And then there were three

We did a noontime run with the kitchen stuff. My daughter had to call a half dozen people to figure out where they left the keys. The landlord finally told her they were in the cupboard over the stove. My daughter said, “Oh – I'm a bit short. I didn't see them.”

The elevator had been put in service, and the two younger girls held the door while I ran boxes into the lift. By the time we had driven back home, the son in law and his family had already picked up all the boxes and stuff we had packed into the garage the night before. So we drove back out to the apartment and we got there just as the moving truck arrived. Between all the men (including myself, my son in law's dad, his other sons, and a friend), the move was done faster than you could blink.

That night I brought my guitar to the open mic night at the local pub. There was nobody there, so I didn't play for a crowd. I ordered dinner instead. The pub owner, a woman from Jordan, came out and talked to me about the huge investment they had made in this pub. Over the course of our conversation, we found out we were both Latin rite Catholics. She belongs to a Melkite Catholic parish at the moment, because they speak Arabic, but she missed her church, she told me. She told me how they would raise eighty thousand dollars for the poor in one day on Palm Sunday, there had been such spirit there. I played Ave Maria for her.

As she was leaving, and her son offered to play pool with me, she said, “When you are here, come at six. You can play the love songs for them, I don't care. But for me, you can play Ave Maria.” I found it comforting in a strange way to share so much with someone from the other side of the world. We came from two totally different places, and yet we shared the same culture – the same events on the same church calendar marked out the days of our lives. Being Catholic is cultural in a way I never really noticed before.

At home, I walked over to my younger daughter's room, to peek in on her and make sure she was asleep. The empty room in the hallway was jarring. I may never get used to that.