Day 17 McKinney TX

I left the Chickasaw National Recreation Area and headed south towards Texas. Halfway there I crossed over the famous Red River that separates the two states. It was anything but red; rather, it was an ugly brown. And apparently it smells very bad and no one swims in it.

It being Sunday, I searched one of my favorite websites, masstimes.org, to find a Catholic Church conveniently on my path. One popped up, Saint Michael & All Angels Catholic Church, in Denison, Texas, with a 10:00 mass time that fit my schedule. But on the way, Madison, who had been coughing for the past three days, vomited her entire breakfast in the front seat of my car. I pulled over and did what little cleanup I could and continued driving.

Nearing Denison, I passed a huge Trinity Lutheran Church and remembered that Texans claim everything is big in Texas. So, I assumed I was going to find a very large Catholic Church. I arrived and saw the church you see posted with today’s blog. It was smaller than the chapel built by Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) in the 1963 movie, Lillies of the Field, one of my favorite movies. (Side note — Sidney won the Best Actor Oscar for this role, becoming the first Black actor to win the award in a leading role.) Saint Michael and All Angels is also not the typical Catholic Church, even beyond having barely enough pew space for 60 people. It is part of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter (something I had never heard of), established by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012 to welcome Anglicans seeking full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. These Ordinariate parishes and churches are fully Roman Catholic, while retaining elements of Anglican heritage. The service was only slightly different than the Catholic Mass I am used to, with minor variations in some of the prayers. But the liturgy and Eucharistic celebration was almost exactly the same. One slight difference – some Catholic churches present the Eucharistic wafer and wine (i.e., the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ) to the parishioners, but most only serve the wafers, especially so since the COVID days. This church did something I had never seen. The priest dipped the wafer in the wine chalice before placing it on the parishioner’s tongue.

After the Mass, I drove another 45 minutes to the McKinney home of my brother, Jim, and his wife, Betty. After settling in, I took Madison to a nearby 24-hour vet to have her cough checked, but they were booked and we made an appointment for Monday morning.

My niece, Karen, and her daughters, Katherine and Rachel, came over for a nice visit for a couple of hours. Then Jim, Betty, and I went out to dinner at Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille in Frisco, Texas, to celebrate Mothers’ Day and my birthday, a little belated. This is one of their favorite places, famous for the Seven-Finger Pork Chop. They did not lie, as the picture attests. I could only eat a third of it, and the rest will be leftovers for at least two more meals.

Tomorrow, I will chill out for a day before heading further south into Texas on Tuesday.