Escape!

When I first heard about Saipan’s eight escaped parishioners, I remember that I’ve been an escapee a time or two. Particularly in spring time, when the snow had melted and we began to remember what color grass was, the thought of being incarcerated for another Sunday was unbearable. Of course, getting busted by the choirmaster for being AWOL was a pretty grim matter, but sometimes a man’s got to run a few risks.

Getting busted could mean anything from being subjected to a few measures of “Crucify Him” from Handel’s “Messiah” (the baritones would have to be present at practice for that one), to the standard brand of butt-chewing from the head choir boy (who was too wimpy to do an effective job), to having tenors say snotty things to us (seldom effective, either), to havingour pay docked.

Yes, pay.

It wasn’t much, maybe five bucks a month, which adjusted for inflation would probably come to about $10 to $15 a month in today’s dollars. For all of us, though, it was the first thing that could remotely be considered as a part time job, although that kind of chump change wasn’t a motivator at all. And getting your pay docked fifty cents or whatever was more of a loss of face than a threat to the financial security of the western world.

But a few bucks a month, dutifully saved, meant that we could buy some kind of Christmas presents for the family; nothing much, of course, but miles ahead of the glued together popsicle sticks or whatever other humble offerings our school buddies were pasting together. A boy has $20 in his pocket when the advent calendars are handed out, he’s a regular little breadwinner, eh?

Graduating from the popsicle stick crowd to buying stuff–real stuff, in boxes and everything– from pretty sales ladies behind store counters was a very heady gig indeed.

And why not? Don’t we all have fond memories of the first money we earned and the first things we bought with it? I invested more time, deliberation, and research buying my first wrist watch than I did buying my first car. Enter the intuitive sense of “opportunity cost”; the fact that I could only earn a finite amount of money and that every dollar I spent on one item was a dollar I couldn’t spend on another item. And, of course, any dollar spent on anything is a dollar that can’t be saved. How many people do you know–grown people–who have never understood those concepts? How many governments don’t even seem to have a grasp of that?

Wait a minute….NEWS FLASH…it wasn’t “parishioners” that escaped, it was “prisoners.” Oh my, that does change things a bit…particularly since I had dispatched an elite squad of tenors to round them up.

Oops!