Weekends with Jimmy - Part II

“I’m not getting along too well with my teacher this year.”  Jimmy said.

“Okay, got that but, if you change schools, you’ll be leaving behind all of your friends in the public school.  Just want to make sure you understand all the implications.”

My son then went on to tell me that he was going to accompany his mother and grandfather next week to some open house at the private school. 

“Which one specifically are we talking about?”  I asked.

“The St. Christian’s Boy’s Academy”…

“A Catholic school?”  Overstating the obvious.

“Yeah, I guess so…”

We had not even taken the step to get my son baptized.  I was curious how that would play out in a Catholic school.  His mom and I discussed religion when he was born and decided that we thought it presumptuous to go through the motions of baptism and other religious sacraments before the child was able to decide for himself what faith, if any, he wanted to pursue.  We felt that our responsibility was to expose him to the choices and let him decide when he was ready.  Here was 8 years later talking about Catholic school (well, actually it was his mom that was talking about Catholic school).

He would eventually make that change in the coming year, which leads to some other interesting developments we might get to in the coming sections of this story.  For now, we’ll go along with the rest of this particular weekend.

We proceeded with the ride up to the capital district of New York and my meager little three-room apartment.  “So, what do you want to do this weekend?”

“Can we go get bagels?”

“Sure.”

My son had fallen in love with a local bagel shop in Troy.  It became a standard ritual either on Saturday or Sunday that we would wind up there and either get a bag of bagels and return to the apartment or we would eat in at the restaurant and talk.  Jimmy also enjoyed the fine array of juices this shop also offered.

As we crunched on the bagel sandwiches, I checked out the areas movie offerings.  It was also a favorite activity of ours to check out a movie on these weekends.  I read off the selection of movies and my son picked one that interested him.

We returned to the apartment to drop off his bag of clothes and his video game console (he rarely traveled anywhere without his console of choice in those days).  We then set out for the local movie theater that was featuring our afternoon’s movie.