Sunday's Munch and Mingle in Ottawa

January 31, 2011

Sacrament Meeting begins at 11:30 here in Ottawa.  After church the first ward Munch and Mingle took place in one of the small Primary rooms. Our vanload of people also carried a cutting board, some bread knives, butter, jam, honey, 10 loaves of bread and 2 large pans of buns, half of each white, the other half pink. Naomi had suggested green and pink bread. I complied. I thought the nursery children would love the colour. Really, I only half complied. I was too near the end of bread making to deliver both colours. My attempt to make pink bread was tipped in the direction of red bread – too many shakes of the food colouring bottle. One woman asked me what I had put in the bread to give it such a vibrant colour. I assured her. Not blended beets, just the flick of my wrist too many times with the vial of food colouring.

I live by the Jim Sherwood model of providing food at pot lucks. When people in a bishop’s meeting were discussing how much food to buy for a Ward Christmas Dinner he said, “I would rather have 3 turkeys left over, than have any of the guests go without food,” Consequently we brought plenty of bread, musing in the car on the drive to church as to how we were going to use it up, since we would be taking many loaves home. Double-decker sandwiches, egg-in-a-basket, French toast, and Monte Crisco sandwiches all sounded good to us. Two small loaves returned home with us. We continued to cut slices of home-made bread for people even after the dessert was gone, but the ward could not eat it all up.

Re the dessert table, I saw a little girl carefully cup one arm around a now empty cholate cake dish, tilt it high and with her other hand, scrape the left over crumbs still clinging to its base onto her dessert plate. So sweet to clean it up so that not even a crumb remained. Then she carefully drizzle caramel sauce over the collected crumbs and ate dessert. I had laughed earlier when Mary showed me that for the first course, the children were lined up at the dessert table and the adults were lined up at the entre table. Now she poked me to look at another child who was licking his dish and said to me, “You know you are at an intimate family function when a child is licking their plate and no one is correcting them.”

The front pew of the chapel is reserved for Mary. She said that there used to be a large family who sat on the row behind her, but they moved a few pews back. She doesn’t know if it is because her family is too noisy, or if it is because the other family’s children desire the good snacks her kids are eating since the 3 hour meeting operates through the lounch hour. Mary prefers to believe they moved for the latter reason but fears the former is closer to the truth.

We arrived at church early. Xavier was the reverence child of the day, the one who stands at the front of the chapel, arms folded. I looked around to see what kind of effect this was having on those who entered the chapel. I think that the reverence child is a way of keeping at least one child in the chapel quiet.

Sitting at the front of the church is the perfect opportunity to see the Sacrament being prepared. I wondered if one of the deacons bringing out the trays of bread and water was going to do a musical performance in church. He was wearing a black suit worthy of the most experienced concert violinist – a beautiful shine to the material. The curls of his longish hair brushed the bottom of the back of his suit coat collar. The shirt material he was wearing was embossed with a medieval design and had a fine raised thread running down the front of it. “An antique shirt, 5- years old, from his uncle”, he proudly told me, later. His pert black bow tie was accentuated by the mother-of-pearl buttons that ran down the front of his shirt.

“Is that kid going to perform today,” I whispered to Mary.

“No, he just likes to dress up,” she replied.

His colleague had a suit jacket with epaulets on the shoulders and fine metal zippered pockets slashing the chest horizontally.  He looked dressed up to me as well. The boy who passed the Sacrament to our row was close enough to me that I could see the black and white skull and cross bones on his iridescent lime-green tie.

“I liked the fact that decorative attire is widely accepted in the ward,” I said to Mary.

“Nothing is regular here,” she replied. “Look, we are blessing a baby next and it isn’t even Fast Sunday.”

A fine Sunday.

Arta