Our Lady of Sorrows, on the Way to Fetch the Car
The gate on Woodstock had my car behind it overnight. That story is the previous entry and I won't tell it twice. This is only about the drive back down to fetch it — which I had assumed would be the dull administrative coda to the whole business, and which instead handed me the best joke of the week at my own expense.
Stopped on Woodstock, I looked up. A peaked white board, navy and red border, a Marian monogram in a red circle at the apex:
Our Lady of Sorrows — Catholic Church
I laughed out loud, alone, in the car.
Seven, and I would like to propose an eighth
The title is one of the older ones in the Western church, and it is properly a list. The Seven Sorrows of Mary counts out the griefs of a life one at a time — the prophecy, the flight into Egypt, the three days the boy was lost, and on to the cross and the tomb. Mater Dolorosa. It is not a throwaway name. Somebody chose it.
So I would not presume to add to a list like that, and the parish would be well within its rights to observe that a car shut behind a burger restaurant does not rank. But for one morning, on one street in southeast Portland, the sign read less like a dedication and more like a weather report.
The sign that was doing its job
Then, having stared at it long enough for the joke to wear off, I noticed what the sign was actually doing. Under the name there's a full-colour LED marquee, lit in broad daylight on a Wednesday morning, and what it was lit up saying was this:
Sundays — 8:30 & 11 AM
Hours. Posted. In lights.
On the same street where the thing that cost me a night with my own car was a gate with no hours posted on it at all.
I don't suppose the church means anything by it, and I'm aware this is the sort of connection a man makes on the morning he has to drive back across town to collect his own vehicle. But it held up the whole way home, because it is the complaint from the night before compressed into one image. Two properties on one street, both with something they would like the public to know about when they open and when they shut. One of them bought an illuminated screen to be certain you know. The other could have managed it with a screw and a piece of card.
The rest of the corner is thoroughly Portland: a purple-leaf plum going almost black in the July light, wrought iron, a chimney with a terracotta cap — and immediately to the left of the Sorrows, sharing the frame, the blue window lettering of a yoga studio. Grief and flexibility, side by side, and both of them with better signage than the car park.