This past Saturday we held a small thank you wine and cheese event for people who had donated to the gym floor project. The event was long overdue but a belated thanks are better than no thanks at all.
Do you remember the gym before it was remodeled? Do you remember the bumps on the floor? Our basketball teams called that “home court advantage.” They knew which way the ball would bounce when it hit one of those bumps. Do you remember how hot the gym was? When we had our beginning of the school year 7th and 8th grade dance the students would sweat, and sometimes faint. One year, most of the dance ended up outside trying to get any breeze they could from the hot summer night.
Then there were the bleachers. Do you remember the portable bleachers. Now portable in this case doesn’t mean easy to move. They were slow and top heavy, kind of like me.
Father Sean Dooley was new back then. When he came to our parish he got lots of advice from lots of people. That’s what happens when you are new. But Father Dooley was a listening man, and he heard about the bad gym floor and the hot gym and the dangerous bleachers. He decided that we had better do something about it. So Father Dooley held a town hall, in the gym to let us know that we were going to do something about it and that we would need money to do something about it, and wouldn’t it be great if people gave Our Lady of Peace money to do something about it.
There was a complication, a plot twist so to speak, the first of many plot twists that take us up the present day. You see, it turns out that the gym floor wasn’t that old. It turns out that the gym floor wasn’t done correctly. It turns out that there’s a seam running roughly down the out of bounds line that leaked and what we are we going to do about that seam and that water? How are we going to ensure that the new gym floor will be any better than the present one.
Well, Father Dooley is a smart man. Good quality to have in a pastor. He assembled the right people to look at the issues. He hired a good man to lead the fundraising. He had a plan, our Father Dooley did, and before long the money started rolling in.
And then there was another plot twist. There was this thing in the air called COVID. Do you remember COVID? And the school was closed. And the church was closed. And everyone pretty much stayed home and spent too much time on the internet. And the fundraising stopped.
Plot twist number 3. The good man who had been consulting with Father Dooley needed to find steady work. And so he left. And Covid, kind of left and things started to open back and we had some money, but not enough to finish the project. But Father Dooley decided to start the gym project back up, and he talked to a lot of good people, many of whom are here tonight and he raised the money, and we had a new floor, and we had air conditioning and we got permanent bleachers. Hurray!
Plot twist # 4 (if you are keeping count). The floor was new and we were pretty careful about keeping it clean and fresh, kind of like when you buy a new car. One day we came in and saw a series of small holes in the gym floor. And, although as you know, the students at Our Lady of Peace are all little angels, we thought that somebody was sticking his pen into our new floor.
But we began to see those little holes all over the place. Kind of like when you walk on the beach at low tide and, after the water has receded, the little clams and crabs poke a hole in the sand to breathe. We called the floor company. After doing a little research they found out that because of COVID and supply chain difficulties (remember that term “supply chain?” that the formula to make the floor had to put some substitute ingredient in the mix and well, that’s why you have little holes.
But the floor company was good, and they re-did the floor and the holes were gone.
Now it is 2026. The gym is well used, and with the addition of our ramp, more easily accessible for all. We kind of take the floor and the air conditioning and the bleachers for granted. But we can’t take the generosity of those who made it possible for granted.
This gym, which is dedicated to our longest serving pastor, Msgr. Ken Grimes, is a room that actually started as the first permanent church for us after the Quonset hut. In this space pastors and priests turned bread and water into the body and blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ. In this space generations have gathered for ball games, and gym classes and assemblies and operas and plays. We do morning prayer in this space when we can’t get outside and we loudly proclaim, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad.”