MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUSIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: A TIGER IN THE GARAGE

Oooh. The drawings are particularly poor this week and Fr. P is bearing the brunt of it.  He's young. He'll recover. 

Anyway, one of our parishioners has a really cool convertible sports car.  He went on vacation this week and was kind enough to let me have it for a week just for kicks.  I would normally never be able to own a car like this so to have one to tool around in for a week is pretty cool.

I had an experience like this once before in my first assignment as a baby priest.  A close friend of my pastor was upset at the trade-in value of his very expensive car, thinking that he would get a much better write off by donating it to the Church rather than trade it in.  So he have it to "the parish" and we used it as a "theater mobile" only taking it when the whole house was going out somewhere. 

Now, Diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty, but people still do expect us to live somewhat simply.  So driving around in too nice of a car can cause problems.  I remember one guy making some loud comments once when I was filling the gas tank of the theater mobile (later donated somewhere) and so I knew with this car to wear a disguise when going to fuel up.

But other than that Fr. P and I have enjoyed tooling around in it over the past couple of days.  As a matter of fact we had a meeting in Cleveland today.  (Hence why this post is so late.)  I've steadily grown cold to driving particularly over long distances but having a different car (a stick shift which I dearly miss) made the trip much more enjoyable.

But I could not hog all the fun to myself.  I could see Fr. P salivating and thought to give him a tiny taste of the fun.

It was a mistake.