The book signing went fine. We were pretty busy in the morning – met a reader of this blog! Hi Tom! – and things slowed down in the morning. I will say this, however – the only customers the store had in the afternoon were people who came specifically to buy my book – including, among others, a fellow who came in from Warsaw (Indiana, not Poland) just to get it, an ancient, ancient lady with few teeth, wispy, straggly white hair and a cane which she needed very much, who said she used to work at Doubleday in New York, and then a woman who rushed in at 2:57, saying “I was just reading Today’s Catholic, and read that you were doing this, and I thought, if I hurry I can get there before she leaves!”

So – it was good.

The trip was quick and tiring. The main purpose was to see 2 of Michael’s sisters and 3 of Joseph’s cousins on the ocassion of his (Joseph’s) third birthday. As mentioned before, the evening was marked by a power outage. The morning was marked by Mass at the Covington Diocese’s Cathedral.

The Basilica Cathedral, modeled after Notre Dame in Paris, was the subject of much discussion a few years ago as its renovation was planned. I had not returned there since, and I have to say the renovation was largely successful, and not as destructive as feared. The only negatives that I could see (in my quick, completely Joseph-distracted look, Joseph who marked his birthday by particularly awful in church) were a still inadequate sound system and (as Michael pointed out) all kinds of track lighting stuck up in nooks and crannies of the gothic arches, which works to diminish the effect of the stained glass – as Michael said, the idea was the light in the church would emanate from the saints, as God’s light shines through their lives, and this lighting just wrecks that effect.

But I have to admit, that in the end, unless I missed something important (which is entirely possible) it didn’t seem to be the “wreckovation” that was feared.

And Mass? I’m all for processions and movement and so on, but somehow the sight of people being directed out of their pews to trudge around the interior of the church, holding their palms and half-listening to (and not singing with, even in the least bit) the barely-audible choir doesn’t seem to capture the intentions here.