Sundays at “Saint Your Host”

Poutine and Sundays at “Saint Your Host”

            I don’t know what all the fuss about “poutine” is. I think I was maybe a sophomore in high school when I had the local equivalent, which was french fries (for breakfast!) with beef gravy on them, with coffee with lots of sugar, on the side. Okay, no one tossed cheese curds into the mix, but potatoes and gravy of some sort goes back to pre-industrial age Britain, so this is not a new idea.

            There were anywhere from 6 to 10 of us on any given Sunday and I’m sure that we were lousy tippers even though we were a lot of work for the poor waitress whose job it was to service the two-“table tops” we’d pushed together full of unruly kids. We all took turns of going to Church. It rotated and the system was pretty fair.

It was important, too.

            That one kid who actually attended Church on Sunday was then expected to meet all of us and tell us all what the Gospel and sermon had been. Because as surely as Monday follows Sunday, we were going to be quizzed when we got home from “going to Church” with our friends instead of our families.

            The liturgical message was important to my folks but…not so much for me. You see, by then I’d already endured 10 years of Catholic school, which meant mass 6 days a week (counting Sundays), ill-suited nuns and ecclesiastic brothers teaching with no real credentials, corporal punishment and an inability to ask questions – which if any one us had the temerity to ask, were answered with either a witheringly sarcastic response or (very real) threat of physical castigation.

            I had one teacher who taught Spanish in my tenth grade classroom who had some sort of punishment fetish. He was an amazing starkly and fascinatingly ugly man who, when we misbehaved made a show out of meting out punishment in full view and for the edification of the rest of the class. We even got to choose which switch, belt or flogger we would be punished with. So when left to my own devices, I chose whatever that had nothing to do with Catholicism and school.

            One time, Charlie Demester and I found ourselves alone in the boys lavatory and “somehow” got the idea that it would be fun to wet a paper towel, ball it up and fling it as hard as possible at the ceiling to see if it would “stick” when the first one did, that was all the encouragement that we needed! There must have been 40 or 50 of those balls stuck to the ceiling when we were caught. And let me be clear, we were caught because we thought that this was hilarious and there was one nun whose “job” it was to patrol the halls and look for anyone “sinning”. She heard the laughing and burst in just as Charlie was flinging number 51 up into the (now) pocked ceiling.

            Corporal punishment was preferred to actually sending us home in disgrace. I think they were so close in budgetary terms, that between expenses and income that expulsion would not have been an option for the school. To my knowledge, my parents were never informed and was I warned to “never do anything like that again”! After the obligatory “corporal punishment, of course.

            Hence, “Saint Your Host”. “Your Host” was a chain of low-end diners situated around the northeast and all had the same ambience: that is, the likeliest place were you could locally find under-educated drifters, sex workers on break and child molesters who were not actually molesting anyone at that moment… It’s main (and only virtue) was that it was less than 1 block from the church.

            The food was cheap and fries were plentiful- both excellent virtues to 15 year olds. I wasn’t my idea to go but I was a very solid adherent to the routine, because I knew all the priests and altar boys and by then, wanted no more of it.

            I had repeatedly asked “too many questions”, so I was turned down to be an altar boy numerous times. This was a very prestigious position for us, because we all knew that the ones who were accepted were regularly getting tipsy by stealing some of the priests’ wine when no one was looking. Since there were a few priests and a great many masses it was an easy feat to disguise how much had been used in liturgical service and how much had been guzzled by the “good” altar boys.

            So, instead, we gorged on fries. And being a 15 year old male capable of eating enormous amounts of “bad for you food” at “the drop of a hat”, I had no worries of being “too full” if my Mom decided upon an early dinner so my Dad could get in a short round of golf with his buddies.

            Anyway, the folks getting excited about “poutine” as a new food trend are rediscovering something that I discovered a “100 years ago”. This is not to say that it isn’t tasty; it just isn’t new.             Interesting “coda” to this story: One of the “ring leaders” of the skipping church and going instead to “Saint Your Host” actually became a Catholic priest. I bumped into him on a cross-country flight one time and was amazed that he was wearing a clerical collar. We just spent a few moments “catching up” and I didn’t mention “Saint Your Host” at the time.

Too bad… lost opportunity.