The Night

It was early in the morning, I am not sure what time, because I did not want to look at my watch, that lights up like ET. Nor did I want to try and read the bedside clock. I realized my breathing, due to congestion, was not soundless, but I did not think it was too loud. My wife thought otherwise. She got up to leave the bedroom and go downstairs. This is a story of what she does at night.

The next morning as I woke up tired from her leaving the bed. She disrupted the nice cocoon of hot air around my body, which made it difficult to fall back to sleep. She went downstairs, and it turns out she was wide awake. The next morning she simply stated I was snoring too much. I will admit I am not as quiet a breather as she is, in part due to cartilage that was removed from nose surgery years after I suffered a few broken noses playing football. I did not get the surgery until I was married, because, well, my breathing kept my wife awake. Apparently, it still does. She has, however, been a light sleeper. I would get home late from Tuesday meetings, often early Wednesday morning and she would have woken up with the garage door being opened, or the door from the garage to the house. I am sure it was not my clodhopper feet which have gotten almost a size bigger since I retired. I realize that my loss of height is going to my feet.

But, this is not about changes in the physical body. While awake she made mental notes of what she would have to do the next day. My takeaway is that my breathing assisted her in her chores for the next day, providing an ability to make mental notes of what she would have to do.  Being a Land Girl, she got right to the tasks that morning. They were probably all finished within a half hour.  I like to think I made her more productive and I should probably be thanked for having woken her up with what she defines as snoring. I think I was in twilight zone, and the snoring was just some heavy breathing.  

One time when she was pregnant, so many years ago, and could not sleep, her nesting instinct kicked in and she made many jars of apple pie filling. I guess this shows I am a sound sleeper because I did not hear anything. She also has tendency to hear weird noises in the walls or in the fire place. I tend to think it is an animal or two on the roof. Although, I do have to admit some noises sound awfully close. I did see a mouse coming out of a corner piece of siding years ago, and since then have placed stainless steel wool in the bottom of the corner pieces. At times, she complains about noises in the chimney and I have even gone outside to examine, and the next day up on the roof to check the flu for the chimney, only of course to notice everything is intact. 

She can be rather funny when going to sleep. At one point she is covered up and twenty minutes later maybe the sheet is left as a cover. She pushes the covers off, then will complain that I pulled them all to my side, when I insist she pushed them on to me, and I pushed them further off. She produces much more heat than I do at night, and perhaps that is one reason why I could not get back to sleep. Not only did she disturb my cocoon of heat, but my furnace went away. All I have to do, is just lift the covers from between us to allow her body heat to flow over. She is that way when walking. A few times in the past few weeks she would get back from her walk and talk about how nice it is outside, only for me to then go biking, and wonder how biking in cold and damp 25+ mph wind is nice. Tuesday was a good example, it was 23 degrees with a windchill of eight above, and she talked about how nice it was on her walk with the neighbor ladies, except, she said, in Lewis Park by Lower Mud Lake. I decided to bike indoors.

What is cold to one is not cold to another, and of course biking at over 12 mph and closer to 15 mph, on average, has a much different effect on the body than a walk at four or five mph. Even though we are not moving in bed, I toss and turn much more than she does, she is the one who gets too hot. I think her body just produces too much heat, in other words, I have a hot wife. One never knows what occurs with my wife at night. Downstairs making lists, making pie filling, getting upset over animal noises she says she hears on the walls. The night is simply a different time. We now have much longer nights as we approach the winter solstice and I wait her next night time finding.

Cleaning the Carcass

It was large as a purchased and dressed full chickens go, half again as large as the four pounders one finds in a standard grocery store. Purchased at an outlet of UW Provisions in Sun Prairie, the good-sized chicken was cooked up by my wife last week Friday. The chicken was tasty and, with just two of us, provided a good amount of left overs for the coming week. Yet, at six pounds, my wife was apparently concerned that too much would be eaten which would cut into the leftovers, here is that story.

We were cleaning up the kitchen after the delicious meal using that large six pound chicken. I usually put away the food, while my better half loads the dishwasher. I was innocently putting away the meat that had been cut off the chicken, and grabbing a bit here and there to eat while putting it into a container, and getting ready to cut the remainder of the meat off the bones. I usually do the cutting off the bones. This time, however, the wife saw me eating a few small hunks of previously cut meat, and commented to the effect that the way I put food away there will be not much left for a meal or so. To add insult to injury, she then added she would cut the meat off the bones. Who am I to argue, so I let her do that while I put away the remainder of the food. 

Chicken Carcass, Google images

I am not sure why she all of a sudden became concerned, because it is not like I have not picked out a few juicy, small pieces of meat to eat when cutting off meat or putting it away on other chickens or turkeys. At six pounds, I think a few more small hunks of meat was not going to make the difference between a third or fourth meal from the large chicken. 

As of this writing we have had three meals from this scrumptious chicken, with one serving remaining. Yet, there will be more to come in the future. After taking the meat off the rest of the chicken she cooked the carcass. My hyperactive wife, rather than putting the denuded carcass in the fridge, decided to cook it down that night to obtain broth, which she froze, in order to have for soup in the future. She makes excellent soup from a chicken or turkey carcass, and next week, with Thanksgiving we will have a second carcass she can cook down. There are few comfort foods as effective as chicken (or turkey) and dumpling soup on a cold dreary winter day. I realized, that as much as I make fun of her hyperactivity, I am a beneficiary. I don't think many people cook down carcasses much anymore. She is a Land Girl through and through. If she was a bird, she would be a hummingbird, never able to sit still. I am surprised I have not gotten dizzy watching her move around the house in a strong purposeful manner, always tending to something. 

When the turkey is cooked and the Thanksgiving meal eaten, I suppose I will attempt to clean off the turkey carcass, and in the process perhaps gobble a few errant chunks of meat. Her recent comment, makes me think I have to be clandestine eating the errant chunks when I clean off the turkey. Clandestine is not my strong suit as I am sure I am more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. It is challenging enough with a woman who senses and seemingly sees everything. I am sure she has eyes in the back of her head. I always wondered with those back of the head eyes, how she could see through thick red hair. I have yet to figure that out. My trials of cleaning the carcass, and perhaps snacking on a few errant chunks of meat, will continue, unless otherwise instructed.

Dog Sh#% Tree

Several years ago, when I could still take my long walks, I had noticed a dog sh#% odor while I walked along Exchange Street, a few houses south of Farwell.  At first I thought there was a good amount of doggy do around, but after a few daily walks, I realized it was a Gingko tree on a lot. While the tree is a nice yellow color, its odor in the fall is horrendous, and to say it smells like one stepped in dog sh#% is putting it mildly.  Since I had to stop walking due to feet problems almost four years ago, I had avoided the dog sh#% smell of that tree. That is, until this year.

The Big dog sh#% tree on Exchange Street

This year, I started swimming a few days a week. I usually bike to swimming, and the road to the pool, takes me by that Gingko tree. Fortunately, on a bike, I do not have to put up with the putrid smell for as long as I had when I walked. Several years ago, I tied the strong odor to the leaves, which never seem to be picked up by the homeowner until late in the season, if at all. I thought it was rotting leaves. This year I looked up what produces the smell and it is actually an odor produced by a covering on the female tree seed pod, and the smell comes out following the first frost. So it is tied, in a sense, to leaf change and drop. The frost triggered odor is not pleasant. One website says it to be similar to rancid butter or animal excrement. Another source compares the odor to vomit. Well, sometimes the odor is so strong it does want to make me vomit. 

I can see myself peddling along the road, on the new laid (two month old asphalt) and discoloring it with vomit spread along the white gutter and curb as the rancid, dog sh#% smell just was too strong for my overly sensitive olfactory sense, and caused a negative reaction. 

Gingko Leaves on Exchange St Sidewalk

Yet, even with this horrible smell, Gingko trees are recommended for a street tree due to their ability to withstand certain conditions and their brilliant yellow fall color. As a Purdue University website says: "Ginkgo trees are valuable street trees because of their low susceptibility to smoke, drought, or low temperatures. These trees grow slowly and perform relatively well in most soil types provided they are well-drained. The leaves turn a vibrant​ yellow during autumn but drop soon after its brilliant fall color is observed." The problem is that as a young tree one cannot tell the difference between a male and a female Gingko. Luckily, today one can select a cultivar that is a male only tree. 

While the seed produces this strong pungent odor, the seed kernel is highly valued in parts of Asia as a food source. Further, some Gingko extracts are said to help improve short-term memory and concentration. The problem is, according to Purdue, when those seeds fall, the odor will last two months. Hence, that terrible smell is around for longer than it should be.

One of a series of Gingko Trees
at the local library.

The first time I came across the odor I looked at the ground wondering if a pile of dog sh#% was nearby. I then looked back, and wondered if by chance I had stepped in some. Some people are not good at picking up their doggie doo. The doggie doo piles are more prevalent in the spring with the snow melt as lazy dog owners avoid picking up their dog's sh#% in snow. Given the prevalence of the odor on subsequent walks, I related it to the leaf change. I guess I never got close enough to see if there was any fruit on the tree; and why would I? Purdue University has several Gingko trees on its campus, many of them female, and recommends students avoid stepping on the fruit as the odor will follow them to class being on the bottom of the shoe. I don't recall, but maybe there were some Gingko leaves, with fruit underneath that I could not see, and had the unfortunate situation of stepping on some seeds which would allow the smell to come along. 

One never knows what will produce a strong odor in nature. Here it is a female seed pod. Hopefully, the people who walk the smell makes dog walkers think they do not have to pick up their dogs doo, since they may think a good amount of other doo is around. In one of the Mighty Duck movies, a prank is pulled on some thieves by filling an old lady's purse with doggy doo, and the putting a few dollars sticking out of it and placing it in the crosswalk, as a not so pleasant find for the person who desires a few dollars. In McFarland it is not doggy doo, or a purse filled with it, it is just a Gingko tree whose pods smell like dog sh#%.

Rent-a-Priest

In the fall of 2019 the US Bishops began their ad limina visits to the Vatican. The Amazon synod had just concluded, and their was much angst by leaders of the US Bishops in regard to two recommendations of that synod gathering. The two issues were, quoting from the National Catholic Register: "calls for the ordination of married men as priests and for women to be considered for diaconal ordination." Parts of the Amazon go over a year to be visited by a priest. Hence, the region felt, and I suspect continues to feel, that more needs to be done to allow the sacraments to the disenfranchised members in far flung regions of the earth. The US church has more capabilities, which many a diocese in the developing countries lack, so in the US the priest shortage has been mitigated by foreign priests, what I refer to as rent-a-priest. However, the effectiveness of the rent-a-priest program is now challenged by US immigration rules.

Amazon Synod, Opening Mass, 9 Oct 2019

Some foreign born priests are very good. Others are difficult to understand, and some tend way too traditional going against Vatican II. We have a priest from India serving the St Cletus pastorate after Fr Kelley was moved to a different pastorate in Southwest Wisconsin. This foreign priest's English is understandable to me, and he says a good mass and has a good homilies. He was in the US for several years serving in far Southwest Wisconsin, left to go back to India for a few years and then came back to the US about two years ago. I often prefer the priests from India, even difficult to understand, to the young radical traditional priests who do not know how to give a somewhat decent homily (much less a good homily), and with their method of saying mass making it about them and not God, but that is another story. The foreign priests I have heard say mass usually say it in the way that we had become accustomed until the young rad trads showed up, bent on destroying parishes. Foreign priests, however, require special immigration documents. The visa issue is not new, an internet search turned up articles well over a year old.

The R-1 Visa program many are under allows them to be in the US for five years and then apply for permanent status or go home. The problem according to the Milwaukee and Madison dioceses is an interpretation made by the Biden Administration last year. For the news reports see the Channel 3000 news report for the Madison Diocese here, and for the Milwaukee Archdiocese a WTMJ news report here. Quoting from the Channel 3000 news report:

The problem according to the Diocese of Madison is that priests applying for permanent status are being met with a backlog after the Biden administration removed a special categorization for immigrants applying from central American countries. This action has placed everyone else's wait times in the same boat as those countries applications, putting wait times for everyone else close to 14 years, according to Bishop Donald Hying.

WTMJ reported a five year plus time frame to obtain the EB-4 visa: 

As a result, the employment-based, fourth preference (EB-4) visa that used to take one year to receive now could take more than five years to get. According to the State Department, the EB-4 is not just issued to religious workers, but also to special immigrant juveniles, certain U.S. government employees, certain international organization retirees, and certain international broadcasting employees, among others.

Archbishop Listecki, per WTMJ,  has sent a letter to congressional representatives asking for their assistance in which he noted: “We urgently seek your help addressing these issues, not only for the sake of religious workers and their employers, but for the many American communities that rely upon them for a wide range of religious and social services,”  He was also more blunt, with WTMJ saying and quoting him: 

"The ministry of the remaining parish priests will be stretched thinner,” said Archbishop Listecki. “This flies in the face of Congress’s intent when creating the Religious Worker Visa Program: to ensure religious organizations in the United States have access to needed workers to carry out their wide-ranging religious and charitable activities, consistent with the First Amendment and the freedom of religion." (Bold by author)

According to the Channel 3000 news report, the Madison Diocese has about 30% of its priests as foreign, and those foreign born priests affect about 60% of the parishes. The St Cletus pastorate, with one priest from India, has five different parishes, and due to the rotation of saying mass at each parish, his presence affects five parishes. The realignment Bishop Hying undertook, by creating pastorates, was to attend to the shortage of priests, but now all of a sudden the diocese is once again concerned.  A sad reality, that I have noticed, is that foreign born priests are given the assignments which require a good deal of travel, and have to handle many small parishes. One example, in 2017, while camping at Day Lake near the unincorporated hamlet of Clam Lake, we went to mass at a small, beautiful little log church near Clam Lake. The priest from India was hard to understand, but he was kind enough to print out his homily so we, and the 12 or so others, could read along. I recall seeing that he had to say at mass at four parishes, one mass at each, spread up to more than an hour apart. I recall his secretary saying they he had to travel over one hour to at least two of the parishes. I don't think Clam Lake is affiliated with that grouping any more, and the Diocese of Superior website does not even have a link for its location, as it does other churches. Who knows if it is even open. Can you imagine traveling over an hour and back, on the icy back roads of northern Wisconsin to get to a rural out of the way small church? Although, it is probably better than travel in the Amazon. 

The US Catholic Church's reliance on foreign priests is now challenged by the change in the US visa program, which raises the question of whether rent-a-priest is a sustainable program.  A US diocese may pay the foreign country diocese, which those small impoverished dioceses like as  revenue source. Nigeria has many priests, some of which make their way to the US. The Madison Diocese has mainly priests from India and some very conservative traditional priests from Spain. (The Spanish priests seem to wish to fate of Spain, as a once Catholic country, onto the US as they have been successful at destroying some parishes; you can read about one parish experience here.) Many US bishops, rather smug at those 2019 ad limina visits, did not wish to see anything that could affect the single all-male clergy and the privileged clerical status they enjoy. Hence, their concern with the two proposals by the Amazon Synod. The US hierarchy cared little of the situation in the Amazon or elsewhere. If you do not think clericalism is a problem one needs only to come to the Madison area and see the young priests in their soutanes, little birettas, and other clerical garb that is common place, and marching and acting like they are king of the hill. They keep to their own little groups living in an alternate reality. 

The whole idea of foreign priests to the US raises a few issues. First, it deprives the host nation of clergy. While some of the host countries seminaries are full, that does not mean they have an excess number of clergy per 1,000 population since they baptize more children and have more adult converts. From a numbers standpoint, such host nations have fewer priests per 1,000 population than does the US.  Second, it is pure and simple unequitable and unjust. Pope Francis preaches about a poor church for the poor, but he has done nothing to assist the poor in the Amazon with their faith journeys. What would people in the US say if they had to wait more than a year for a mass, and the now even rarer baptism or wedding? Wealthy countries on the other hand can rent-a-priest to see that the shortage of clerics is mitigated and mass and the sacraments are more readily to available to many in the US more than once a year. If the host diocese does not get money, the priest usually sends a portion of his more substantial US salary back to the home diocese. 

Archbishop Listecki makes the case that the foreign priests are required to "carry out their wide ranging religious and charitable activities." It seems a rather broad statement, and I would suggest that the ordained are not required for all the duties encompassed in his statement. If priests are so important to the religious and charitable activities, should not more sustainable clerical solutions be implemented? Should a smug US hierarchy now embrace what was recommended by the Amazon synod?  The situation highlighted by Archbishop Listecki on the need of priests to carry out religious and charitable activities shows how dependent the US and world-wide Church has become on a single all-male clergy. This also shows the need for dioceses, and the Vatican, to think of new ways of being Church if they are going to continue to rely on the single all-male priesthood. For over fifty years people have been praying for more priests, and perhaps the Holy Spirit has given options, to which the all-male clergy and hierarchy does not wish to hear. 

In a generation or so the US the priest shortage may not be a problem. Few young families are in church. Mass attendance is mostly populated by older persons. Attending mass, I feel as if I am the youngest 10% of those gathered. If this trend continues, this will lead to parish closures and consolidations making the remaining faithful drive further and further to find a mass or obtain a sacrament, or likely just leave and go to a nearby Protestant church. Hey, but in a developed country at least we have paved roads. In Tanzania it took over an hour to travel 12 miles on a rutted dirt road to get from Old Maswa parish to St Peter's parish in Nkololo. The parish priest at St Peter's travels by motorcycle to his outlying parishes where he has often to spend the night.

In his Into the Deep project, Bishop Hying noted a few main reasons for establishment of pastorates. Reduce the workload on priests, spending too much on buildings and infrastructure, get 50% of the masses at 50% or more capacity. They have cut masses by almost a quarter, but so far nothing has been done on parish closures or building consolidation.

The Catholic Church has more issues than decline in mass attendance. It has a major issue in people leaving the church (an 18% decrease in affiliation from 1998 to 2018), a mass that fails to meet spiritual needs (78% of people who move an evangelical church said this was the main reason), it has problems with transparency and trust due to the abuse crises (which took away any moral authority the institution had left), it has issues with the number of nuns and priests, and it has issues with relevance in a changing world. It needs to break out of its old methods and ways of doing things to become more creative in personnel and in empowering the laity. 

The rent-a-priest program is now seen as challenging to many dioceses, due to immigration laws. Time will tell if the US will continue on its preferred path of clericalism or embrace ideas as expressed by the Amazon synod. The US Bishops response is to blame the government for the rule interpretation rather than to think of creative ways to address the issue. They may just wish to wait the situation out, as in a generation the shortage in the church may well be of laity and not priests. Who knows, perhaps US priests will be part of rent-a-priest program going to Africa or East Asia in a generation or two.