A Dilly of a Dildo

Dear Mother Hildegard:

As a good Catholic alum of your school, and according to the penance imposed on me by Father Riley in Confession on Saturday, I apologize for my behavior to your sister nuns last Wednesday.  I acknowledge that my actions put them in the occasion of sin by tempting them to impure thoughts that should never enter into the mind of any good Catholic woman, especially a nun.  Father Riley also made me say two Rosaries.  He did this after he was finished laughing so hard his nose was running.

In my defense, I would like to explain why I was walking down the street in front of the school on Wednesday carrying a huge inflatable penis.

 

To begin with, It never occurred to me that a nun would even know what that thing I carried represented.  I forgot that Sister Mary Eloise teaches biology, that she used to be an exotic dancer and that she likes to talk.

So okay, it all started on Wednesday morning when Angie Ricciardone and Lourdes Valdez decided at the last minute to give Mary Frances McBride a bachelorette party that night.  Mary Frances married Johnny Burke on Thursday.  The reason they didn’t get married on Saturday was that they could get a catering hall cheaper in the middle of the week.  Mary Frances and Johnny are both cheap as a $2 dress.  Mary Frances even wore her mother’s old wedding gown, which I have to admit did look pretty good after forty years of lying in a box in the closet.  Knowing Mary Frances, she’ll preserve it until it’s almost petrified then pass it on to the next female in the family who gets married.

Angie and I put ourselves in charge of decorations.  One of the places we hit was Eros’ Lair, which sells (excuse me for saying this to you, a nun) sex toys and other erotic paraphernalia.  I only knew about the place because other people had told me about it.  To this, I can swear.  We bought a few items, which I won’t mention to a nun, including the thing I mentioned earlier, which I had to tell you about because this whole story is about it.

I asked the clerk behind the counter how big it would be when inflated.  To show us, he took it out of its package, brought an air pump up from behind the counter and inflated it right there.  Holy Moly, that thing was HUGE!  Of course, we bought it.

By the way, if you’re worried about the effect of a giant you-know-what on Mary Frances, don’t.  She and Johnny have been going at each other for a year now, and he wasn’t her first by any means.  She knows what a man looks like.  It’s okay now, though.  She’s gone to Confession, and she got married in St. Brendan’s church, wearing white, figuring that if she wore white nobody would guess what a tramp she had been in former days.

Angie and I figured we had better bring the inflated hoo-hah out of the store as it was because none of us had an air pump and we weren’t about to blow that thing up ourselves.  We were in a hurry, so we took a shortcut.  That’s how we ended up on the corner across from the school with me carrying the big piece of junk and a group of startled nuns across the street.

Again, I apologize.  I have now done my entire penance, so it looks like I am forgiven, even though I smiled and waved at the group of nuns just for the fun of it, to make sure they saw me.  It was all a big joke, and I’m sorry I made Sister Bernadette faint.

Yours truly,

Annie McNeely

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Inspired by a picture prompt posted by Audrie Michelle on the Writing Prompts Group page on Facebook.

Ten Signs that You are a Catholic of "A Certain Age"

1.  While saying the Rosary, your mind wanders and you get mixed up counting the prayers on the beads.  You say an extra Hail Mary at the end of the decade, just to make sure you got all ten of them in.

2.  You once told a priest what you thought was a pretty big sin in the confessional and were both relieved and surprised when he only gave you a penance of five Our Fathers and didn’t tell you that you were going to burn in hell for what you did, which is what your mother said when she caught you at it.

3.  You still have your old First Communion picture but you never show it to anyone because people laugh at it.

4.  You express exasperation by raising your eyes and hands to the ceiling and making the Sign of the Cross.  If you are Italian, you accompany this by saying, “Madonna Mia!”

5.  You bring your dog to the blessing of the animals on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi and pray that he'll behave (the dog, not St. Francis).

6.  You have a go-to saint for just about anything:  St. Francis of Assisi for your pet(s); St. Anthony of Padua for finding lost items; St. Jude for impossible cases; etc.  You carry little prayer cards around in case you have a sudden urgent need for help from a heavenly specialist.

7.  You had a little glow-in-the-dark angel statue in your bedroom when you were a kid, and another little statue of the Infant of Prague.  You prayed to your guardian angel every night before getting into bed, and you gave your guardian angel a name.  (Mine was "Nina.")

8.  You can still remember, word for word, some of the questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism.

9.  You can sing “O Salutaris Hostia,” “Tantum Ergo,” “Ave Verum Corpus,” “Panis Angelicus” and an entire Gregorian mass in flawless Latin, but you have a sketchy idea, at best, of what the words mean.

10. You still wonder if the nuns who taught you in school had to shave their heads.

 

And she's really tired of being asked that question.

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