Dad, Books, Snork

11:15 pm on Thursday night and I really should be fast asleep by now but my brain is too busy.

Dad mailed 2 paperbacks to me earlier this week by a writer named Elizabeth George. Dad and I (and Mom too) are avid readers and while we go on intelligent, foo-foo fancy pants binges (Dad did most of Faulkner last year gag me with a spoon and I've been on a Charles Dickens/Jane Austen binge) we both kind of dig mystery/detective/suspense mind candy and the Elizabeth George books are completely diggable. Tonight since Gray's Anatomy was a repeat I got in bed with Elizabeth and now it's late and I just keep reading the greatest paragraphs!

To wit: "It was a pre-Elizabethan structure by initial design, but one which had undergone a number of Jacobean changes that added to its air of rakish whimsicality." People, sentences like this are so much more satisfying than sex it isn't funny. OK, maybe not, but reading a delicious sentence like this is definitely in the same league.

So in this first book there is a priest who finds a murdered body. I'm only 63 pages in but I figure he is a prominent figure. Which got me to thinking about Snork.

I'm a really bad Episcopalian. When I was maybe 13 I announced to my parents that I'd be damned if I would go to church anymore. This was mid-70s. It so happened that our church had this totally cool Sunday night guitar/hippy service for college students - total Kumba-ya stuff - and I started going to that instead of Sunday mornings to appease my folks. Snork (the Rev. Charles Roberts) was the priest. He hugged. Everyone. Always. I think I have yet to meet anyone as loving as Snork. He had this mop of wired out blonde hair and I never saw him without a smile. A grin to be more specific. He was (gasp) divorced and remarried to a great lady. He loved me into a really comfortable, personal relationship with the big guy upstairs which is strong to this day despite the fact that spirituality is far more important to me than religion. Snork dropped dead of heart failure in the library one day when I had barely turned 20. I still think about him often and for some reason reading this book tonight really brought back my memories.

Alright, maybe I can now sleep.