St Haralambo's Below

 

When I was young and we were poor and we had to go on long trips with a big family in just a normal wood panelled parisian station wagon and too much luggage, or when we had to accept a satellite dish instead of rent on the house that we still owned in rural mid-Michigan and we still hadn't found a buyer for the house in West Virginia because God kept calling our family from one church to another, from one state to another so we needed to sell the satellite dish in order to make the grocery bills in this third house we lived in,  also if a parishioner would give us a perfectly good sofa or a set of mattresses or a pool table...in all of these cases we would tie the massive object(s)  in question to the top of our car.  

All of the kids would watch dubiously as our inventive, hard-working, overly optimistic father would stretch ropes, no let's try clotheslines, wellll no, how about a series of interlocking bungies in a byzantine spiderweb of hope.  The kids would also be charged with holding these webs in place while balancing in various doorframes of the car as our father fastened and stretched and craned his own body in contortions to make this magic trick work.  Sometimes we would even be charged with holding tightly to the ropes in the car once the windows were rolled up and the trip was in progress.    

Our mother was also extremely optimistic in general and made every outrageous adventure in our lives into something both epic and hilarious.  But in these particular moments even she would express the smallest shred of doubt in the driveway before we left:  "Bill are you sure we should...?"

But he couldn't hear her.  His father, a dentist and a decorated Captain in WW II had hewn roads through miles of forest, built more than one cabin and a massive crib dock and a bridge across the creek so the cousins could run back and forth across the water.  All these feats in his spare time.  The least my father could do to channel his father's scrappy physical prowess was to fasten a [fill in the blank] to the top of our station wagon. 

Once we were in the car, racing down the highways, inevitably we would feel the difference in the ride.  The mattresses, the sofas, the satellite dish would catch the wind and every minute it really felt as if the car was going to lift off from the highway.  

Logically we knew it was improbable, but my mom would just laugh with increasing levels of hysteria which made it all seem fun.  The laughter was infectious and I imagined that we would be the happiest, most rollickingly laugh-filled space vessel to ever lift above earth's atmosphere. 

So you can imagine why I was so glad when this photo popped up on my time hop today.  How lucky I had been to have gotten my phone out in time, three years ago, to snap this photo of an equally happy and adventurous family zipping north on Harvard Avenue just moments before they lifted into the air and flew up over Highway 62 and off into the cloudy sky.  The golden glint of St. Haralambo's turrets a tiny gleam from below as they looked down, laughing with delight. 

Truly beautiful, terrifying and astonishing things are happening around us every single day.