Photo: Bangor West train station, mid-morning
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Bangor
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States but here in Northern Ireland it’s not a holiday at all. No one’s rushing around to the grocery store getting whipping cream, wine, turkey, and fixings. Turkeys here are for Christmas – so I’ll be making do with a farm-raised free range local turkey that’s been frozen since Easter. But I am lucky to get even that so I’m not complaining. I’ll pick it up about 5 pm from the butcher’s, and while I’m downtown I’ll check into canned pumpkin, too, and maybe some celery for the stuffing. It would be nice to have some friends or family to share the holiday with - a lovely Thanksgiving at the Litman residence in rainy Sitka, Alaska that we enjoyed a decade ago comes to mind - but since we don’t, we can at least have fun doing just the Thanksgiving foods we adore, with no obligation to put sweet potatoes on the table. So, it will be turkey with stuffing (with celery, sage, mushrooms, onions, and sausage), mashed potatoes, a green salad, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. The 2007 Beaujolais Nouveau has arrived, too, so that might be a good wine to go with it, if it’s not too expensive.
We experienced church in a foreign country for the first time on Sunday. I looked online and found a couple of Presbyterian churches that were supposed to have services at 10:30 am so we headed downtown at the proper time, only to discover that actually one was at 9:45 and one was at 11;30. Meanwhile, as we arrived downtown the bells in St Comgall’s Church of Ireland were pealing beautifully, calling all to the service at 10:30. So that’s where we went. The service wasn’t the usual formal Anglican type service on this particular Sunday, as it was a “family” service, where the kids stayed instead of going off to Sunday School, and there was lots of singing and a very short talk. They called everyone who had birthdays in November up front for a treat and to be serenaded with the birthday song – so we convinced Reed to go up too. He chose his candy and started to head back down the aisle before we’d sung, so he got embarrassed when everyone was indicating that he should go back up. A while later the kids got called up again; Reed didn’t want to go at first, but then it turned out the “new member” of the church they were meeting wasn’t a person but a black and white hamster that had been abandoned in the church foyer the previous Sunday – left inside the door in his little plastic ball. So Reed couldn’t resist going back up for that.
The church occupies a large triangular patch of ground very near the main street, and is quite large with tall stained glass windows and lots of gothic arches – quite lovely. Several people were quite friendly to us afterwards, and the minister, Nigel, talked to us for several minutes. We had some tea and cookies afterwards and felt pretty at home; Walt was tentatively recruited into the choir, as well, but I managed to avoid that – knowing that Reed will need to be in bed by the time choir practice starts on a Wednesday evening. I’m not sure if I was living here permanently that I’d go to the Church of Ireland but for just a few months I think it will be a good place for us. At home our church is the Community Congregational United Church of Christ, so when I spotted a Congregational church here I thought “all right.” But then I saw commanding and forbidding scriptures posted right on the front gate and knew immediately that it was not the same kind of place as at home. Strangely enough I’ve seen more scripture posted in public view here than anywhere I’ve seen – it feels a bit in your face (we’re uncomfortable with that in the UCC) and I wonder how much of it has to do with decades of religious conflict here in the North.
No comments:
Post a Comment