and not see it. I could not see something for several minutes straight; we never tested the upper limits of this knack of mine, primarily because the sought item would snap into focus the moment Dad disentangled himself from the drivetrain of the pickup, rolled out from beneath it on the creeper, stood, sauntered over to the bench, and pointed at it, right where he said it would be.

“Oh,” I would say sheepishly, handing it to him. “I didn’t see that there.”

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Book Break: St. Joseph, Unsung Hero

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Growing up, many of my heroes were “the strong, silent type”—men of few words and decisive, often violent, action, who always knew the right thing to do and had the ability to carry it out. Small, bookish, and emotional, I admired men like that, even though I was not that type myself.

Since I didn’t grow up in the Church, I knew only a few Bible stories. The heroes of those stories seemed larger than life—even the shepherd boy, David, who slew Goliath, has already been chosen by God, anointed by Samuel, and filled with the Spirit of the Lord before he ever took the field against the Philistine.

I knew the story of the birth of Jesus, but I didn’t think of Joseph as a hero.

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Finding Peace by Candlelight

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

On Ash Wednesday this year, Archbishop Hebda visited our parish and school and presided over the school Mass. During his homily, he asked the school children to give examples of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. One boy suggested that you could fast from lights, “like, with an oil lamp or something.”

Archbishop chuckled and said he had never thought of that before. But I have.

Years ago, I ran across an article by Catholic convert, blogger, and speaker Jennifer Fulwiler entitled “8 Reasons to Turn Out the Lights During Lent.” Her experience captured my imagination, and I pitched it to my own family and those in faith formation at the time as “Firelight Fridays.”

The premise is simple—no electrical lights or screens of any kind after sundown on Fridays during Lent. The results were profound: we found ourselves congregating as a family around the candlelit kitchen table or living room, playing board games, listening to music, or just talking and laughing together as a family. It a couple hours, we would begin to feel snoozy; eventually we would, by common consensus, snuff the candles and go to bed early, sleep soundly, and rise refreshed on Saturday morning.

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A Wee Bit Irish: Peace and Understanding Addendum

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Over many St. Patrick’s Days I’ve shared and reshared a short post on how Irish I actually am. The answer? Not very, in flesh-and-blood sense; in fact, some of my ancestry was Scots-Irish, Protestant, and apparently anti-Catholic, even in my parents’ younger days. But though our Thorp name persists, we’ve since converted to the Catholic faith of my mother’s Polish family, so spiritually I feel more akin to the the Poles and the Irish these days.

My father tells, however, of a period in which peace was achieved between the Scots-Irish Protestant Thorps and Polish Catholic Galubenski clans. The story goes that during Prohibition, my great-grandfather Bronislaw Galubenski was brewing or distilling on the family farm. One of Dad’s uncles or cousins was a deputy sheriff at the time. He knew what was cooking on the farm and could’ve shut it down, but instead, reached an agreement: As long as Broni left a bottle in the culvert on the corner, the deputy left well enough alone.

Peace and understanding acheived thanks to a shared love of spirits. Would that all conflicts could be resolved over a drink.

Confessions of a New Catholic Schools Family

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Two summers ago, Jodi and I and our youngest daughter Lily arrived at a New Family Social at St. Michael Catholic School (StMCS) to learn the ropes at a new school. We’ve been members of this parish for nearly 20 years now, and I’ve been on staff in two different roles—but when our oldest son, Brendan, was heading to kindergarten, we never made it off the waiting list for StMCS. We wound up enrolling him at Albertville Primary, and we never looked back.

That first year…

We are blessed with great schools in this community, including some of the most faith-friendly public schools around. But when COVID derailed our older daughter Emma’s senior year and graduation, cancelled our youngest son Trevor’s theater performance of The Three Musketeers, and confined Lily to interacting with her classmates through a Kindle screen, we began to rethink our approach to educating our children. Two things seemed clear to us at the time:

  • Once the state gets involved in the day-to-day operations of public schools, it seems unlikely that they will pull back very much.
  • The best chance for Trevor and Lily to have a somewhat normal school experience during the 2020-21 school year would be in a Catholic school.
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