For reasons I can't begin to imagine, the school at our church, where we had Sunday night's spaghetti dinner, has a life-sized statue of Pope John Paul II in the lobby.
I wish I was kidding, but there he is in all his posthumous pontifical splendor, right down to the red papal slippers [which I have to believe are not the shoes of the fisherman].
In any event, Samson was intrigued by this figure, so I explained it was a statue of the Pope.
Well, that word is only one syllable and has a nice pair of plosive Ps in it, so it took about half a second for Samson to start repeating "pope, pope, pope." Which seemed perfectly appropriate given the venue (not to mention the decor).
However, somewhere between then and now, the pope has been incorporated into Samson's playgroup. Samson has swimming on Wednesdays, and as he and Vicki were driving home, she asked him who he saw at swimming. They went through the litany of friends: "Jacob, Oliver, Christopher" when Samson added "Pope."
Sure enough, when I asked him tonight at dinner who was at swimming, the Pope made an appearance. He was also at playgroup and even merited a shout-out from Samson while I was on the phone with my sister.
Perhaps this is some kind of toddler sixth sense thing [although, if anybody should know they're dead, you'd think the Pope would; I imagine they get to skip all the Dante-inspired stuff and head right to the big room]. Or maybe Samson is just really affected by statues. Either way, we'll probably steer clear of Madame Tussaud's.
And I'm sorry, but I have to think that even Martin Luther would have found the thought of the Pope swimming with a class of toddlers funny.
He might have ended up with 96 theses, but I bet he would have laughed first.
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