Bad weather means Molly gets nervous about going up to meet St Peter...

After a 6-day heat wave, Mother Nature finally decided to bring the temperatures down...in the form of VIOLENT thunderstorms. I rarely see hail up here, but we had quarter-size hailstones outside. I shot this right between spurts of hail, but it was still really nasty. It reminds me of a funny story involving storms. Maybe my confession shall even absolve me.



I seem to know a lot of people that LOVE watching thunderstorms, but I have never gotten into it. The whole lightning mess, combined with drenching rain and the fact that Colonel Mustard is terrified...it just isn't fun to me. I grew up in a pre-Civil War house that seemed to shake and move every time we got a storm, and we really had no neighbors, so it was basically one big Nature Fury show. Pretty scary. Plus I remember a couple years back where a girl at a Dave Matthews Band concert was struck by lightning and she wasn't even on the top tier of the arena - like it SOUGHT her out.

I don't think that girl got anything other than the shit-end of a random-selection stick, but if that whole "God throws lightning bolts at the real heathens" thing is true, I am screwed. My friend Megan (no, not Holbrook, a different one, a really close friend from just after college) had me be her son's godmother a last year, and I thought I did everything I was supposed to do, which largely consisted of going over to where they live in Northern Virginia, holding the baby in the front of the church and standing up for way too long. After the service, Megan's husband, Jim, came up to me and said "Megan forgot to do this before, but you need to fill something out in the church office, nothing big, just telling where you went to church and got your first holy communion and stuff like that."

"...uhhh, I don't remember my first communion, but I got confirmed somewhere around 13 at Peakland Church. I don't think we call it Holy Communion like y'all do."

"do you remember who the priest was?"

"well, ours are called pastors, I think"

Suddenly Jim gives me an "OH SHIT" look.

"Molly, you ARE Catholic, right?"

"No, but my mom was raised Episcopal, and that's like Catholic-Lite. All the ceremony and half the guilt."

He did not find this as funny as I did.

"Oh no..."

Unbeknownst to me, the godparents are supposed to be Catholic, too. How am I supposed to know this? I barely even knew any Catholic people until I got to college. Because he didn't want anyone to freak out, the godfather jumped in and told me what to put on the form that basically made the whole thing kosher...pardon the pun. Since Jim didn't want to cause a scene, have to do the Christening all over again or more importantly, have Megan find out, he looked the other way while I filled out the form with the aid of the godfather. For the record, God, Jim took no part in lying to the church, he didn't even handle the form containing my littlewhitelie. Should, God Forbid, Megan and Jim should get hit by a bus tomorrow, I promise to raise their children in the Catholic church, because really, I don't care. If they make me, I'll even convert. Whatever. I thought it was more of a ceremonial duty, sort of symbolically demonstrating the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" mentality. Apparently NOT.

That afternoon, despite having exactly zero forecast for it, I saw the most violent thunderstorm EVER. I was having some beers with the godfather and a couple of other friends and he said "hey, maybe it's God throwing a bolt at you for lying to the church. That's an offense worthy of excommunication..." Well, so is premarital sex, saying GD or hey-zeus cree-sto and for that matter, speeding, but I DID feel quite guilty about it. Megan eventually found out, and said she really didn't care anyway as they hadn't been to church since the christening anyway.

But yeah, I don't take risks with lightning anymore. Because I could be laying in a ditch in the lowest point of the land, far away from any tree, and Johnny NeverLiesToPriests could be standing on a radio tower holding a magnetic golf club in the air, but that lightning bolt would be headed directly for me.