The ‘First Time Ever’ Altar Boy
By Fr. Paul Richardson ssc
My father was a bus driver in Boston and always worked the earliest possible shift, so he always got up early. It was his job to drive the first of the daytime busses out of the bus company garage at 6:30 in the morning. (There were two nighttime busses that drove around our town in apposite directions all night.) My father got up at 5:30 in the morning and left the house for work at 6:00 o’clock. Between the opening and closing of doors and other related noises, I was always wide awake when he left the house. And since I didn’t have to be at school until 8:15, I became very religious. The morning Mass on weekdays in our parish was 6:30 a.m. and I started going to Mass every day. The church was only ten minutes away from our house.