This Week at The Table

Hello people of The Table.

How many of you know what foolscap is? Don’t answer that out loud, because unless you are of a certain age or are a paper history geek (and that would be an extremely geeky kind of geek indeed!), it’s entirely possible that you don’t.

A couple of years back, when I was in grade school, the first assignment upon returning from summer vacation was to take a blank sheet of foolscap (it’s a kind of dauntingly long lined paper) and write an essay on “What I Did On My Summer Vacation”. Kind of a no-brainer assignment for the teacher, it seems to me now, but to be fair they were just getting back into the groove as well.

Well, the Plett family is just back from our summer vacation, a trip which one of our kids described to a grandparent as “perfect”. We could disagree about the word choice, but it was a great trip. So as I sit down in front of the virtual foolscap of my computer screen, I feel as though I want to tell you a bit about what I did with my summer vacation.

The very short version, which I will expand when we gather on Wednesday evening, is that we went to Italy. We brought back a lot of pictures and a lot of stories, and we all have our favorite memories. For my part, I loved the city of Venice. Venice is, famously, sinking. It’s a place I feel fortunate to have seen. It is also, as it turns out, an apt metaphor for faith in the 21st century western world, and not just because it is slowly falling into decay.

But that is a story for another day. In this case, for Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., 493 Notre Dame. And yes, I am acutely aware that it is opening night for Folk Fest, so I promise to reference at least one song lyric. I know it won’t be quite the same, but it’s what I can do…

Peace,

Tim Plett