My mom liked to camp out in the second row of pews at the noon Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle on the blighted corner of Fifth & Cassady in Columbus, Ohio. From there, she could survey the altar while partially screened by the front-row patrons, like Barry Sanders crouching in the backfield before the snap. It was the ideal vantage part for Mom to take note of any yawns or inappropriate scratching that might indicate that I was not giving the Lord his due as the lead altar boy at STA.
But my elevated position on the altar also allowed me instant access to Mom's occasional early exits. She thought she was slick, taking Holy Communion, genuflecting at the end of her row and then stepping aside in a strategic bit of strategic duplicity to allow feeble Mrs. Letty to enter the row. As she bumped and banged her way down the narrow pew, Mrs. Letty created the distraction my mother was seeking; by the time our old neighbor got settled back in the second row, Mom had disappeared out the side door. That gave her seven or eight minutes to conduct a crucial bit of business on the front steps of the church before the doors flung open and Father Eastadt led 300 worshippers into the sunlight: Selling the remaining $10 squares in her weekly Cincinnati Bengals pool.
So Mom got busy working the steady stream of her fellow early-exiters. She knew when to appeal to ego (and Catholic guilt): "Mr. O'Leary, won't you be quite the hero with the boys down at Liska's Bar when you win the second quarter and can buy a round on the house?" She knew when to appeal to charity (and Catholic guilt): "Mrs. Delgado, did Monsignor Eastadt tell you how much more he enjoyed the Bengals' game when you bought him that square last month? He raved about that for weeks!"
The job always got done, but in truth the occasions when she had to hustle to fill her sheets were rare; my mother was the ninth of 10 Grimes children (Irish-Catholic birth control) and her side of the family alone produced enough offspring and spouses of offspring to fill those 100 squares internally. In any case, the end of every quarter in my household on Sunday afternoons was cause for celebrating the relative who was suddenly $250 richer ($250 in 1970 is the equivalent of $1,975 in 2024). On the blue-moon occasions when someone claimed more than one quarter, Mom felt obliged to pick up the phone, like the president placing a congratulatory call to the Super Bowl champs.
In memory of Jane (Grimes) Higgins (1938-2011), the 2nd Annual Super Squares Pool will be the first-ever Meadow of Shame game to allow adults to enter their minor children, grandchildren . . . or great-grandchildren!
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