Read Online Heaven Is Paved with Oreos by Catherine Gilbert Murdock - Free Book Online Page A

flowers. I could listen to it all day. Do you think if I become a tour guide that I’ll sound like that? (I know I won’t, but it’s nice to dream!)
    The inside of the Maggiore church is so beautiful—I like it much more than St. Peter’s. The columns come from ancient Roman temples. I think that is tremendously wonderful. The church also has mosaics of sheep that remind me of the goats I saw from the train. There aren’t any mosaics of goats. Goats would not make good Christians, I don’t think; they’re too stubborn.
    Right now I am outside by a fountain while Z buys a rose to put on Bernini’s tomb. Isn’t that romantic? We must honor the great artists no matter what Miss Hesselgrave thinks of them. Z also wants to take a picture of the Oreos. Oh! I forgot to mention that earlier. The floor of Maggiore has extremely fancy decorations made out of marble. One of the patterns is black circles, and as we were walking on them I said, “Look, Z! Oreos!” And she laughed and laughed and said, “I knew we were in heaven!” So now she’s taking a picture.
    There is one other thing too . . . Many important people besides Bernini are buried in this church, and some of them have tombs that are really decorated. And in several spots—to illustrate that everyone is going to die and so you’d better be good—they decorate their tombs with skulls. Carved skulls, not real human skulls, but it is still vivid. And even though the skulls are carved out of marble, they still have bad teeth.
    Curtis would love those skulls! He loves bad teeth. Right now I want nothing more than to show him. Besides, no one in Rome knows about the Brilliant Outflanking Strategy and the fact that we are fake boy/girlfriends. I am extremely sure that no one in Rome would even care.
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Saturday, July 13—LATER
    I am sitting inside our number two pilgrimage church for today. It was done by a woman named St. Helena whose son was a Roman emperor, so she was rich. Miss Hesselgrave says St. Helena murdered her daughter-in-law, but even so she likes her because St. Helena was born in England. Miss Hesselgrave says St. Helena is a
mother of the church
(although not, I think, a mother-in-law of it) for all her church work and because her son was so important.
    Z agrees. She says these two churches = the Great Moms tour.
    I am not sure it is appropriate for me to be scribbling in my journal in such a sacred place, but I need to write this down.
    Here is what happened. As Z and I were walking here just now, we passed two college students carrying backpacks with guitars strapped to them. Seeing them, Z told me a long story about how she was living in San Francisco in 1976, during the American bicentennial, which was the year the United States turned two hundred years old. She really wanted to go to the fireworks on the Fourth of July, but she couldn’t find a ride so she ended up hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge with a backpack and guitar just like those two students. It was so windy, though, that she worried the guitar and backpack were going to blow off the bridge—with her attached to them!
    She told it really well—Z is a great storyteller—and I laughed . . . But then I remembered a story Dad tells us about when he was a kid, when his scout troop made a gigantic float of Washington crossing the Delaware for their bicentennial Fourth of July, and Dad was supposed to be General Washington. But on July 3rd (which is the day Dad tells us the story every year) he fell off his dirt bike and broke his arm so badly that he had a fever and had to stay in bed with Grandma Ann taking care of him. So instead Uncle Tommy was Washington and Dad never got to be the father of our country.
    Dad’s story is funny too, especially because you can tell he doesn’t feel sorry for himself at all. But until today I’d never thought about what Z was doing on