I really needed Mass yesterday. And whether you’re religious, spiritual, agnostic or atheist, when you get a hankerin’ for whatever brings you solace, you gotta have it. Right? Am I right?

Mass is all what you make it. I’ve attended Mass on beaches, in woodsy-chapels, in bingo halls, in mountain mosques. So it was no skin off my back that the church I spontaneously decided to attend yesterday had folding chairs instead of pews. But I was understandably sad to not be able to kneel. That’s how I pray the best. Prostrate. Reverence. Submission. Surrender. Personal subjugation. All that good stuff. Without it, I’m nothing.

So I did what I always do. I made the best of it. And when I die, if that is all that is inscribed on my headstone, that “Mary made the best of it,” I’ll think I did a decent job at life. I was happy to be there, mask and all. I picked a seat far away from everyone else and I listened to the words of Catholic Mass, the words I love more than any words written in the English language. I have listened to these words my whole life, and with every passing year, they become more and more significant to me.

(Side note: Last week I threw a book across the room and into the trashcan before I even finished it. The book was Nora McInerny’s widow memoir No Happy Endings, and not shortly after she railed against Catholicism was when I threw it in the trash. I have something to say to her real quick:

Nora: The words in Mass may not mean anything TO YOU. The symbolic reason we kneel may be foreign TO YOU. The responses and prayers and Signs of the Cross may not make sense TO YOU. But many of us studied hard and have known since childhood why we pray, respond and kneel the way we do. We understand your confusion and support your decision to leave Catholicism, since you are someone who confesses to spiritual ignorance but refuses to educate herself about her faith. Buh-bye. Don’t let the rectory door hit you on the butt on your way out.)

Anyway, peaceful prayer and serenity was not meant to be mine yesterday. Because a family of five walked in, looked around the nearly empty church and plopped their act right down next to me. A mother, a father, two cranky preschoolers, and a grandmother. Told you, this happens to me everywhere I go. They could have sat anywhere in that cavernous building, but chose my row.

Normally I would have moved elsewhere, without hesitation. But this was not my normal church, and I was aware of the distinct possibility that perhaps I was intruding on their territory. Maybe they sit in this row every Sunday, I thought, and I have inconvenienced them. So in penance, I remained. I’ve always believed that a little suffering is good for the soul.

Big mistake.

This family was a train wreck. The two little boys cried and screamed and whined from the second they walked in. They wanted cups, snacks, hugs. No cups, no snacks, no hugs. Nana, Mommy, Daddy. I dropped it, I hate it, I want it, I lost it. Waah, waah, waah. For forty minutes straight. I mean, of course antsy tired children attend church. But none of the three adults did anything to placate, soothe or discipline the children. Nothing.

Hey, my boys weren’t angels in church when they were that young, either. But I’ll tell you, when they did behave badly, I immediately and calmly removed them from church, told them I was proud of them for lasting as long as they did, and then took them to get pancakes for breakfast. The next time we went to church, maybe they would last fifteen minutes. The next time, maybe twenty. But as soon as their shenanigans inconvenienced other church-go’ers, which wasn’t often, we’d leave.

But that’s just me.

Taking little angsty kids to church is like winding up one of those cymbal-clanging monkeys, setting it down on a church pew, then yelling at it for being loud. It’s just doing what it was made to do. Bang its cymbals. Why did you wind it up and bring it to church if you didn’t want it to bang its cymbals?

The family sitting next to me yesterday couldn’t have cared less about the religious serenity of the rest of the parishioners, and I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet. The grandmother thought it was appropriate to text with full volume on. I’m not joking. Texting. With volume. And the parents kept moving down the row to accommodate wherever the children wanted to sit, so before I knew it, there was only one seat between me and them. I closed my eyes to focus on prayer, and then I heard a bad noise.

It was something like Scccrrrrunch…

I opened my eyes to see one of the little boys sitting in the seat right next to me. Smiling up at me. I smiled back. He was kind of cute, but teary and sweaty from having spent the better part of thirty minutes acting like a miscreant. He stared at me with his pure saucer eyes, and I tried to figure out what was bothering me about his sitting there. Not social distancing guidelines, no. It was something else, something I had to reach far back into my short-term memory stores to find. What is it, what is it, I wondered, and I searched and grasped around in the dark recesses of my mind until I remembered…

Ah yes. My prescription Ray Bans and car key had been laying on that chair. The chair that now held a greasy, blonde-ringleted child with juice stains on his Doc McStuffin shirt. A child who for forty minutes had been jumping around like a squirrel on crack, but who was now settled in his chair as if he was content never to move again. With his little legs sticking straight out, he looked away from me towards the priest, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and tried to keep a straight face.

Yeah, like I would fall for that. Like he didn’t know perfectly well he was squashing expensive mirrored sunglasses and an Audi fob. It wasn’t so much the smashed sunglasses that distressed me, though. It was that I wanted to leave, and in order to get my glasses and key back, I knew I would have to speak to one of the grown-ups in the family. I so didn’t want to.

The grandmother was closest. She had pulled the toddler close to her, and he was now asleep in her armpit, my glasses and key still partially obscured under his butt.

Here goes. I whispered.

“Excuse me?”

She looked up from her phone.

“Can you lift him up so I can get my sunglasses?”

Confusion registered on her face.

“My key. He’s sitting on my key.” I motioned to the little boy.

Still confused, she lifted the boy up imperceptibly. I retrieved my twisted sunglasses and key, smiled and thanked her, and stood up to leave. She gestured to me and I leaned over.

She whispered. “Lens Crafters will fix those for free.”

Yeah, thanks. And no apology necessary, really.