Something happy, or amusing, because Laetare Sunday is Coming.

Warning: the following may be considered gross.

Let me tell you a story. This is how Bear met Puff. It is true, though few believe it.

I was sitting at a table in a pub at my university with some friends and acquaintances one day, drinking tea and coffee and talking. The topic of conversation had turned to tales of what our parents had done during the war. Everyone was chipping in stories.

I was going to tell a story about my father (who had served in Italy and the Netherlands) and his time in the Spaghetti League. One time he was on patrol, and likely somewhat drunk. (He often spoke of being "bombed" in Italy and I don't believe he was always referring to airplanes dropping ordnance.) While wandering around he found himself standing in a chicken coop and wondering how exactly he had got there. As he watched the chickens squawking around him, the idea struck him that chicken would make a tasty switch from the usual Army fare. The only problem was how to kill the chickens, when the only weapon he had was his Tommy gun. But, being somewhat tipsy, he figured he was a marksman. He planned to simply aim at their heads, knock a few off, and carry the carcasses back to base. (At this point you have to understand that the preferred weapon of the British/Canadian forces and Al Capone was really not designed for fowl. It was also, contrary to what you see in movies, very inaccurate. Dad once said it really excelled at killing cows. You just aimed at the front half and cut what you wanted off the back half.) So he opened fire. Predictably, things did not go as planned. He kept hitting chickens square on and they would disintegrate in a puff of feathers. Well, determined to have something other than meat in a tin, he just switched his gun over to full automatic and just began sweeping the coop, back and forth, back and forth, chickens squawking, exploding, feathers flying- until he finally had a few that were more or less intact, which he carried off.

This, as I said, was the story I was about to tell. But before I could the woman sitting next to me (who was the friend of a mutual friend also at the table and not someone I knew very well) chirped up with a story of her own. It was about the time her mother, who was born and raised in Italy, was going out back to feed the chickens. Before she got there she noticed a drunken Canadian standing in her coop, and while she watched him, wondering what he was doing, he raised his weapon and began machine gunning the entire coop, before he carried off her two best laying hens. She rushed off to tell her father what had happened. "Curse him!" growled her father. "May that man's sins be visited upon his son!"

My immediate reaction was: I'd better find another story.

And that's how Bear met Puff.

Because this is a Catholic blog I'll try to give this story a moral.

Here goes: The Lord works in mysterious ways.

He also has a very odd sense of humour.