Break Time at Conception

May 24, 1992 Conception Abbey, Conception, MO: Break Time

Mr. and Mrs. Friendly & Niece & the Purtiest Cat You’ll Ever See

This woman accosted me from the front seat of the roadster pictured here as I walked up a hill toward the Conception water tower. She had seen me taking a picture from lower on the hill, and she called out, “Hey, are you the person fixing up that new place over there?” “No,” I said, “I’m just passing through. “Well, where are ya from?” she asked. “From Lincoln, Nebraska,” I said.

“You walked from there!?” she asked in astonishment. “No,” I said. “I drove down in my car.” “Come ta see the church?” she asked further. “Yep,” I said. “Stayin’ a couple of nights.”

“Here comes my niece,” she said as a seven- or eight-year-old girl came walking up and plopped herself in the back seat of the car next to a stack of elementary school books. I spied a grade 6 science book, so maybe the kid was older than she looked. A pair of fuzzy white dice hung from the rear-view mirror. “She’s getting over a broken ankle,” the woman said. “Ya see, I had a thirty-pound tumor removed from my stomach and I was at the doctor’s office and I passed out and fell on her.” She said all of this quite matter-of-factly.

Meanwhile, from lower down on the hill comes a guy who looks like he is the grandfather of the group, and he says to the woman, “You want to take that cat with ya?” The woman says, “Sure do,” and as the guy turns around to go back down the hill, she says, “Oh, that’s the purtiest cat you’ll ever see.” “It’s got tiger stripes!” says the niece. “Yeah,” says the lady, “tiger stripes and two big spots of orange on its hindquarters!”

I looked up to the house that the car was parked outside of and saw kind of a dimwitted guy come out the front door. I waved and said “Hello.” The guy said hello and looked a little puzzled and shy and went back into the house. There were several cats wandering around on the porch and in the yard in front of the house, and there were two dogs lying under the rear end of a pickup truck much like hogs in a wallow, though there wasn’t any water in the wallow and it wasn’t even hot out. The bigger dog looked at me over his shoulder kind of mournfully and thumped his tail some. I thought, “That is one mournful and timid dog.” Then as he got up and shifted around, I saw that the mournful and timid dog was also quite overweight (just like Brother Tom and the tall fat lady I had been jabbering with back at the retreat center).

“That’s some dog you got there,” I said. The dog looked like Old Yeller in his later, debauched-Elvis stage. “Oh, that’s Old Duke,” she said. “He got shot in the eye, but he gets by O.K.” Old Duke lumbered over to me while the little girl sort of jumped around him and said, “Hiya, Duke!” The other dog, a frisky Scotch Terrier, jumped up and tried to get my attention. “That’s Blondie,” the lady said.

“Say,” she says, “Are you taking pictures of everything around here?” I says, no, I just took a distance shot of the Conception water tower, one of those 100-foot-tall straight up-and-down things (a standpipe), and I was on my way to take a close-up shot. “That tower,” she said, “If it falls, it’ll smash our house to pieces.” “Yeah,” I said, “and keep on sliding down the hill to that house where Grandpa has gone to get the cat.”

By this time, the scene was so darn cute – the little girl, the dogs, the dice in the window, the somewhat mentally askew woman stretched out half-in, half-out of the big cruiser – that I said, “Say, can I take your picture?”

She said, “Shore. I better get out of the car” (though really I wanted the car in the shot). She swung herself out, looking like the doctor had forgotten to take the other thirty-pound tumor out of her stomach, and said, “Now wait for my husband.” So that was her husband, not her grandpa, coming up the hill in a fluorescent seed cap and carrying a scrawny little kitten in one hand.

I thought that maybe he wouldn’t want his picture taken, but he said sure. The girl had handed me the kitten to look at its orange tiger stripes, and I said, “That’s some cat,” then handed it to the guy, who threw it in the back seat of the car.

I then had them stand in front of the trunk of the car and asked them to get the dogs in there with them too. (Actually, I would have liked to have gotten all the four or five cats in there too, but there was only so much time to fart around.) They all said Cheese and were real happy to have gotten their picture taken. I said I would send them a copy, which I fully intended to do. (I later did send them a copy, and they wrote back a nice letter.)

More than anything – well, maybe along with a nice shot of the interior of the basilica of Conception Abbey – meeting those folks was the best part of my spiritual adventure of the weekend.