Hudson. Mrs. Bridges. And Rose….dear, sweet Rose. I don’t know when I saw them last. And I don’t know where I might see them still. For they were characters, you know. Television characters. British television characters. They came into our home (weekly, as I remember it), through a vehicle known as Masterpiece Theater and a series of dramatic episodes known as Upstairs, Downstairs.

Given my lineage (as I detailed in Steeple Notes), I could just as easily have been a Roman Catholic. My Irish Catholic grandmother could have joined forces with my Slovenian Catholic grandmother and made it happen. They didn’t, of course. So what you see is what you get….a Protestant with “hints of Rome” in his blood.

As I noted in my Steeple Notes column, this year’s version of the “wedding season” is pretty much history. I don’t have a single wedding scheduled for December. Matt has one. And I’m not certain about Melody. But I can tell you that this year’s season concluded with a bang.

There was a story that first appeared in a newspaper in Galveston, Texas about a woman and her parakeet named “Chippie.” It seems that the woman was cleaning Chippie’s cage with a canister vacuum cleaner, the kind that has one of those long suction tubes onto which you put the various attachments.