Prologue
Growing up Catholic in the 1950’s was participating in a rich culture, spoken and unspoken. We lived in a now-foreign place and time where dying for your faith was a daily part of your religion, where a language and concepts that no longer exist was spoken and professed.
Growing up in a homogenous Catholic neighborhood still presented a conflict of cultures, a daily duality of religions: the practice and beliefs which define your life. The two faces of my Catholic childhood were the family: do what you have to in order to get by; and the church/school: do what you must to go to heaven.
THE CHURCH BUILDING
THE BOOGEYMAN’S HOUSE
My brothers, six to ten years older than me, would be put upon to take my sister and me for walks in our neighborhood. Just a few blocks from home, close to a small business, there were several stone, tomb-like, empty, dark, lifeless, churches that reigned unpeopled during the weekdays. In boyish glee, my brothers would haul us into the cold dead churches announcing they were delivering us to the Boogeyman’s house, and then listen in delight as we’d scream bloody murder. No one to hear us. Scream scream scream again until they’d had their fun and would drag us out by our arms and cram us both into the outgrown baby stroller and squeal down the sidewalk, whooping with life and mischief.
Back home on Thomas Street, at the dividing line between Capitol Hill and the Central District, our family of five kids was busting out of the house. My sister Shelagh, just a year older than me, had been threatened by the cranky
neighbor lady with grass clippers. My brothers, 7 year old Tony, 9 year old Peter and 11 year old Michael, were wrestling and fighting nightly in their tiny shared bedroom.
One rainy Sunday afternoon my mom stormed out of the house in desperation and found a lovely big shambling house further south on Capitol Hill, at the end of the Number 10 bus line and just a block away from both Volunteer Park and Lakeview Cemetery.
Our new home at the top of a rockery and a curving uphill garden path, sat high above the street. The floor plan was deep, with a front verandah that ran the length of the house, then a front hall and living room, backed by a high-ceilinged kitchen and dining room; the laundry room and tiny toilet closet, breakfast room, wall-papered with bright red cardinals hopping about on green leaves, and my dad’s cubbyhole of a den formed the last rank of rooms on the first floor.
The front hall held a tree-like coat rack with a full-length mirror in the middle of it, and a small telephone table and chair. The wallpaper depicted a two n in reddish-pink and green against a grey background that wound up the stairs. Just before entering the kitchen was a three-foot wide coat closet, a favorite hiding place in indoor hide-and-seek games. The grey-painted stair banisters had telephone numbers written in pencil, with the idea that someday they’d be cleaned off, written higgledy-piggledy all over them.
The stairs wound up two three-step landings before the final 14-step climb to the second floor. On boring days, Shelagh and I practiced jumping, first conquering the 3-step intervals, then increasing to 4, 5, and 6 stair leaps until my mother would yell from the kitchen, “Stop that jumping!”
Mom and Dad had guests for dinner, and in his hyperbolic playacting of discipline and mayhem, my dad whipped off his belt and thrashed it around the corner of the stair landings. In terror and glee my sister and I ran screaming upstairs and then in fits of giggles, snuck downstairs again.
Finally my mother excused herself from her guests, scolded my Dad for stirring us up and marched us upstairs all the way to our bedroom at the end of the hallway.
“Now stay in bed and don’t come downstairs again.” She was annoyed and stern.
I wanted to stay in our bedroom so that Dad wouldn’t get in trouble again. However Shelagh hated to be told what to do, so she ventured to the end of the hallway, on her way downstairs again. She egged me on and I climbed down from my high bed and followed her to the end of the hallway.
But there was a watchdog to the downward stairs to freedom. Just as Shelagh reached the end of the hallway, and beckoned me to follow her down the stairs, the door to our brother’s room swung abruptly open and there stood Michael, relishing his role of spoiler and sergeant. “Get back in your room!” he proclaimed with the authority of one who would stand firm until compliance was attained or punishment was dealt.
All three of my brothers shared the divided room at the front of the house that had once been two rooms. The supporting wall between these two rooms had been removed, with the result that the ceiling sagged in the middle.
Michael recreated the separation of the wall with a long, crudely built bookcase of rough lumber. He loved airplanes, and longed to fly them one day, but for now he displayed his model airplane collection along the top of the bookcase, with his book collection underneath.
This biggest bedroom had wallpaper with a dark purple background with voluptuous white magnolia blossoms on it. The room had a fireplace of pink bricks at one end of it, and both ends had walk in closets with deep built-in drawers. A door led outside to another thin verandah that ran the length of this room, and here the tar floor bubbled on the hottest summer days.
Already at those young ages, we were defined. Michael, the eldest, was the smart one, the good kid, the leader who’d go far. Peter, the blond brother, was funny and easygoing, though like most of the easygoing people I knew, was the most unpredictable and frightening when he was roused to anger. Tony, the youngest of the boys, was the bad kid, the rebel. As the youngest of the three boys, yet older than my sister and I, he relished lording it over us.
Shelagh, the first daughter, was sunny and carefree, and I was the baby, given into more than spoiled, for Mom was too tired to challenge my strong will, except when I’d push her too far, and then her Irish temper would give way and she’d be provoked to scream angry words or throw something at me.
From our mom and dad we inherited our good looks, our love of music, and our conviction that we had to fight for every thing we got.
Mom had grown up an Anglican minister’s daughter in Canada; Dad’s family was Catholic. When the boys started school at St Joe’s, my oldest brother Mike was tormented by the knowledge that Mom would go to hell when she died, because she wasn’t a Catholic. Finally she couldn’t stand to see him anguish in that way, so she was quietly baptized a Catholic, just to shut the nuns up. “It’s exactly the same as the Anglican church anyway,” she said. Her easy adoption of the Catholic religion told me that keeping the peace everyday was more important to Mom than going to hell when you died. She would never be a saint.
Soon after moving into our new big home, we got a piano. No sooner had we gotten it than my brothers playing war, threw the heavy bookends into it and put three big nicks in the wood. My Dad, the most unhandy husband a woman could have, patched the dents with wood putty, and the patches formed a quizzical face in the piano’s belly.
I listened to my brother Mike play his eighth grade recital pieces, The chords struck out and the arpeggio’s came pounding down. Tony also took piano lessons which he stuck with only because the nun who taught him piano was charmed by his puckish independence, and looked past, or perhaps admired, his rebel’s defiance.
So Tony thumped out a rustic, two-handed Dvorak melody. I picked the notes up from listening to them practice, and when I played the piano, I rocked the bench back and forth, kicking the underbelly of the piano in rhythm as I played.
“Stop kicking the piano!” Mom cried out in conflicted desperation, for she loved hearing us play, but she hated that we had to wreck the only nice thing she had in the process.
“What’s your favorite song, Mom” I asked.
“Oh I don’t know…“I Know That my Redeemer Liveth” she said.
Mom was so occupied with us and Dad that she didn’t reflect much on the past. It was years before I came across a sketch of a young woman with beautiful long blonde hair singing in a choir with the pencil-written notation underneath it, “The loveliest of the sopranos captures me with her angelic voice as she tells that her Redeemer liveth.”
“Who did this Mom?
“Oh I had a boyfriend in the choir who had a crush on me,” she said.
Mom had a boyfriend…then why did she marry Dad?
“Did you have lots of boyfriends? How come you married Daddy?”
“I had one man who was nice to me at the bank, where I worked. But he was very shy, and so was I. One Christmas he gave me a giftbox with gloves inside, and the glove had a ring on it. But there was no man-woman thing, and I moved with my family a few months later.”
“What’s your favorite song, Dad?”
“Oh I don’t know, Little Horsie. I love Chopin, I love the soft gentle caress of his songs, like…” and he came to the piano keyboard and lovingly pressed down a jumble of discordant notes.
Dad was shaving in front of the kitchen mirror and bellowing out the one song he knew:
“BRAVO BRAVO PUNCHINELLO! BRAVO PUNCHINELLO
HE,,A STALWART PUCHINELLO
She, a graceful Columbine
BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO”
He launched into a high sweet falsetto for Columbine’s line before roaring out to the end of the phrase.
One Saturday Dad drove Pete and Tony out to the country to shoot their bb guns. Mom made him take Shelagh and me. That was a dry and dusty day. We finally pulled off onto a dirt road. Dad parked the car. The bushes and grasses were dried out and scraggly. “Now Little Horsies, you wait here” Dad said to Shelagh and me. Then he and Pete and Tony went further down the road to where the brush grew high overhead and formed an arcade as they disappeared into its mouth.
Well, there we were in the country, to sit on a log and wait. There in the middle of nowhere we sat with the sun overhead and flies buzzing around us, Dad’s old green Packard with the dark leather seats, the big log and each other to look at. We heard pops from the brushy wood, and so knew Dad and the boys weren’t far. It was kind of like waiting for Dad when he went into the liquor store and we waited in the car, only this time we were outside and we had each other for company.
Mom took me to the recital at school in the big dark wooden-floored auditorium The eighth grade boys (for there were no girls in the school after 3rd grade) sang “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” from My Fair Lady.
I was happily swinging my legs back and forth to the lilt of the song when Mom leaned over. “Stop swinging your legs, you’re kicking the chair.”
“What are they singing?” I whispered to Mom.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely?” she said, “Only with an accent.”
***************
Aunt Barry and Uncle Winkie lived in an old home converted into apartments. They lived on the second floor, and we never went to visit them without being hushed on the stairs.
My aunt knit baby clothes because they were going to have a baby. Beautiful pastel tiny garments that said, ‘This baby is wanted.’ Then one day the baby clothes were put away and there was to be no baby anymore.
“Why?” I asked my mom.
“Because the baby wasn’t strong enough to live,” she said.
That isn’t fair, not fair, and no one was powerful enough to make it fair. Except God.
There wasn’t much heralding when, a year or so later, a baby did arrive.
Suddenly I was in a boogeyman’s house, but my parents were with me, and my sister, and my aunt and uncle and the new baby. She was in a beautiful long white dress, and she was being baptized.
“Don’t talk about this at school,”my mother admonished me.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not supposed to be in this church.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not Catholic.”
“Oh…????????????”
“Do you renounce Satan and all his pomp?”
“I do.”
“Mom, Who is Satan?”
“The devil.”
“What’s pomp?”
“Oh you know like pompous, think too much of yourself. Vain, always looking at yourself in the mirror.”
But that was the fun! To stand in front of Mom’s dresser with the full length mirror in front, and the wing mirrors that you could swing to see any angle of yourself. And then to play, to pretend.
“’It’s Howdy-Doody Time” we heard the song from the television downstairs. We ran down to watch the freckle-faced puppet and his master, Buffalo Bob, and then at the end, Howdy-Doody’s face beamed from the TV screen as the program ended. Shelagh walked right up the TV set and kissed Howdy’s face. I crowded her out and kissed him myself. Then she elbowed her way back to kiss him again, and I nudged her away for my second turn. We continued to tussle back and forth until at last the black and white screen flashed on to a cooking program.
Then we ran back upstairs to Mom’s dressing table and snuck Mom’s lipstick out of the top drawer again, applied it liberally and sloppily and kissed the mirror again and again and giggled at the mirror, our reflections pock-marked with lip imprints.
Growing up Catholic in the 1950’s was participating in a rich culture, spoken and unspoken. We lived in a now-foreign place and time where dying for your faith was a daily part of your religion, where a language and concepts that no longer exist was spoken and professed.
Growing up in a homogenous Catholic neighborhood still presented a conflict of cultures, a daily duality of religions: the practice and beliefs which define your life. The two faces of my Catholic childhood were the family: do what you have to in order to get by; and the church/school: do what you must to go to heaven.
THE CHURCH BUILDING
THE BOOGEYMAN’S HOUSE
My brothers, six to ten years older than me, would be put upon to take my sister and me for walks in our neighborhood. Just a few blocks from home, close to a small business, there were several stone, tomb-like, empty, dark, lifeless, churches that reigned unpeopled during the weekdays. In boyish glee, my brothers would haul us into the cold dead churches announcing they were delivering us to the Boogeyman’s house, and then listen in delight as we’d scream bloody murder. No one to hear us. Scream scream scream again until they’d had their fun and would drag us out by our arms and cram us both into the outgrown baby stroller and squeal down the sidewalk, whooping with life and mischief.
Back home on Thomas Street, at the dividing line between Capitol Hill and the Central District, our family of five kids was busting out of the house. My sister Shelagh, just a year older than me, had been threatened by the cranky
neighbor lady with grass clippers. My brothers, 7 year old Tony, 9 year old Peter and 11 year old Michael, were wrestling and fighting nightly in their tiny shared bedroom.
One rainy Sunday afternoon my mom stormed out of the house in desperation and found a lovely big shambling house further south on Capitol Hill, at the end of the Number 10 bus line and just a block away from both Volunteer Park and Lakeview Cemetery.
Our new home at the top of a rockery and a curving uphill garden path, sat high above the street. The floor plan was deep, with a front verandah that ran the length of the house, then a front hall and living room, backed by a high-ceilinged kitchen and dining room; the laundry room and tiny toilet closet, breakfast room, wall-papered with bright red cardinals hopping about on green leaves, and my dad’s cubbyhole of a den formed the last rank of rooms on the first floor.
The front hall held a tree-like coat rack with a full-length mirror in the middle of it, and a small telephone table and chair. The wallpaper depicted a two n in reddish-pink and green against a grey background that wound up the stairs. Just before entering the kitchen was a three-foot wide coat closet, a favorite hiding place in indoor hide-and-seek games. The grey-painted stair banisters had telephone numbers written in pencil, with the idea that someday they’d be cleaned off, written higgledy-piggledy all over them.
The stairs wound up two three-step landings before the final 14-step climb to the second floor. On boring days, Shelagh and I practiced jumping, first conquering the 3-step intervals, then increasing to 4, 5, and 6 stair leaps until my mother would yell from the kitchen, “Stop that jumping!”
Mom and Dad had guests for dinner, and in his hyperbolic playacting of discipline and mayhem, my dad whipped off his belt and thrashed it around the corner of the stair landings. In terror and glee my sister and I ran screaming upstairs and then in fits of giggles, snuck downstairs again.
Finally my mother excused herself from her guests, scolded my Dad for stirring us up and marched us upstairs all the way to our bedroom at the end of the hallway.
“Now stay in bed and don’t come downstairs again.” She was annoyed and stern.
I wanted to stay in our bedroom so that Dad wouldn’t get in trouble again. However Shelagh hated to be told what to do, so she ventured to the end of the hallway, on her way downstairs again. She egged me on and I climbed down from my high bed and followed her to the end of the hallway.
But there was a watchdog to the downward stairs to freedom. Just as Shelagh reached the end of the hallway, and beckoned me to follow her down the stairs, the door to our brother’s room swung abruptly open and there stood Michael, relishing his role of spoiler and sergeant. “Get back in your room!” he proclaimed with the authority of one who would stand firm until compliance was attained or punishment was dealt.
All three of my brothers shared the divided room at the front of the house that had once been two rooms. The supporting wall between these two rooms had been removed, with the result that the ceiling sagged in the middle.
Michael recreated the separation of the wall with a long, crudely built bookcase of rough lumber. He loved airplanes, and longed to fly them one day, but for now he displayed his model airplane collection along the top of the bookcase, with his book collection underneath.
This biggest bedroom had wallpaper with a dark purple background with voluptuous white magnolia blossoms on it. The room had a fireplace of pink bricks at one end of it, and both ends had walk in closets with deep built-in drawers. A door led outside to another thin verandah that ran the length of this room, and here the tar floor bubbled on the hottest summer days.
Already at those young ages, we were defined. Michael, the eldest, was the smart one, the good kid, the leader who’d go far. Peter, the blond brother, was funny and easygoing, though like most of the easygoing people I knew, was the most unpredictable and frightening when he was roused to anger. Tony, the youngest of the boys, was the bad kid, the rebel. As the youngest of the three boys, yet older than my sister and I, he relished lording it over us.
Shelagh, the first daughter, was sunny and carefree, and I was the baby, given into more than spoiled, for Mom was too tired to challenge my strong will, except when I’d push her too far, and then her Irish temper would give way and she’d be provoked to scream angry words or throw something at me.
From our mom and dad we inherited our good looks, our love of music, and our conviction that we had to fight for every thing we got.
Mom had grown up an Anglican minister’s daughter in Canada; Dad’s family was Catholic. When the boys started school at St Joe’s, my oldest brother Mike was tormented by the knowledge that Mom would go to hell when she died, because she wasn’t a Catholic. Finally she couldn’t stand to see him anguish in that way, so she was quietly baptized a Catholic, just to shut the nuns up. “It’s exactly the same as the Anglican church anyway,” she said. Her easy adoption of the Catholic religion told me that keeping the peace everyday was more important to Mom than going to hell when you died. She would never be a saint.
Soon after moving into our new big home, we got a piano. No sooner had we gotten it than my brothers playing war, threw the heavy bookends into it and put three big nicks in the wood. My Dad, the most unhandy husband a woman could have, patched the dents with wood putty, and the patches formed a quizzical face in the piano’s belly.
I listened to my brother Mike play his eighth grade recital pieces, The chords struck out and the arpeggio’s came pounding down. Tony also took piano lessons which he stuck with only because the nun who taught him piano was charmed by his puckish independence, and looked past, or perhaps admired, his rebel’s defiance.
So Tony thumped out a rustic, two-handed Dvorak melody. I picked the notes up from listening to them practice, and when I played the piano, I rocked the bench back and forth, kicking the underbelly of the piano in rhythm as I played.
“Stop kicking the piano!” Mom cried out in conflicted desperation, for she loved hearing us play, but she hated that we had to wreck the only nice thing she had in the process.
“What’s your favorite song, Mom” I asked.
“Oh I don’t know…“I Know That my Redeemer Liveth” she said.
Mom was so occupied with us and Dad that she didn’t reflect much on the past. It was years before I came across a sketch of a young woman with beautiful long blonde hair singing in a choir with the pencil-written notation underneath it, “The loveliest of the sopranos captures me with her angelic voice as she tells that her Redeemer liveth.”
“Who did this Mom?
“Oh I had a boyfriend in the choir who had a crush on me,” she said.
Mom had a boyfriend…then why did she marry Dad?
“Did you have lots of boyfriends? How come you married Daddy?”
“I had one man who was nice to me at the bank, where I worked. But he was very shy, and so was I. One Christmas he gave me a giftbox with gloves inside, and the glove had a ring on it. But there was no man-woman thing, and I moved with my family a few months later.”
“What’s your favorite song, Dad?”
“Oh I don’t know, Little Horsie. I love Chopin, I love the soft gentle caress of his songs, like…” and he came to the piano keyboard and lovingly pressed down a jumble of discordant notes.
Dad was shaving in front of the kitchen mirror and bellowing out the one song he knew:
“BRAVO BRAVO PUNCHINELLO! BRAVO PUNCHINELLO
HE,,A STALWART PUCHINELLO
She, a graceful Columbine
BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO”
He launched into a high sweet falsetto for Columbine’s line before roaring out to the end of the phrase.
One Saturday Dad drove Pete and Tony out to the country to shoot their bb guns. Mom made him take Shelagh and me. That was a dry and dusty day. We finally pulled off onto a dirt road. Dad parked the car. The bushes and grasses were dried out and scraggly. “Now Little Horsies, you wait here” Dad said to Shelagh and me. Then he and Pete and Tony went further down the road to where the brush grew high overhead and formed an arcade as they disappeared into its mouth.
Well, there we were in the country, to sit on a log and wait. There in the middle of nowhere we sat with the sun overhead and flies buzzing around us, Dad’s old green Packard with the dark leather seats, the big log and each other to look at. We heard pops from the brushy wood, and so knew Dad and the boys weren’t far. It was kind of like waiting for Dad when he went into the liquor store and we waited in the car, only this time we were outside and we had each other for company.
Mom took me to the recital at school in the big dark wooden-floored auditorium The eighth grade boys (for there were no girls in the school after 3rd grade) sang “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” from My Fair Lady.
I was happily swinging my legs back and forth to the lilt of the song when Mom leaned over. “Stop swinging your legs, you’re kicking the chair.”
“What are they singing?” I whispered to Mom.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely?” she said, “Only with an accent.”
***************
Aunt Barry and Uncle Winkie lived in an old home converted into apartments. They lived on the second floor, and we never went to visit them without being hushed on the stairs.
My aunt knit baby clothes because they were going to have a baby. Beautiful pastel tiny garments that said, ‘This baby is wanted.’ Then one day the baby clothes were put away and there was to be no baby anymore.
“Why?” I asked my mom.
“Because the baby wasn’t strong enough to live,” she said.
That isn’t fair, not fair, and no one was powerful enough to make it fair. Except God.
There wasn’t much heralding when, a year or so later, a baby did arrive.
Suddenly I was in a boogeyman’s house, but my parents were with me, and my sister, and my aunt and uncle and the new baby. She was in a beautiful long white dress, and she was being baptized.
“Don’t talk about this at school,”my mother admonished me.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not supposed to be in this church.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not Catholic.”
“Oh…????????????”
“Do you renounce Satan and all his pomp?”
“I do.”
“Mom, Who is Satan?”
“The devil.”
“What’s pomp?”
“Oh you know like pompous, think too much of yourself. Vain, always looking at yourself in the mirror.”
But that was the fun! To stand in front of Mom’s dresser with the full length mirror in front, and the wing mirrors that you could swing to see any angle of yourself. And then to play, to pretend.
“’It’s Howdy-Doody Time” we heard the song from the television downstairs. We ran down to watch the freckle-faced puppet and his master, Buffalo Bob, and then at the end, Howdy-Doody’s face beamed from the TV screen as the program ended. Shelagh walked right up the TV set and kissed Howdy’s face. I crowded her out and kissed him myself. Then she elbowed her way back to kiss him again, and I nudged her away for my second turn. We continued to tussle back and forth until at last the black and white screen flashed on to a cooking program.
Then we ran back upstairs to Mom’s dressing table and snuck Mom’s lipstick out of the top drawer again, applied it liberally and sloppily and kissed the mirror again and again and giggled at the mirror, our reflections pock-marked with lip imprints.
Shelagh ran across the hall and came back with a ribbon of toilet paper wrapped around her hands. “Quick! Wipe it off with toilet paper before Mom finds out!” she coached me.
********************
Then Shelagh was at school and I was in kindergarten, morning kindergarten. I walked the three blocks by myself after the first week, past the row of giant chestnut trees. Where in the autumn we collected prickly spears and the glossy nuts inside them; past the grocery store with the asphalt tiles siding the building that kids carved their initials into with a nail, past the street of two-story houses divided into apartments where strangers lived, to the school.
Home for lunch with Mom, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or peanut butter and jam sandwiches.
“Lie down and take a nap now.”
“I don’t want to take a nap.”
“You need to rest, you’re tired.”
“I’m NOT tired!” I wailed.
“Well, I’m going to lie down.” Mom yawned and curled up at the end of the sofa. The soap opera hummed from the TV with the depressing organ music and the heavy drama playing out. It was kind of creepy. There was nothing to do.I lay down at the other end of the sofa.
The next thing I knew, Shelagh was home from school and Mom was in the kitchen and I had a blanket over me. Tricked again, and I hadn’t even been tired.
********************
Summer days became hot and boring and one night when my cousin was visiting she said, “It’s starting to get dark earlier.”
In the hot late August days, we trekked downtown to try on uniforms, the dark navy jumpers and sweaters, the thin white blouses. We stopped at the department stores for white slips, socks and underwear, and the brown oxfords.
School started, and I took up my new red satchel with pencil and paper in it and followed Shelagh with her matching blue satchel to St Joe’s. We lined up outside according to class, and Shelagh deposited me with the first graders and we filed into school when the bell rang.
At lunch, we again marched in file downstairs to the cafeteria, across from the dark, high-ceilinged gym with the brick walls and the cement floors: nothing comfortable about the gym. The boys threw balls hard and if you weren’t looking in every direction, you’d get hit by a ball, or worse, yelled at, “Get out of the Way!”
The cafeteria was crowded with kids, noisy kids chattering and yelling away, hastily eating lunch from brown paper sacks and running outside to play. I spilled the orange juice from my lunch and it ran down my sleeve. Yuk. There was nothing to do but throw my paper bag in the garbage can and follow the other kids outside. The orange juice dried, harsh and scratchy on my wool sleeve. It scraped my bare arm in a sticky, itchy, uncomfortable way.
I could hardly wait to get home and change into playclothes.
****************************
The little reading chairs were rounded in a circle for reading lessons. Already knowing how to read “See Dick run, run Dick run,” I was in the first group, and after performing, sat down to read silently while the other groups had their turn.
In religion class, we had the richness of posters of Biblical stories, Adam and Eve spurned from the Garden of Eden, St Michael fighting Lucifer, the baby Moses found in the bulrushes, Jesus at the Last Supper, the Guardian Angel hovering benevolently over the two children crossing the bridge.
But no interpretation, no discussion or sharing our thoughts. We were too young to have thoughts of our own. No, there were only the thoughts we were meant to learn from our Baltimore Catechisms.
“Who made you?”
“God made me.”
“Why did God make you?”
“To show forth his everlasting goodness and share eternal life”
One by one we rose from our desks to answer the questions. As in a complicated poetry structure, each answer built upon the previous answer, so you prayed to be the first one called upon to answer the first question. We had to be able to say the answers without looking at our books, by heart. Then we read the next day’s lesson, knowing that we’d be called upon to answer those questions by heart.
It was important to be good and to believe. It mattered that we uphold the goodness and zeal of early Church martyrs. We knew about the Romans and the catacombs and martyrs and gladiators and virgins and tyrants thanks to our religion. We knew about war and Korean orphans and missionaries. We knew that it mattered to God who was a just God, not an indulgent or a punitive parent, that we try to be good and overcome our Original Sin.
***************
We’d all go to church together when my brothers were altar boys. Their wardrobe that they wore on the altar had a language of its own – vestments instead of clothes, surplice instead of blouse, alb instead of slip, chasuble instead of dress, cinctures instead of belts.
Dressed up in their long black robes and white lace blouses over the top of the robes, my brothers and boys holier and more respectable than them, served the priest with his richly colored vestments.
For weeks and weeks, Sunday after Sunday, steel scaffolding enveloped the cold dark columns of the church, as richly somber purple and dark green vines and leaves were painted up the cement-block columns of the church.
Dark recesses lined the outer walls, the votive candle banks in front of the stained glass windows of the saints the only glimmers of light in the shadows.
The gory crucifix of a nearly-naked Jesus was off to the side, just between the main altar with huge, Byzantine-looking mosaics of Jesus and two other men, and the side altar with an equally ominous mosaic of St Joseph, who was the most approachable saint, because he was older and took care of Mary and Jesus when he was just a little kid. So you looked at Joseph and tried to pray, though your eyes would sneak off sideways to see Jesus in terrible anguish, with just basically a diaper around his lower body, his eyes twisted pitifully up to heaven, and the blood streaming from his wrists and ankles as his bony knees cried out for relief and warmth.
Suddenly everyone stood up and the figures at the altar stared speaking in Latin, I knew the Mass had begun because everyone stood up. Mumble, mumble and then drop to your knees and pound your chest with your fist and imitate seagulls “Kee Kee, Kree Kree Kee Kee.“ It sounded like seagulls begging for freedom and forgiveness.
Then the altar bells would peal out and the Glorias would start. Nobody was named Gloria, that was a show-offy name like Marilyn Monroe. There was something beautifully threatening about Marilyn Monroe. She was pretty, but she wasn’t cute or appealing or compliant. She hinted at something hidden and dangerous.
Shelagh distracted me by kicking my ankle with her foot. As we sat down, we locked legs at the ankles and started swinging our legs together. As the priests mumbled on and on and strutted back and forth at the front of the church, we swung our legs harder and higher, suppressing guilty giggles.
Mom reached over and grabbed my fingers in her fist. With her other hand stretched across her lap, she quietly but firmly pounded my finger tips. This wasn’t part of the rituals of Mass.
She let go of my fingers and pointed her finger to the altar. ‘Behave” her eyes said louder than her lips. The priest had climbed the stairs to the pulpit and everybody stood up while he read the Gospel from the Bible. Then we sat down and listened to his sermon, explaining the words of the gospel, or asking for money. Very rarely, the priest would say something like, “I know you want to go home and listen to the baseball game on the radio, so thank God for all the blessing that allow you to enjoy the World Series, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”
Then it was back on our feet as the whole church said out loud in Latin, “Confiteor Deo omnipotens” and the rhythm of
beatum Maria,
beatum Michaeli,
Sanctos apostolos Peter et Paulum
was broken as we knelt at the words
Et incarnates est (And was made Man)
in the middle of the prayer,
Then the kneeling began. You knelt and you knelt forever. If you were a little kid, your Mom might let you sit down. But you had to be good. You had to sit quietly and not be a nuisance.
And when the bells rang out again, three times urgently and you heard people say, “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus” you had to kneel and watch the priest dip his fingertips into a shallow bowl of water at the side of the altar, and first kneel to the peal of bells, then raise first the Communion host, a round bread wafer, then repeated again for the chalice, the gold-plated wine goblet, above his head with both hands to a second call from the bells, and then kneel again to a final call from the bells.
The awesomeness and enormity of the church, the people, and the ritual struck you dumb and motionless.
Then the kneeling people, with their heads bowed, would say quietly,
Domine non sum dignus
Et interim pectam meam
But say the word
And my soul shall be healed
That was the most profoundly somber moment, as the humbled hundreds bowed their heads, and again made a fist and beat their chests, “Lord I am not worthy…”
Soon after that, most of the people in the church would stand and file out to the center aisle, row by row, to go up to the communion rail. The organ played serious strictly metered music from the choir loft at the back of the church as row after row of parishioners knelt at the wrought-iron rail, hands together in front of them. The priest progressed one-by-one down the length of the rail and back again for what seemed like hours as the altar boy held a plate-like gold paten under each person’s chin and the priest took a single communion wafer from the chalice and placed it on the communicant’s tongue.
As they got up from the communion rail, the row of people lined behind them would kneel and take their places. As the communicants filed back to their seats, you’d hear the swish-swish sound of the women’s nylons as they came back from the communion rail.
Soon now the Mass would be over and the herd would lunge for the Church exits (sound it out, ex-its).
Talk about pomp and calling attention to yourself! Who was better at that than the priests with the parish processions and rituals of Baptism, First Communions, crowning of Mary, funerals, and the church parades of the Knights of Columbus.
***************************
I loved singing in a strange tongue. Nobody taught you, you just listened week after week to the same song, you heard it more than “I had a cat and the cat pleased me and I fed my cat by the Yonder Tree” as you pranced around the living room on the rare days that Mom would let you play your one record on the record player.
But “Tantum Ergo” was there every Sunday that you went to the last Mass, the one that had Benediction afterwards. Some people would sneak out in the seconds between the end o f Mass and the beginning of Benediction, but you weren’t supposed to, so we stayed planted in our pews.
The singing started. The song called to me, “Janey Doyle, Janey Doyle,” I interpreted the Latin, :”Genitori, Genitoque”.
The priest was joined by two other priests as they placed the Blessed Sacrament, the round palm-sized wafer in a gold chalice, a heavy vase-like showcase with radiant gold beams shooting out from it, and then swung the censer of incense and the lovely warm aroma of perfumed smoke filled the air.
The people started to sing the melodic “O Salutaris Hostia,” knowing that soon it would be over and they could head for home, or socialize downstairs in the cavernous Social Hall, across from the gym.
***********
Dad was walking me to a school music recital, and I seized this rare, private, now-too-seldom sober moment to ask, “Dad, how come you don’t go to Mass on Sundays anymore” Perhaps I could change his fallen-away ways, and we would be A Good Catholic Family.
“Well, Little Horsie, I just can’t agree with a religion that says little babies who haven’t been baptized can’t go to Heaven.”
But Dad, there’s Baptism of Desire….”
“Well if Baptism can be by implied desire and not exactly the physical act of pouring water on a baby’s head, and putting salt on a baby’s tongue, and oil on a baby’s forehead, then why don’t they just say so? Why must be accept that unless a baby goes through that, they can’t be saved?
“And Little Horsie, why are we taught that we come into this world inherently marred, original sin, a big black evil birthright?”
“Well Dad because Adam and Eve…”
“But if we have free will, if we’re individually responsibly for our souls, then how can we inherit sin?
But now, Little Horsie, we’re going to your music concert, and I want to tell you a little secret.”
My heart leapt at a secret between Dad and me; a secret shared, not like his disappearing trips to the liquor store where he would be gone for what seemed like hours while I waited in the car, and when he got home, Mom would sigh, and Dad would disappear in his small, booth-like den.
I looked up eagerly to him. “What is it Dad”
He smiled gently and leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Daddies love horsies.”“Oh Dad!” That wasn’t a good secret – everybody knew that!
The cafeteria was crowded with kids, noisy kids chattering and yelling away, hastily eating lunch from brown paper sacks and running outside to play. I spilled the orange juice from my lunch and it ran down my sleeve. Yuk. There was nothing to do but throw my paper bag in the garbage can and follow the other kids outside. The orange juice dried, harsh and scratchy on my wool sleeve. It scraped my bare arm in a sticky, itchy, uncomfortable way.
I could hardly wait to get home and change into playclothes.
****************************
The little reading chairs were rounded in a circle for reading lessons. Already knowing how to read “See Dick run, run Dick run,” I was in the first group, and after performing, sat down to read silently while the other groups had their turn.
In religion class, we had the richness of posters of Biblical stories, Adam and Eve spurned from the Garden of Eden, St Michael fighting Lucifer, the baby Moses found in the bulrushes, Jesus at the Last Supper, the Guardian Angel hovering benevolently over the two children crossing the bridge.
But no interpretation, no discussion or sharing our thoughts. We were too young to have thoughts of our own. No, there were only the thoughts we were meant to learn from our Baltimore Catechisms.
“Who made you?”
“God made me.”
“Why did God make you?”
“To show forth his everlasting goodness and share eternal life”
One by one we rose from our desks to answer the questions. As in a complicated poetry structure, each answer built upon the previous answer, so you prayed to be the first one called upon to answer the first question. We had to be able to say the answers without looking at our books, by heart. Then we read the next day’s lesson, knowing that we’d be called upon to answer those questions by heart.
It was important to be good and to believe. It mattered that we uphold the goodness and zeal of early Church martyrs. We knew about the Romans and the catacombs and martyrs and gladiators and virgins and tyrants thanks to our religion. We knew about war and Korean orphans and missionaries. We knew that it mattered to God who was a just God, not an indulgent or a punitive parent, that we try to be good and overcome our Original Sin.
***************
We’d all go to church together when my brothers were altar boys. Their wardrobe that they wore on the altar had a language of its own – vestments instead of clothes, surplice instead of blouse, alb instead of slip, chasuble instead of dress, cinctures instead of belts.
Dressed up in their long black robes and white lace blouses over the top of the robes, my brothers and boys holier and more respectable than them, served the priest with his richly colored vestments.
For weeks and weeks, Sunday after Sunday, steel scaffolding enveloped the cold dark columns of the church, as richly somber purple and dark green vines and leaves were painted up the cement-block columns of the church.
Dark recesses lined the outer walls, the votive candle banks in front of the stained glass windows of the saints the only glimmers of light in the shadows.
The gory crucifix of a nearly-naked Jesus was off to the side, just between the main altar with huge, Byzantine-looking mosaics of Jesus and two other men, and the side altar with an equally ominous mosaic of St Joseph, who was the most approachable saint, because he was older and took care of Mary and Jesus when he was just a little kid. So you looked at Joseph and tried to pray, though your eyes would sneak off sideways to see Jesus in terrible anguish, with just basically a diaper around his lower body, his eyes twisted pitifully up to heaven, and the blood streaming from his wrists and ankles as his bony knees cried out for relief and warmth.
Suddenly everyone stood up and the figures at the altar stared speaking in Latin, I knew the Mass had begun because everyone stood up. Mumble, mumble and then drop to your knees and pound your chest with your fist and imitate seagulls “Kee Kee, Kree Kree Kee Kee.“ It sounded like seagulls begging for freedom and forgiveness.
Then the altar bells would peal out and the Glorias would start. Nobody was named Gloria, that was a show-offy name like Marilyn Monroe. There was something beautifully threatening about Marilyn Monroe. She was pretty, but she wasn’t cute or appealing or compliant. She hinted at something hidden and dangerous.
Shelagh distracted me by kicking my ankle with her foot. As we sat down, we locked legs at the ankles and started swinging our legs together. As the priests mumbled on and on and strutted back and forth at the front of the church, we swung our legs harder and higher, suppressing guilty giggles.
Mom reached over and grabbed my fingers in her fist. With her other hand stretched across her lap, she quietly but firmly pounded my finger tips. This wasn’t part of the rituals of Mass.
She let go of my fingers and pointed her finger to the altar. ‘Behave” her eyes said louder than her lips. The priest had climbed the stairs to the pulpit and everybody stood up while he read the Gospel from the Bible. Then we sat down and listened to his sermon, explaining the words of the gospel, or asking for money. Very rarely, the priest would say something like, “I know you want to go home and listen to the baseball game on the radio, so thank God for all the blessing that allow you to enjoy the World Series, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”
Then it was back on our feet as the whole church said out loud in Latin, “Confiteor Deo omnipotens” and the rhythm of
beatum Maria,
beatum Michaeli,
Sanctos apostolos Peter et Paulum
was broken as we knelt at the words
Et incarnates est (And was made Man)
in the middle of the prayer,
Then the kneeling began. You knelt and you knelt forever. If you were a little kid, your Mom might let you sit down. But you had to be good. You had to sit quietly and not be a nuisance.
And when the bells rang out again, three times urgently and you heard people say, “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus” you had to kneel and watch the priest dip his fingertips into a shallow bowl of water at the side of the altar, and first kneel to the peal of bells, then raise first the Communion host, a round bread wafer, then repeated again for the chalice, the gold-plated wine goblet, above his head with both hands to a second call from the bells, and then kneel again to a final call from the bells.
The awesomeness and enormity of the church, the people, and the ritual struck you dumb and motionless.
Then the kneeling people, with their heads bowed, would say quietly,
Domine non sum dignus
Et interim pectam meam
But say the word
And my soul shall be healed
That was the most profoundly somber moment, as the humbled hundreds bowed their heads, and again made a fist and beat their chests, “Lord I am not worthy…”
Soon after that, most of the people in the church would stand and file out to the center aisle, row by row, to go up to the communion rail. The organ played serious strictly metered music from the choir loft at the back of the church as row after row of parishioners knelt at the wrought-iron rail, hands together in front of them. The priest progressed one-by-one down the length of the rail and back again for what seemed like hours as the altar boy held a plate-like gold paten under each person’s chin and the priest took a single communion wafer from the chalice and placed it on the communicant’s tongue.
As they got up from the communion rail, the row of people lined behind them would kneel and take their places. As the communicants filed back to their seats, you’d hear the swish-swish sound of the women’s nylons as they came back from the communion rail.
Soon now the Mass would be over and the herd would lunge for the Church exits (sound it out, ex-its).
Talk about pomp and calling attention to yourself! Who was better at that than the priests with the parish processions and rituals of Baptism, First Communions, crowning of Mary, funerals, and the church parades of the Knights of Columbus.
***************************
I loved singing in a strange tongue. Nobody taught you, you just listened week after week to the same song, you heard it more than “I had a cat and the cat pleased me and I fed my cat by the Yonder Tree” as you pranced around the living room on the rare days that Mom would let you play your one record on the record player.
But “Tantum Ergo” was there every Sunday that you went to the last Mass, the one that had Benediction afterwards. Some people would sneak out in the seconds between the end o f Mass and the beginning of Benediction, but you weren’t supposed to, so we stayed planted in our pews.
The singing started. The song called to me, “Janey Doyle, Janey Doyle,” I interpreted the Latin, :”Genitori, Genitoque”.
The priest was joined by two other priests as they placed the Blessed Sacrament, the round palm-sized wafer in a gold chalice, a heavy vase-like showcase with radiant gold beams shooting out from it, and then swung the censer of incense and the lovely warm aroma of perfumed smoke filled the air.
The people started to sing the melodic “O Salutaris Hostia,” knowing that soon it would be over and they could head for home, or socialize downstairs in the cavernous Social Hall, across from the gym.
***********
Dad was walking me to a school music recital, and I seized this rare, private, now-too-seldom sober moment to ask, “Dad, how come you don’t go to Mass on Sundays anymore” Perhaps I could change his fallen-away ways, and we would be A Good Catholic Family.
“Well, Little Horsie, I just can’t agree with a religion that says little babies who haven’t been baptized can’t go to Heaven.”
But Dad, there’s Baptism of Desire….”
“Well if Baptism can be by implied desire and not exactly the physical act of pouring water on a baby’s head, and putting salt on a baby’s tongue, and oil on a baby’s forehead, then why don’t they just say so? Why must be accept that unless a baby goes through that, they can’t be saved?
“And Little Horsie, why are we taught that we come into this world inherently marred, original sin, a big black evil birthright?”
“Well Dad because Adam and Eve…”
“But if we have free will, if we’re individually responsibly for our souls, then how can we inherit sin?
But now, Little Horsie, we’re going to your music concert, and I want to tell you a little secret.”
My heart leapt at a secret between Dad and me; a secret shared, not like his disappearing trips to the liquor store where he would be gone for what seemed like hours while I waited in the car, and when he got home, Mom would sigh, and Dad would disappear in his small, booth-like den.
I looked up eagerly to him. “What is it Dad”
He smiled gently and leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Daddies love horsies.”“Oh Dad!” That wasn’t a good secret – everybody knew that!
copyright Port Gamble Publishing 2006. All rights reserved. Contact Pub@FishermansQuilt.com for reprint permission
