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| My first "real" Bible. |
My parents gave me a New American Bible (St. Joseph's Edition) by the Catholic Book Publishing Company of New York, printed in 1972, as a gift for receiving my first Holy Communion. My mom hand wrote my personal information on the presentation page in her perfect Catholic schoolgirl script, a relic from both of our youths: I was just a little girl, and she was a very young and relatively inexperienced mother by today's standards, way before my history presented itself to me in the form of a vocation, and her Multiple Sclerosis set in to give her hand bad tremors. Years later, my Malamute puppy would pick out a few of my books off the lowest bookshelves to mouth on while I was away at work, cutting his puppy teeth on them by soothing himself with my oldest and strongest scents.
I'd come home for lunch in the middle of the day on my little purple motor scooter, to walk him so he could go to the bathroom while he was potty training, changing his wee wee pads, steam vacuuming up doggie doo doo, and picking up books strewn about the living room floor, or piled up in his doggie bed rat's nest, along with chew toys and my oldest clothing items, like a sweatshirt from college days he got out of the bedroom closet's laundry basket: "Doing a little bit of light reading, eh, Ted?" He had pulled out the oldest books I had in my collection by the corners that stuck out from the shelf, like my high school yearbook and this red bound bible, dogeared time capsules of my life up until now. Life; it goes by so quickly.
Enjoy it as much as you can.
