These old ladies sure can yap!
If you want to get a word in edgewise with these bathing beauties, you’d better ask for a
handicap.
They tuck their white hair under pink bathing caps.
After her double-mastectomy, Mary has trouble keeping up her shoulder straps.
Ta-ra-ra boom de aye! The skirts on their bathing suits give a little kick to their arthritic hips.
“Faith is a trap.” Do you believe that claptrap?
You might say Our Lady was forced into faith’s trap.
Yet she accepted her possibly ignominious fate without a yap.
Pretty soon she would be bouncing baby Jesus on her hips.
It’s an understatement to say that unwed motherhood could have proven a real handicap.
Poor Joseph! He must have brayed like a donkey as he was cinched into marriage’s halter
straps.
He needed a pregnant soon-to-be wife like he needed a pink bathing cap.
Circumstance is a pink bathing cap.
To say otherwise is to deny suffering, which is like opting to live your life in a tourist trap.
Sometimes the bathing cap seems so shocking in its pinkness you don’t think you can put it on, but you do. You let it cut into your double chin with its too-tight straps.
Connie’s husband is in a coma. Charlie was such a talker too. Now he has gone almost a year without the slightest yap.
He had planned to spend retirement spoiling his grandchildren and working on his golf
handicap, worrying, if he had to worry about anything, about having a little arthritis in his
hips.
Never say that life doesn’t shoot from the hips.
It does. None of us get what we really deserve. All any of us can do is try to bloom where we’re planted, in our pink bathing caps,
and vow to take no gift for granted, even a disabling handicap.
Just ask Mildred. That stroke sure got her to clean out the claptrap.
All our lives, if death were a dog, it would bite us, but we barely hear its yap.
Then, suddenly, we’re old, and death is barking, barking, barking. Nothing binds us to each feeble day but faith. It’s the strap that unstraps
.
Our Lady, who art in heaven, through all that shimmering luminosity, we spy your bra straps.
On your feast day, put on your bathing suit and wade with these ladies into the salt water up to your hips.
They believe that you can cure what ails them, or at least stop pain’s yap.
Be assumed back into heaven in a pink bathing cap.
Prove dogma is claptrap,
orthodoxy the believer’s worst handicap.
The bathing beauties give each wave a handicap.
“Watch out, Evelyn,” Winnie says. “That big one’s headed right for you.” But Evelyn is a little deaf. At that very moment, she lets go of dignity’s invisible straps.
As she plops into the water, the others laugh so hard they almost cry. Friendships of seventy years are full of such joyous claptrap
.
Winnie and Mildred start splashing each other. It’s like they’re pouring champagne over each other’s hips.
Oh, life’s too short. Let these old ladies be buried, when they’re good and ready, to solemn accord in their pink bathing caps.
Let them, for these few minutes, become their grandchildren. Let them be young enough again to think grief is a little yap.
Don’t strap faith in. Doubt is not claptrap.
On the Feast of the Assumption, trust your aching hips to the buoyancy of salt water. Put on the
shock and awe of a pink bathing cap.
You are faith’s worst handicap. Let miracle yap!