Tonight at the shopping center bus stop it was getting dark and cold.

I hopped around foot to foot singing “Salve Regina,” or “Hail, Holy Queen” — not the zippy number in the film “Sister Act,” but the chant at Catholic evening prayers.

We Catholics are fond of our Hail, Holy Queen; no rosary is complete without that prayer at the end. Thomas Merton writes about it in The Seven Storey Mountain, in part III chapter 3, “The Sleeping Volcano.” At that point in the memoir, after agonizing for ages over whether he has a vocation to the priesthood, he takes a long night walk at St. Bonaventure’s Monastery, and prays for help:

“Suddenly, as soon as I had made that prayer, I became aware of the wood, the trees, the dark hills, the wet night wind, and then, clearer than any of these obvious realities, in my imagination, I started to hear the great bell of Gethsemani [Monastery] ringing in the night — the bell in the big grey tower, ringing and ringing, as if it were just behind the first hill.The impression made me breathless, and I had to think twice to realize that it was only in my imagination that I was hearing the bell of the Trappist Abbey ringing in the dark. Yet, as I afterwards calculated, it was just about that time that the bell is rung every night for the Salve Regina, towards the end of Compline. The bell seemed to be telling me where I belonged — as if it were calling me home.”

Like Thomas Merton I was headed home too in a more ordinary sense, after a trip to the Goodwill Store to replace a pair of everyday trousers. The managers at Goodwill, God bless them with health & safety, came up with fine precautions. They’ve cleared out half the merchandise, widened the aisles, shut down the fitting rooms, mandated face masks for entry, put up hand sanitizer stations, and reduced the number of shoppers allowed in. That should have kept things in pie order. But then I got in line to pay for my purchases. All of a sudden, between me and the exit, ahead and behind and to the right and left, the cash-registers-&-donations corner suddenly turned into some post-holiday flash mob superspreader gleefest. I should have dropped the shopping basket and bolted for the door. But my first reflex for that last five minutes was to yank my sweatshirt up over my cloth mask, shielding my head toward a display of tutti-fruity gummy worms, with the judgmental thought “Is it so hard to count up to a social distance of six feet?”

Soon, outside under clearing but dark storm clouds in the falling dusk, while taking huge breaths of open air, I realized with repentance that anyone vaguely in touch with modern living would have realized that this was Black Friday Weekend (!), a sub-optimal choice for social distance shopping. Was I now just a walking viral vector? Resolving sadly to stay even farther away and barricaded off from absolutely everyone for their protection, my discouraged mind latched on to the evening prayer “Salve Regina.” In the wind and headlight glare I belted out the Latin words over and over until the bus appeared.

Upon arrival at home, sitting down with a nice bowl of oatmeal, it was slightly disconcerting to see my internet feed algorithm immediately serve up “Salve Regina.” But at least it was a sweet version of 450 voices in a virtual pandemic recording by Canto Católico.

The visual film calls to mind the gradual individual-to-group unifying theme that one would see from The Piano Guys, that is if devout Latter Day Saints went around singing to Mary at the bus stop. The video shows little clips of the contributing singers praying the rosary with their families. The thought of having a family to pray with had me bursting into tears right away.

Bedtime. Clouds are gone; we’re due for heavy fog and frost in the morning. The moon out this window is 98.7% full, waxing and rising. Tomorrow is the first day of Advent. Goodnight, Moon. Goodnight, Holy Queen.