So around this time last year I introduced you all to St Digitassa of Phalangeville, the patron saint of manicurists, and while she is a very worthy saint, today I needed a figure of somewhat more gravitas.
Because it is the first of April, and despite all my precautions (lock all the doors; believe nothing; do not answer the phone) my most favored son managed to have a large anchovy pizza delivered here, in a box from Tony’s of Delray, Florida, which is a whole other mystery. CSB had to pay for the pizza, and neither of us like anchovy pizza AT ALL. I will let you know tomorrow if it agreed with the chickens.
I should have preemptively called on St Jestrius to protect us against stupid pranks, but I cockily believed that my own precautions would suffice. I was wrong.
St Jestrius was a monk who lived and died in North Africa in the 4th century. As a young man he was wild; he liked to dress as a strumpet, barge into the homes of his friends and his father’s friends and, in front of their wives, accuse the men of engaging in exotic sexual behavior with storks and Blue Hooting cranes. He made a very convincing strumpet, and no matter how much the accused men explained to their wives, Jestrius was responsible for putting many marriages onto the rocks. Then one night a real strumpet appeared to him in a dream and castigated him for bringing ignominy to strumpets everywhere with his antics. Upon awakening, Jestrius was so penitent that he distributed all his wigs, tight togas, and boas to the poor, and set off for the desert that very morning.
Deep in the desert he found a cave and lived there, praying for forgiveness and contemplating his bad taste. Years passed. A Blue Hooting crane from a nearby oasis began to fly over Jestrius’ cave each morning, and the very scrawny and generous Jestrius began to leave out a chunk of bread and a couple of dates for the bird. The crane swept down, gobbled up the tidbits and went on his way. This became their ritual, with both Jestrius and the crane enjoying their quiet contact in the middle of the desert. Until one morning when Jestrius woke up feeling like his old self and had a clever idea. He found some rocks in his cave, and – using vegetable dyes for paint and his own hair for the brushes - painted them to look like bread and dates, and left them out on the ledge where the crane flew in each day.
It was another warm sunny day in the desert, and the Blue Hooting crane swept in at his usual time and took the “bread” and “dates” in his beak and swallowed. In his last living moments, as the rocks descended and crushed his windpipe, the crane looked at Jestrius, his false friend, with sad but forgiving eyes. Then he keeled over, dead.
Jestrius was appalled with the realization of what a cruel joke he had played. He called on God to bring back his friend the crane; he tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the crane but mouth-to-mouth is almost impossible when one of the parties has a long and sharp beak.
So the crane stayed dead, but this time the repentance stuck with Jestrius. He ended his days praying and eating only stone soup, leaving any other food he had for the wild animals and birds.
Jestrius’ bones were discovered years later by a troupe of traveling strumpets, and brought back to the city where a church was build to house the relics of the holy man. Now the faithful from the world over can visit the old bones of Jestrius and hope to be protected against jokers, pranksters and all sorts of foolishness.

There are many good reasons to go to your local library’s book sale, such as supporting a good cause and taking note of how many copies of the Da Vinci Code have been discarded by your fellow citizens. I stopped counting at 18.

Here is another: find out what you have in common with John Steinbeck. But first, I must tell you that I thought I had read or was at least cognizant of all the books of Steinbeck. I was wrong. I had never heard of or read The Short Reign of Pippin IV, and there it was for $1 at the book sale.
So here it is: not only have both John Steinbeck and yours truly engaged in the most amusing pastime of inventing necessary saints, but we both invented female saints who would be sacred to manicurists. (See SQD of April 1 – St Digitassa of Phalangeville)
In The Short Reign of Pippin IV we make the acquaintance of St Hannah, patron saint of feet. She founded an order of nuns “dedicated to silence, black bread and pedicures for the poor.”
Don’t laugh too hard – I think we could really use this saint. Has anyone seen CSB’s toes lately?

Another myster solved, sort of

Yes it is true. Or not true, depending on what you thought. St DIGITassa of PHALANGEville* is no more apocryphal than so many other saints whose stories I have related, and no less so. That is to say, I made her up on the occasion of April First.

I could become very fond of her, and perhaps she will catch on in hagiographic circles.

*As one of my sharper readers pointed out: Phalangeville? A town named after a finger bone??

I have been trying to keep my hagiographic divagations to a minimum, but I cannot resist telling you about a certain saint whose feast we celebrate today. St Digitassa of Phalangeville experienced a very ordinary youth, ordinary for the child of 14th century traveling acrobats. She was uneducated, promiscuous and triple-jointed. She could tumble before she could walk, and by the time she was eleven she was performing multiple contortions balanced atop a phallus-shaped pillar. (Apparently in the 14th century traveling acrobats were expected to be bawdy, and there were no regulations about child pornography.)
Because of her talents, the nubile Digitassa generated a decent income for her parents. She was actively discouraged from seeking any other way of life. But even so, she was drawn to holiness, and the Blessed Virgin Mary in particular. She regularly disappeared from the family caravan and snuck into local churches, where she was entranced by the statues and stained glass windows. In her religious fervor she unconsciously bit her fingernails and even her cuticles, and when there was absolutely nothing left for her to chew on, she bit her toenails. Because she was triple-jointed, this was extremely easy for her, so easy that she was unaware of the spectacle she made in church.
One day in the tiny village of Phalangeville in the Ardennes she was rapturously nibbling her toenails in a dim corner of the Chapel of St Wandrille when the Abbé noticed her unusual behavior. He immediately reviled young Digitassa for desecrating the house of God and threw her out into the muddy square, forbidding her from ever entering the church again. She was bereft. She looked at her hands and feet and realized that all her fingers and toes were bleeding, and she swore at that moment that she would spend the rest of her life atoning for her misspent youth* and blasphemous behavior in the church. She stopped a beggar-woman on the square and traded clothes with her: the beggar-woman was happy to walk away with Digitassa’s brightly colored, form-fitting attire, and Digitassa trudged away in layers of ragged filthy skirts, dragging her bleeding toes in the mud.
And Digitassa did indeed spend her few remaining years going from village to village, in a kind of sanctified mirroring of her earlier wandering days, but this time everywhere she went she displayed her scarred fingers and toes to warn the people of the evils of acrobatics and nail-biting. In 1313 she had wandered back to Phalangeville, the scene of her conversion. After displaying her hideous fingers to the populace, she walked outside the village and fell asleep under a tree. She never woke up. When a young shepherd found her body the next morning, all her fingers and toes had been restored to perfection. He ran to town announcing the miracle, and since that day the shrine of St Digitassa has attracted manicurists from all over Christendom to Phalangeville, where they can view the preserved body of the saint inside the very chapel she was once ejected from.


* and you regular readers of SQD are surely well-aware of my devotion to saints with misspent youths.