Easter dinner was interesting. You have to understand that we live in one of the whitest areas outside Utah. The family we were visiting is interracial. The husband is African American and the wife is Caucasian. We invoked them during our homestudy as the only thing we could offer locally to keep a minority child in touch with her culture. They are about it around here.

So we go to their house and the place was packed with people. The odd thing is that everyone was speaking Spanish. This caused the husband to look at me after a bit and whisper, “You know, I always thought he was black.” I had explain that he is and everyone else were not relatives but friends from their church. It was fun. I’ve been watching DVDs with the Spanish subtitles turned on and it has improved my Spanish. I understood a lot more. I tried to sit there and look like I didn’t understand a word to see if I could pick up some secrets. But either my Spanish isn’t good enough to pick up the interesting stuff or they really were just talking about all the board games we were playing.

The husband, alas, did not manage to contain his pagany outbursts. We were talking to the person that cleans my stalls. She had been over one night when the husband was sitting outside at our firepit. He says out of the blue, “The night you were there I was doing my pagan ritual by the fire.” She looked at him odd and I hit him on the leg under the table. I wasn’t subtle about it either. He replies, “She gets mad at me when I talk about it.” I hit him again and he changed the subject. I don’t know what his problem is.

Actually, I think I have an idea. He was raised as a pastor’s kid but he’s never taken religion seriously. Because he doesn’t take it seriously he doesn’t see how anyone else can either. He’s totally happy to hear about and discuss other people’s religious beliefs and can not fathom how revealing those beliefs could be problematic at all. I need to sit him down and forcefully explain that we are in the middle of our adoption process in a year where kids have been removed from families because of pagan beliefs. I know there are clinics I have worked at that would never have me back if they knew my religious beliefs. At the place I work most often, a new employee brought in a quasi-pagan catalog and the rest of the staff went nuts. I said that I get that one at home and that caused a big uproar. It only settled down some when I admitted that I had never ordered anything because witchy bodystockings are not really my thing.

He is also making me mad because he has no clue what paganism is. Because of that he ends up saying things that are really offensive. He keeps wanting to go to a pagan store. I’ve asked what he wants to get there and keep telling him that they tend to be books, jewelry, incense, and bath products. Nothing he’d be interested in. He keeps asking if they have potions. My scientific side comes out and I explain that there are no magical potions. He said last night that he wants to go to a pagan store like in the Harry Potter movies. I sarcastically explained that Diagon Alley is imaginary. There aren’t any stores like that. He lit up. He wanted to make one. He said that we could have potions. I started again on how potions aren’t real. He said that he knew that but if we just put olive oil in a bottle and labelled it Love Potion people would buy it. I lost it. It was such a violation of Harm None to willfully try to cheat people out of money that I exploded. Of course he doesn’t know about Harm None because he doesn’t want to know the “boring” stuff. He just wants the movie version of witchcraft.

I’m about at the point where I wish I knew some of the spells he’s imagining so I could turn him into a toad.