The Puddle’s home parish is St. John of the Cross Catholic Church, so named because St. John famously doodled Christ on the Cross, later inspiring Dali’s famous adaptation.

Despite its name, it is modeled closely after Dowd Memorial Chapel at Boys Town, Nebraska — which is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. Dowd is the church I attended most often throughout my childhood and is therefore the archetypical Catholic Church in my mind. A dark worship space, it has Gothic and Tudor influences, along with statuary that may be considered late Art Deco.

Notably absent from my rendering is the resting place of Servant of God Fr. Edward J. Flanagan, founder of Boys Town, a village within the limits of Omaha, Nebraska but entirely its own legal village, complete with a child mayor. Boys Town, as you might have guessed, is run and inhabited by children — girls included for some decades now — as a means for teaching social living and responsibility in rehabilitating wards of the state. While I grew up only a few minutes from Boys Town, making it the church I most often attended for Mass, my chief connection is that my grandfather, an early Boys Town Booster, was friends with Fr. Flanagan and his successors, one of whom — the late Fr. Val Peter — I had the pleasure of eating hundreds of meals with as a child during my summer vacations.

Dowd Chapel will always have a very special place in my heart. I hope that St. John of the Cross Parish may have a special place at the heart of the Geekdom.