by sowhatnow 4 Replies latest social current
live near there? boy I feel for you.
the outright display of idol worship ever will be again witnessed at the big event in Philadelphia pa.
oh, and new year, of mercy? I bet that was 'invented' for this year I guess.
the same idol worship being shown in a more subtle way for the GB.
why cant these people see what they are doing? seriously, its so obvious.
No, I'm not in Philly, but I feel bad for commuters.
Once, many years ago, the Pope came to my city. I believe it was Pope John PaulII who came to Baltimore in the early '90s. However, it was not something I paid attention to at the time.
My attention was focused on more practical things. My husband and I had just purchased our first home, a tiny fixer-upper, and had just purchased a very old Volkswagen squareback. It was a fun little car for being 20 years old and ran pretty well, but a few things needed replacing and parts were hard to find.
We finally found a parts car. The guy said we might be able to get it to run so we could drive home, but no promises. We were young and up for adventure and so we jumped into the Volkswagen and drove around the beltway all the way across the city to look at this car. It did not look so great, but it had the parts we needed, so we made the deal and tried to start the car to go home.
No dice. The car would not run, which was okay in the sense that we just needed the parts, but now we had the dilemma of how to get it home. We thought of getting a tow truck, but that would be expensive taking it to the other side of the city. So, we did what broke, young and stupid people do. We chained the parts car to the VW and decided to tow it home through the city and I mean directly through the middle of the heart of the city because we couldn't tow it around the city on the beltway.
So, we started off. Slowly. My husband drove the VW and I got in the towed car where I slammed on the brakes when hubby did in front of me. We actually made some progress and were beginning to think this might work. But, traffic slowed ahead and then it really snarled. Suddenly we had to take detours. Stop and go, stop and go. My husband would start off slowly until my car started moving, then he would wave out the window that he was going to brake and I would hit the breaks on the parts car. When we turned corners, I wrestled the steering wheel around the corner.
It was just one hell of a miserable traffic mess in the middle of Baltimore City and we couldn't figure out why. There were no sports games going on. And why were there all of these people milling around?
Finally, I saw my husband waving wildly and pointing at a cross street and there he was, the Pope himself in his Popemobile driving through the city waving at the faithful!
We got home several hours later safe and sound. The cars were okay, too. We laughed and laughed and laughed over our poor timing. We thought maybe we should start paying attention to the news. We still laugh over this 20 years later. It's one of our favorite family stories. And we still think our little old Volkswagen squareback was much cooler than the Popemobile!
We will not be going anywhere near Washington, DC later this week when the Pope shows up there.
I actually work in downtown Philly in the area where the Pope will be. I am not looking forward to it. We were told that certain sections of the city will be closed off to any vehicular traffic. This includes the area around my job. Due to the Pope visiting, we are being forced to close the office for 2 days because no one will be able to get in or out. It sucks! I am thinking of trying to get out of town for a few days to avoid all of this.
I'm from Philly (Mount Airy) but now I live in Brazil. So glad I'm far from that commuter nightmare. Been keeping tabs via philly.com.
Good luck new2ttatt!
