People of Costco

Today I'm guest posting for Bonnie at A Knotted Life, talking about religious identity and how I secretly want to make friends with people who follow super-religious dress codes. Her blog is honest, funny, and faith-filled; definitely check it out!

Magnetic cart escalator to heaven?

It's funny how just after I finalized my post for Bonnie, I ran into the very same experiences that inspired it in the first place. We need snacks for a big museum event this weekend, so I was dispatched to Costco, that haven of bulk provisions for large religious families. Most of the time working in Brooklyn I feel like my suburban upbringing is a liability, but not today, hipsters! I knew this place back when it was still Price Club.

The Sunset Park Costco's industrial setting is pretty different from the strip malls of NoVA, but inside it smells just like a Costco. The signs and price tags are the same and the layout is familiar once you realize this store has two levels. The sheet cake order form is unchanged since my 1998 sugar-coma of graduations  and Confirmation receptions.

It brought back so many memories I almost wept with homesickness. I felt like I should be wearing a school uniform and making sure my little brothers didn't wander off in the frozen foods. Bulk grocery shopping is my heritage, dangit.

The crowd of giggling hijab-clad schoolgirls in long black dresses on the R train platform should have tipped me off. Of course this place would be packed with various descendants of Abraham. There were Jewish men in black hats and their wives in wigs. There were more hijabs and long skirts, including one Muslim mom pushing a double stroller while wrangling two other kids.

For once, I didn't feel like I needed to explain to these people that I am sorta kinda one of them. I've logged enough hours in my life traipsing the Kirkland Signature aisles in a plaid skirt to be certain of my identity. I come from a Big Catholic Family, and my people can feed a crowd with the best of them.

My Dive Bar Catholic High School

This weekend we traveled down to Virginia to celebrate Brother #3's graduation from 8th grade. It's not a huge transition, since he'll still attend the same grade 7-12 school, but rites of passage are always a good excuse to eat cake. On the long drive I filled the Southern Baron in on more quirky details of my tiny Catholic school, like the locker situation.

Me: "So the Sevvies get these tiny boxes, but the high school ones are huge enough for a couple people to share."
Him: "Wait, you SHARED a locker? What if you want to lock it?"
Me: "Oh, nobody has a lock. There's just a general sense of trust, and it's not like you have anything worth taking in there. I shared with the J and K last names all four years."
(Brother #3 later confirmed that anyone caught messing with another guy's stuff would be dealt with behind the school.)

My husband and I both look fondly on our solid Catholic high school educations, but as a New Orleanian he basically went to school on another planet where your identity is fixed before you take the SATs. NOLA and St. Louis are the only two places I know where "Where'd you go to high school?" is the defining question to ask when meeting someone. There's something about those cities on the Mississippi river settled by tenacious French nuns - Catholic schooling caught on and never let go.

The Southern Baron is proud of his all-boys Jesuit education, and has the swag to prove it. There are lapel pins, an etched rocks glass, and glossy alumni magazines in our apartment. Last time we flew to Louisiana, the college kid in our row recognized his class ring and they proceeded to trade saints' and bishops' names like a secret code. At a Memorial Day barbecue, we discovered that my aunt's boyfriend's niece's husband also went to Jesuit, and it took the two men only five minutes to sniff out the other's academic track and activities. They count a Supreme Court justice and an American Idol judge among their fellow alumni.

My diploma doesn't have that kind of clout, except among the Steubenville/ Christendom crowd. When I tell people where I went to high school, I usually have to say "You've probably never heard of it, it's really small..." But I've concluded this means Seton is secretly super cool. My high school is the Catholic education equivalent of an awesome hipster dive bar.

The building is a little rough around the edges, with a distinctive musty smell, unreliable climate control, and worn mismatched furniture and paint colors. The same faded posters have been on the wall for years, if not decades. The menu hasn't been updated much since they opened, and you won't find anything too exotic or complicated. Some employees have cycled in and out, but for the longtime head staff, keeping the doors open is a labor of love.

Christ The King watches over the lobby.

You've probably never heard of it because it's pretty small and in a random part of town between the fire station and the railroad tracks. They don't really bother to advertise since word of mouth promotion from the regulars is enough to fill the seats.

But if you are lucky to be one of the insiders, it's a place where you know everyone and their mother and their brother and their six other siblings. Memories of fun shenanigans, long deep conversations, and romantic misadventures are scattered among the uncomfortable chairs. Other places may have broadened your horizons since, but this place knows how to deliver the classics insanely well. It also offers all kinds of obscure retro small batch stuff most people have never heard of.

It's great that there are flashier, bigger Catholic high schools with enough long hallways of identical lockers for each student to keep one with his own padlock. But I'm glad I went to a place with dubious fire code compliance that taught me about things like: logic syllogisms, sentence diagramming, Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God, Fr. Walter Ciszek, St. Januarius' liquefying blood vial, and King Philip II"s last days in the Alcazar. I'm glad that they made us go Mass twice a week and sing Pange Lingua so many times we'll never forget the lyrics. I'm especially grateful for the community of devout families in which I still find warm welcomes a decade after I graduated.

Because sometimes you gotta go where everybody knows your name.