Recalling the days

It's all been about nostalgia this week. I was down the pub last Sunday talking to some friends and we were talking about "kid's today" and how all today's music is bullshit and how spoiled youngster are, etc, etc, etc, when we realised that we have in fact turned into our parents.

The conversation moved on from that to going to school and our on upbringings. I seem to have a bunch of friends who are are "lapsed-lics" (lapsed Catholics) but when I tell them my tales of the Scottish Catholic School system it simultaneously horrifies them and makes them cry with laughter at the same time.

I was telling the story of the "Black Babies". Apparently this particular phenomenon didn't make it to the US School system... thank god!

The "Black Babies" were little cards that you got when you gave donations to the Catholic Missions in Africa.

I remember these cards very distinctly; it was always an little African child staring forlornly at the camera. They had a light blue border or a red border, a prayer on the back and a blank line under the prayer where you could write the name of your little black baby. Saints names were encouraged of course! Peter, Paul and Mary were in, Lakesha and Keyshawn were out.

Now maybe I went to a particularly fucked up school but I think I remember that the red and blue border signified how much money you donated. The blue ones were for the people who gave more than a pound, the red ones were for the cheap bastards who could only scrape together 12p.

Blue cards were to be cherished. We used to compare these little black baby cards in the playground and if we had doubles we would swap them like Panini Stickers. I'm pretty sure that you could get two red ones for a blue one but I might be making that up.

One thing I am sure of though is the reverance that was shown to these missionarys who would come into the classroom to show slides of their work in Africa (and sometimes Latin America). These guys were like returning superstars, they had given up their comfortable posts in Glasgow or Edinburgh or even Rome, to go off and help the poor. Now that I have an ex-priest friend who told me he went to the Seminary because he thought it was a good way to meet other gay men and I have to start wondering if some of these guys ended up in the missions for other reasons. You never met any missionarys from the South Pacific or South Asia. I guess those guys aren't allowed to come back, I wonder what they did.

That same weekend we ended up at a small Italian Festival in Jersey City on a 2-blcok street that has 2 massive Catholic Churches on it, one is an Italian Church and the other is a Polish Church.

You tell by the attendees at the festival that these churches obviously don't pull in the crowds like they used to, most the people there were in their 70's and the entertainment was a kind of cut price version of the 3 Tenors. Actually when we walked up one of those Tenors was singing "Danny Boy" which is about as Italian as Tracy Chapman.

I have to admit that despite my intense hatred of the Vatican, seeing the grannies dancing with a Tony Orlando look-a-like was fun. That generation had it tough, much tougher than we ever did, and maybe your faith was the only thing that kept you going. I don't agree with it but I can't say that it didn't matter.