March 9 - Saint Laurence, Comic Skeptic and Innovator

I was told I was almost never born because my mother kept yanking my father’s John Henry out to see if the muffins were done.  Not that it would have mattered because she always burnt everything¾even my father’s John Henry, which he told me she took a hot iron to after he preached a sermon about the virtues of adultery.  But my father was always yakking away about things he never did; for him, all the fun things in life belonged to other people.  In his own perverse way, he needed to be a bad man, but couldn’t be¾so he made faithfulness the worst sin and himself the worst sinner.  But my muffin-burning mother¾she was another story.  Even the bishop caught her with everything down (or up, depending) in the stagecoach from Southwark to Canterbury, doing the Ancient with the Archman himself.  So he joined in¾why not, if the boss was going at it¾and the coach almost toppled over with all that heaving and farmers from far away as Lewdes in Sussex saw smoke from all that ecclesiastical exertion, as the biggest workout they usually got was raising God’s ounce of flesh above their two tons of bombast.  I have about a thousand half-brothers and sisters, but who cares about them¾this day’s about me.  I don’t believe the muffin story though, since a cousin told me a better one on my last birthday on this scurvy and disastrous earth, when my own John Henry looked like an undigested prune that had passed through the Devil’s ass¾she said I was almost never born because the St. Mary’s bake sale was going bust.  Mrs. Sinicky, the fat priest’s aunt who raised the bastard to be the head pedophile of Clonmel, was drunk as a gypsy’s mule and stuffing pies up her skirt faster than you can say Jack the Rake went schplat into the snatch of the holy hatch of the Virgin and didn’t stop spouting the Magnificat till she lit the thatch of her snatch with a match and unlatched her hatch and smoked him out.  (The people from Clonmel don’t move very fast.)  There was only one pie left¾a blueberry one¾and the chief baker, who had had a dream the very night before about seven thin pies eating seven fat ones or something like that, was getting worried that the Stanmore-Foxes hadn’t even arrived and they always wanted pies and they were as stacked as the Trollope’s daughter and as stupid as an intellectual which meant everyone made a lot of money from them and she thought maybe the presence of an Anglican might do something and went to fetch my father right in the middle of the muffin story.  My cousin, I might add, is a very reliable woman¾she won Most Likely to be Pious in third form, beating out Jansenina Picklepuss by two votes, but I heard this was only because she pulled her panties down for seven boys and let them see how the other half lived.  Be that as it may, I died on March 18 1768, 19,837 days after I was almost never born, if you use the Julian calendar, 19,838 according to the Gregorian calendar, and 19,827 if you count properly and use both, since I was born in one and died in the other¾though I prefer the Gregorian because it makes me sound as if I got older and wiser.  Anyway, I died.  But, as I’m the most beautiful spirit that ever lived and the supplest of saints, I was made St. Laurence by the Council of I on February 2 1922¾so honor me today with your souls and flesh.