The Wild and Holy Child

Labor Day by Day, Decade by Decade

2011-08-31T08:15:00.000-07:00

Job #1 School

Babysitting 35 cents an hour – 50-cents an hour, but the benefits: reading house un-american activities correspondence, touring Pioneer Square in its renaissance, dressing up in Victorian antique dresses for the Save the Wawona campaign, dressing up to go to weddings to keep an eye on Dana and Shelley, finding the Playboy stash – and reading the interviews, reading newspaper in "breakfast room;" conversations with architects and culture-lovers
Bought clothes with money saved
It wasn’t quite in my consciousness that I had to work after school to offset tuition costs that my parents couldn’t meet, I thought it was just something required, like homework.
So I started out, Cleaning classrooms – Sister tight lips overhearing me rant against her
Typewriter room and taking the typewriters apart to clean, all I knew how to do was unjam the keys with my fingers if I typed too fast or recklessly
Reception at school; work the intercom and answer the doorbell for the huge front doors; pretended it was my mansion
Getting calls from bill collectors as Dad got sicker – his final job pushing a cart of files in basement of county building, although his foot was so swollen from an untreated fall that he had to cut the tops off his leather shoes, fashioning sandals.
Then the ax fell; no transcripts released for college until $1,000 back tuition paid.
Luckily I had a wage-earning brother whose job was guaranteed after attending college on a ROTC scholarship. He paid the bill. (Twenty years later, my husband and I were the wealthy members of the family, and my niece was in a similar situation – we paid the $1,000 so that she could graduate from nursing school).
I graduated high school just as Seattle entered its Dyno-saur recession when Sec. McNamara pulled the plug on the Boeing program.
Famous billboard: Last person to leave Seattle turn out the lights?

Job #2 Independence
Job #3 Sex appeal
Job #4 Motherhood
Job #5 Amateur professional
Job #6 Rehabilitation
Job #7 Secretary
Job #8 Administrator
Job #9 Communicator

When Marty Brown died

2008-12-30T15:48:00.000-08:00

When Marty Brown died

It was summer and so hot, both my big toes were stubbed from going barefoot and playing in the street. All I wore was underpants, shorts and a top; my hair was in twin ponytails and my bangs were short.
“Is it a party Mom?”
“No, honey, it’s very sad. Mrs. Brown’s son drowned. He was in Pete’s class at Prep.”
Somehow this wasn’t the same as the heroic deaths of the martyrs who lived for eternity in Heaven with God.
This was a Mom who’d be forever sad, a Dad who wasn’t strong but broken, a family with a big hole that would always be there in their happiness.
Fix it, make it right. Make Mrs. Brown smile again with her eyes, not with that tight bright cold smile that flickers across her crumbling face.
Please God.
But I think he was listening to someone more important than me.
Drowned in the deep water of the lake.

Burnt pudding, paper crowns

2008-12-21T16:59:00.000-08:00

Mrs. O'Farrell made the plum puddings, and their delivery before Chrismas was one of the early harbingers of the Christmas Day festivities.
You weren't supposed to like plum pudding, it wasn't supposed to look good, but with its dark, almost repulsive blackened mass, like a blood blister, it wobbled on the plate, topped by a prickly sprig of holly with berries from the tree at the corner of our front yard.
Only Dad could get the holly sprig, because the tree was on the edge of the 15-foot rockery that overhung the sidewalk, and Dad in his soggy inebriety could be jeopardized, where we shiny agile monkeys couldn't.
Mom made the whole dinner, no potluck or shared duties, she cooked it all, she put it all on the table, us kids helped, maybe, setting the table, Dad poured the drinks and roasted the almonds.
After dinner, while we sat at the dining room table in anticipation, Mom and Dad warmed the brandy and spooned it over the pudding which had been steaming in its tin can on the stovetop since before dinner started. Then Mom raced around turning out the lights and inviting darkness and wonder to the feast.
Then the door from the kitchen opened, with Dad bearing the blazing pudding into the dining room. We all sang, "We wish you a Merry Christmas." with Dad fanning the brandy flames until he set the pudding down on the table.
We turned the lights back on and picked up our Christmas crackers, crossed arms and pulled each others' snap to open the packages of trinkets, fortunes, and most important of all, colored tissue paper crowns which we universally and immediately set atop our heads.
One year a cousin from Canada was coming. He asked us what we'd like him to bring and we asked him to bring the crackers. He told his young, American Jewish wife that they were to bring crackers as their contriubtion to the Christmas Day dinner.
By crackers, she understood Ritz, saltines, edible biscuits, and not the British party favors that alway accompanied the consumption of plum pudding and the end of our Christmas feast. Luckily, our cousin was able to detect her assumption in time to take corrective measures and deliver the party crackers.
In those days, everyone at the table had a little pudding and a lot of hard sauce -- butter and powdered sugar with one vivid maraschino cherry in the middle. The bitter, dense darkness of the pudding was blanketed by the heavy sweetness of the hard sauce as we read our fortunes and shared our trinkets.
Nowadays, a few of us still sample the pudding. For years, my sister made the puddings, and sometimes she still does. But the younger generation's attitude towards our plum pudding was best expressed when my niece purchased a canned commercial plum pudding at a British food import store.
"Ooooh, do you like plum pudding?" asked the clerk. "This is very small.... are there may folks coming to your dinner, maybe you need more?"
"No, thank you," replied my niece, "We just set it on fire."

Nightmare of the Boomers - who killed Kennedy?

2008-12-14T10:05:00.000-08:00

I did not kill Kennedy
I loved Kennedy
Not the way Jackie did
Of course
She was his wife and my idol
Even though “Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me”
The Golden Calf
But he was my hero
My champion
Of passion
And idealism
Of Camelot
I will not reign in benevolence
But retreat in sorrow and pain

This is a mystery I cannot understand
This was a parade
A bullet
A shattered dream
Because I have no power over dreams
I can only pray

We were just leaving our freshman religion class and I was going down the hall to Ancient History, my favorite class with the whip-thin sarcastic nun, Sister John Patrick. She wore glasses and had pimples and tried to shame us into thinking, although there was no catechism for right answers in Ancient History.
During the year of interruption, my sixth grade, I had studied Canadian and South American history at the public school instead of ancient history at Holy Names. So Ancient History was all new to me. This thinking for yourself was scary stuff: if I could be certain, then I could live in happiness forever in Heaven instead of burning with guilt and shame, unloved in Hell when the End of the World came.
The downtown library was my Temple of Refuge. There I picked out books in the Roman history section and read that the early Christians had sought martyrdom, had been revolutionaries. When I dared speak that in class, Sister John Patrick said, “What do you think about that?” and it was if Perry Mason, no, the Prosecutor – Hamburger – was trapping me into admitting my guilt. I caved.
“I don’t know, Sister,” I said.
I was relieved when she caved too and went on teaching her lesson.

So as we were walking out of religion class and the next class came bursting through the door into their English class, it was the everyday tumult of the tide coming in and the tide going out at the same time and they told us:
Kennedy
Shot
Head
Kennedy’s been shot
Shot in the head
Kennedy may die
Kennedy can’t live

A shadowy army of skinny girls filled the hallway – it always felt like an underground tunnel, and today we were more confused than ever.
We filled the classroom at the end of the hall. Sister John Patrick’s face was paler than ever. Her little mouth was set in a grim line.
She let us talk among ourselves and didn’t call the class to order.
Shot
Kennedy
Texas
Communists
Ku Klux Klan
Russians
Death
Lincoln
Mad men

Someone knocked at the glass-windowed door. Sister answered it and turned back to us.
“President Kennedy is dead,” she said. “We should pray.”
So we all tumbled to our knees on the wood floor and prayed and wept quietly for a little bit.
She told us, “We don’t know who shot Kennedy, but as St. Paul said, we are all responsible. Our society killed Kennedy.”

There was no comfort anywhere for a long time.

2008-09-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

First Holy Communion

2007-08-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

Confession and Communion were a little like purgatory and heaven: first you suffered for your sins and offered up atonement, and then you had a glimpse of heavenly perfection. In religion class, after reading and arithmetic, we learned of sanctifying grace: a rainbow of beauty, acknowledgment and belonging, after the storm of sin. Sanctifying grace: it sounded like a sweet, filling grape juice, and it promised satisfaction, pure happiness. Maybe we wouldn’t go to hell for our sins and inherent badness if we had a big enough pantry of sanctifying grace, like jars of home-canned vegetables, jams and jellies.

Sanctifying grace made us holy and pleasing to God, adopted children of God, temples of the Holy Ghost, and gave us the right to Heaven. (And this was the correct answer if I was called upon to stand up and give the answer from memory to the Baltimore Catechism question, “What does sanctifying grace do?”)

Sanctifying grace was earned through receiving the sacraments, the public rituals of the church’s membership. Sanctifying grace was dress-up Sunday clothes, the great gobs of goodness that your entire church, school, family and friends focused on. While most of the sacraments were received only once — Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders and Extreme Unction — Confession and Communion were the mortar that held the bricks of our church-going together.

If sanctifying grace was like my best outfit; actual grace was my everyday uniform. Actual grace was the daily sustenance I earned by performing the mundane little dollops of goodness, or avoiding the pesky little daily occasions of sin. So while acts meriting actual grace were the character-building bricks of our personal temple; sanctifying grace involved the Sisters and the priests, classmates, parents, and family.

Communion, along with Confession, was the meat and potatoes of parochial Catholic existence. Holy Communion was not only the “holiest” sacrament, it was also the one we could do repeatedly and frequently and publicly as the long aisles of pews emptied out and parishioners formed lines to go to the communion rail.

Once I made my First Confession, and then right afterwards, my First Holy Communion, I had three sacraments under my belt and was well on my way to building my bankroll of sanctifying grace, all sweet and purply.

First Communion was also the first pageant we parochial school kids performed. At age seven we were told that we had reached “the Age of Reason” so we knew when we’d done wrong. It was often confusing to know what was wrong and what was right. It was wrong and frightening to not do my homework and not know the answers in class. But it could also be wrong to always know the answer and be a showoff, a smartypants.

The white dresses should have told me something.

Being a little girl, I loved dolls and brides. Barbie had not yet been born, leggy and pointy-bosomed. My dolls were all hairless baby dolls, until the “Littlest Angel” dolls came along. They were pretty dolls who had clothes nicer than mine. Fashion wasn’t the dictator, at least for dolls and little girls, yet.

Better than dolls were brides. They were perfect and beautiful and the center of attention. The first bride I knew personally was our next door neighbor. At 23, Marilyn was ready to start a life of her own; she didn’t have to be an obedient child or student anymore. Marilyn was a golden perfect blonde with creamy skin, brilliant blue eyes, cherry-red lips, tall and slim. She was perfectly beautiful. Her bridesmaids wore heavenly periwinkle-blue sheathes. It was a Disneyland of beauty.

The women’s magazines promoted this ideal with a sense of class and mystery. The sanitary napkin companies placed their magazine ad on the back cover with a woman in evening dress mounting the staircase in a palace and the hype was simply, “Modess…because.” I didn’t know what they were talking about until I was well past the age of reason but I wanted that, whatever it was.

So the tradeoff was this: I had to start owning up to my sins, to always be aware that God was watching and cared about me and wanted me to do good and was offended when I did wrong and might not like me anymore unless I went to confession, but I got to be a little bride, and then after First Communion, a Big Girl who went up and down the aisle to communion by herself. Not a real bride, or even a bride of Christ, as the nuns described themselves, but dressed like a Princess Bride, with everything perfect -- white dress, white slip, white petticoat, white undershirt and underpants, white socks, white shoes, and white veils; all studied, planned, and starched: sterile perfection on everyday wild little garden flower girls.

My hair was curled into tight little corkscrews or sausages; my Saturday night bath was a wet and soapy ritual of its own, and then there was the fast.

Fasting was not all that big a deal in the 50’s. Fasting before receiving Holy Communion was meant to honor and respect the sublimity of the holy meal of the bread “hosts” and “symbolic” wine; for in those pre-Vatican II days, there was no wine of any form given with the communion bread.

The Carmelite nuns made the hosts: Carmelites were human saints, for many reasons. They had the wonderful honey-warm name; kind of like Carmello candies. We knew that they were named after some mountain in the Old Country; but our daily experience, our “other” religion, told us that they were inherently sweet, chocolatey and honey-flavored combined. Carmelites were cloistered; they never went out, but once taking their vows, they never saw their family again, except through a grill-like screen, like a prisoner or a confessional, and they spent their days praying. The only work they did was make the hosts, the circular flat bread that the priest consecrated (turned into the body of Jesus Christ, but this wasn’t cannibalism: this was a miracle!)

And they didn’t call it Holy Bread or Holy Body of Christ, they called it Holy Communion. Who cared if it made sense? Sense wasn’t part of do-or-die religion. That was why we had holy mysteries: “You can’t understand it so don’t try. But here’s the details of what you can’t understand. Pray for faith.”

Shelagh and I could play Holy Communion at home, when Mom wasn’t looking, although she probably wouldn’t have cared if she was, except for the idea that we were wasting food. Even so, it was like dancing with girls; we knew the priest and altar boys were missing. But on a boring day we could raid the bread drawer and take some pieces of foamy Wonder bread and a small juice glass and cut out a host and then smash it down into wafer thinness and pour some exotic purple Welch’s grape juice and voila there was the real thing with both body and blood, only of course it was make-believe because the priest hadn’t turned it into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ.

Fasting started at midnight the night before Mass and Holy Communion. Then the fasting restriction was changed to three hours before; kind of like swimming, we weren’t supposed to go in swimming until at least an hour after eating. So it was no big deal not to eat in the middle of the night. A glass of milk in the morning might have been nice, but we were not great breakfast eaters, and especially with the excitement of First Holy Communion, who could eat?

I ran to school, without stopping for a bowl of oatmeal or a piece of toast or anything in my stomach. My socks slipped down under my ankles in my scuffed brown oxfords. My hands and feet tingled with the chill blains from coming out of the cold air into the radiator-heated room. Nothing felt good, but everything felt normal.

Gentle old Sister Hilaria was teaching us arithmetic that morning, more adding and subtracting. It was all so ordered and clear and repetitive – first and second grades, addition and subtraction. Third grade, multiplication and division. Fourth grade fractions, fifth grade decimals. Sister Hilaria taught the lesson and we tackled the deskwork. I rubbed my empty stomach. She came to my desk.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

I didn’t know anything was the matter. This was normal.

“Nothing, Sister.”

“Did you have breakfast this morning?”

“No, Sister.”

“Are you hungry?”

I was always hungry. But if you didn’t get up for breakfast, then hunger was just part of the way you felt every day.

“No Sister.”

She got up from her crouch over me and left me there. Soon the class was over and Sister Ethbena came in to monitor our reading aloud. Sister Ethbena made us pronounce words wrong to fit in with her Irish pronunciation.

Sister Hilaria and Sister Ethbena put their heads together and whispered, and then Sister Hilaria beckoned to me.

I came to her, and she ushered me out of the classroom. And into the nun’s dining room, one of those mysterious rooms that lay beyond locked doors with translucent glass.

It was just a big room with wooden floors and high ceilings with 15-ft high windows looking out to the street. The room was filled with round tables.

“Here, sit down here, honey,” Sister Hilaria said. She went into another corridor in this hidden maze and I heard her speaking to Sister Ethel Marie, the crabbiest, meanest Sister in the school, who always frowned at us, and never spoke to us as she bustled around the kitchen corridors. She always wore a white apron over her black habit, as they called their floor-length wool dresses with shoulder capelets, and she usually was carrying large cooking pans.

“No, Sister,” I heard Sister Ethel say.

“But the child’s hungry. We can just give her some crackers, just a little something…” Sister Hilaria said.

She came back to the table with a plate of saltine crackers and some honey and placed them in front of me. “Would you like some butter with these crackers?”

“No thank you Sister, “I said.

She nodded, and left the table to go back in the kitchen. She returned with two steaming mugs.

“Here’s some hot tea for us,” she said. “I put lots of milk in yours. Do you want to put some honey in, too?”

“No thank you Sister,” I said. She spread some honey on the crackers and pushed the plate closer to me.

“This will help,” she said. “Now, eat.”

I did, and she smiled gently with her mouth, while her big brown eyes looked not sad, but serious.

At school for weeks and months I practiced Holy Communion: holding my hands just so, keeping my eyes lowered, but not too much so that I didn’t bump into the child in front of me; walking slowly and evenly so there were no gaps in the line or traffic jams; keeping quiet so the holiness of the occasion was not broken by chitchat or silliness. Above all, I was supposed to think about this holy and awesome sacrament I was about to be initiated into: Jesus Christ, God the son, the nice one but still God, died so that I could march down the aisle and receive communion AND go to heaven when I died.

Now I too could parade up the aisle, like a bride or a priest, even though I was in a long line with the rest of the commoners, to the communion rail, I would kneel in front of the wrought-iron twisted vines and clusters of grapes and wait for the priest and the altar boy to work their way down to me. The priest, a big adult man who wasn’t my father or uncle or grandfather, would approach little measly me, and I stuck your tongue out at him! No, don’t think that, I told myself, that proves you’re not very holy. What I meant to say was, I stuck my tongue out for the priest to place the Holy Communion bread on it.

Then, I had the tricky walk back to my pew: tricky in acting naturally holy when I was the center of attention, was everybody looking at me? If I acted too holy my brothers would make fun of me. If I acted too casual, the Sisters would take me aside and scold me. Plus I had to worry about swallowing the Holy Toast: I couldn’t bite it, that would be terrible! I couldn’t let it stick to the roof of my mouth. I had to let it glide whole down my throat, all the while realizing that God himself, the creator and ruler of the universe, was now in me! God in me!! Why don’t I feel holier, bigger, saintlier, more cosmic? I’m still just skinny little me.

So I just knelt there with my eyes closed and tried to act holier than I felt.

Food was a given: Mom made the meals and you ate them. No questions. Our family traditions respected certain quirkiness inherited from my father’s father: no vegetables that were dug up from the ground; hence no potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. My mother, being a poor minister’s daughter, ignored this tradition when she could, but my uncle’s family, who ate only rice as his father had, was held up as an example of principle whenever my mother served the ignoble root vegetables.

Again, my mother’s lack of principles, of standing up for her faith, was worrisome to me. Poor mom, she just didn’t have the stuff to stand up for her beliefs.

Being a plain Irish cook, Mom’s idea of garnishment was limited to Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce with the brown paper label. My first family job was to set the table, and Dad had a little silver salt “cellar” a finger-length tub filled with salt with a tiny little silver spoon for strewing the salt over his diner. The rest of us had a set of salt and pepper shakers. That was the limit of our seasoning.

Food was also simple, even garlic was suspect. During the Seering era, our next-door neighbors (who happened to always, through three different families, the Seerings, Hills, and Schoenknechts, be composed of a rich doctor, his blonde wife and daughters) Mrs. Seering approached me over the white picket fence with a brown grocery bag in hand, asking if I’d like to give our dog their garlic-drenched steak bones. The smell from that bag was mouth-wateringly piquant. I could not resist. I took the bones from the bag and chewed on them myself before handing them over to Queenie.

A couple of times a year Mom would drive up to Canada to see her family, her Mom, the ferocious Nana, and Mom’s sisters all still lived in Vancouver. Two of their husbands, Tom and Gordon, who’d served in the Canadian army in World War II, loved to rib us about being Yanks, though my Mom didn’t become a US citizen until Shelagh and I were in high school

Mom’s family loved to sing and party, though in a simple natural way. NO performance, just spontaneous. Sometimes during those days Mom went by herself, and we were left to our uncertainty and apprehension in Dad’s care.

Dad was an unobservant, non-participating parent, as most of the fathers we knew were. Oh there were the bellowing, lecturing fathers, thank God Dad wasn’t like that, but I don’t think I knew of a concerned, loving father who enjoyed his children and guarded them until my Uncle Winkie’s kids came along eight and ten years after me, and by then the course was set.

The thing we feared, that consumed us with dread when Mom would take off for a weekend, was Dad’s cooking.

He loved to concoct weird recipes and Snow White’s evil stepmother couldn’t have cooked up more evil-looking sorcery potions than Dad’s greasy grey stews, pear-and bacon sandwiches with hard clumps of margarine breaking through the white pillowy Golden Rule bread that, along with the milk bottles, were delivered to our home every other day.

One Sunday afternoon Mom was gone to Canada and everyone else was out of the house when Mr. O’Farrell came over. Mr. O’Farrell was Dad’s debate partner, (“No no, Doyle!” “Let me explain, Brendan!”) and the two of them would take over the living room and talk forever, enthralled by the sounds of their own voices and the brilliance of their perceptions in a conversation that would bore any outsider silly. When Mom was home, she would camp out in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning, but Mom was gone. Heck everybody was gone except Dad and Mr. O’Farrell and I was bored and hungry.

I rummaged through the exotic spice drawer and found a vial of garlic powder. There was a full loaf of white bread in the tin-lined bread drawer. I set myself up with the hard margarine, the garlic powder and the white bread and as Dad and Mr. O’Farrell talked and drank into the dusky dinnertime, I made 17 pieces of garlic toast, one right after the other.

Finally Mr. O’Farrell left, and Dad came into the kitchen to heat up some grey stew or muck we were supposed to eat for dinner.

“I’ve already eaten, Dad,” my brothers said as they came home.

“I’m not hungry Daddy” Shelagh lied as she blew in fresh-faced from playing with her friends.”

“I don’t feel good, Dad,” I said and went upstairs to brush my teeth repeatedly to get the plastic-garlic taste out of my mouth. Finally after numerous brushings, I squeezed the tube of toothpaste onto my finger and smeared it on my teeth, not to brush away, but to seep in and override the horrible garlic hangover I was tasting.

That night I threw up a couple of times, and the next day, when my mother returned home and investigated the occurrences during her absence, notice how my eyes had a yellow cast to them.

She hied me to Group Health Clinic (our membership in that health cooperative made us slightly suspect as Communist sympathizers in those days, as did my dad’s support of city-wide water fluoridation: who were we to deprive the doctors and dentists of plying their practice, just because were too poor to pay them.?) Instead we paid a monthly membership fee in the Co-op, and went to the doctor whenever we needed and could interrupt our daily routine with a trip to the clinic or emergency room.

At Group Health my doctor diagnosed hepatitis, and to my astonishment, I found that I was really sick and would have to stay in bed for a long time. I didn’t feel that sick, I was just throwing up a lot, but I wasn’t nauseated.

It was fun! I stayed home all day every day, usually in bed, knowing that Mom was downstairs. At first I was the center of attention, as everyone in my family had to get a shot – in the bum! My brothers teased each other about pulling down their pants of front of the pretty young nurse.

Then it got boring, and I made dioramas, of the Little House in the Woods, the little house a discarded Lipton tea box with straws glued to the outside for a log cabin, and tree branches taped to nails punched through the cardboard for a forest.

What happens to girls who aren't good Catholics or lucky

2007-08-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

“Please don’t ask Mr. Tuohy if you can be in the play. He’s told us to tell all our friends that didn’t get picked not to beg for a part,” my friend who’d gotten picked for a part advised me sympathetically.

I knew my life would be different if I wasn’t in that play, the annual event where the boys’ school and girls’ school got together and high school romances began leading to marriage and babies. And this year the play, the musical – and I loved to sing! – was being performed at a major theater downtown, one of the grand old ladies dating before vaudeville, just before it closed because movie theaters, like the rest of us, were moving to the suburbs.

Don’t complain if all fall your friends are too busy for you, not because of homework or babysitting but because of rehearsals and all the flirting and horseplay they’re a part of and you’re not. I didn’t. I tried out the role of maturity – the gracious loser, head held high with a sincere smile for all the winners.

An ill wind that blows no good – every cloud has a silver lining, platitudes were cold comfort. I was invited to opening night on my first date by a boy uninvolved in the play, because he was too shy. A nice “dip” as we called nerds those days. He came to the door to pick me up. My mother liked him because he was the doctor’s son. We walked to his family’s station wagon. His brother was driving. Danny opened the back door for me and went around to sit in the front passenger seat. In the car, I turned from the door as it slammed shut to look at him in the front seat. The family dog, a St Bernard sitting next to me leaned forward to lick my face

Running from guilt

2007-08-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

I’m sure it happened, but how could it?

It must have been the Halloween after that rare summer when the Schoenfelds’ whom I never even saw, let all the neighbor kids come to their pool to swim.

How else would I have known that at the end of the long descending driveway into the edge of the ravine lay a swimming pool.

But why, how was I there alone and why wasn’t I scared?

It was dark and I was notoriously scared of the dark, and kidnappers and boogeymen.

Had I been ditched and was I feeling my way in the dark to find my sister and her friends? Did I think I’d find them at the bottom of the Schoenfeld’s driveway, with no lights to illuminate anything?

I know it must have happened because I’ll never forget the fearful horror of realizing my foot had punctured the pool cover and I sank, one-legged up to my knee in cold water before jerking my leg out and back to the concrete where my other foot waited and then took off running, racing, pounding my way uphill in the dark, up that long dark driveway, terrified of getting caught breaking the Schoenfeld’s pool, running through the pitch black dark uphill, praying with total desperation that I wouldn’t get caught, I wouldn’t get found out.

No one must ever know it was me. I ran into the street – was it deserted too, while the neighborhood horde had moved on to trick-or-treat at the street’s end?

I don’t remember crying, was I too scared to cry? I ran up the hill to the end of our block. Maybe there were some parents with little kids trick-or treating there but all I remember was an unpeopled run in the dark.

I ran up the block, my heart pounding. I ran inside my house, where was my candy? I don’t remember candy. I don’t remember costumes. I don’t remember anything except my terrible guilt and knowing I could never tell anyone.

The front porch

2007-08-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

When first we moved into the house, the front porch, or verandah as my dad called it, was the place where my parents lived their truest lives, unfettered for once by tasks and talk.

At the age of three, in the midst of big boys and men (was it only my brothers and dad?) moving in furniture and heavy boxes, I climbed on my tricycle and rode it down the seven cement steps, stopping just short of the 12-foot drop down the rockery from the rose garden to the street.

I think I remember mom shrieking and a frantic trip to the hospital a mile away. The next thing I remember was gentle Mrs. Seering, the next-door neighbor, gently saying, “It won’t hurt,” and pulling a huge, forehead-size scab off my face. I carry a bump in the middle of my forehead for the rest of my life.

Then as a five year old, coloring the cement tops of the brick walls with crayons, accompanied by my kindergarten friend, Mary McElmeel. Mary was a doctor’s daughter and lived in one of the roomy mansions on Capitol Hill. “Won’t you get in trouble for doing this?” Mary asked nervously.

Why would I even consider getting in trouble for drawing beautiful deep colors that took ten years to fade from our front porch?

I wasn’t fighting with my sister, nor was I pestering my mother. I was happily making art – my parents had bigger fish to fry than a big old porch.

Over the years, the porch or verandah became my parents’ territory, at different times and in different ways.

In the summer afternoons and evenings, before and after dinner, Mom would sit on the front porch, sometimes doing handiwork, sometimes reading the afternoon paper, but most often watching and listening to the kids on the street. She heard the games and hollering, the whining and bullying, the words between parent and child as the child left the family home, the passion with which we kids played our games and fought our battles. She reveled in knowing they didn’t realize she was overhearing their lives.

My dad spent little time during the day on the verandah, but often in the evenings he would call to us as we ricocheted throughout the house, answering phone calls, watching TV, raiding the refrigerator, throwing shoes and jackets off: “Come and look at the sky, the moon, the stars, the lake,” always gazing off in the distance.

The Year of Interruption

2007-05-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Mr. Saari

This is about the year of interruption.

Kathy Peterson, the neighborhood leader, was going to public junior high. Her parents were good Catholics but they used kindness and reason to speak of their faith, not sanctimony and rules.

So maybe it was because what Kathy did, Shelagh did, and what Shelagh did, I did.

Or maybe it was because my dad had lost his job, was “let go.” Nobody said it was because of drinking, though I think that probably was the case. I remember one dark Sunday afternoon as I crept down the stairs, hearing long-winded Mr. O’Farrell saying to my Uncle Winkie when my Dad had left the room for a minute, “My God, what kind of man calls another man’s wife to tell him to stop drinking, boss or no boss!”

So Shelagh was going to Meany Junior high, and I was going by myself to the elementary school.

But I was the youngest in my family, and in the youngest class in a school that was gradually becoming a high school by closing the elementary class each year that my grade completed it. For the first time in my life I was going to be in the oldest class, the highest class in school.

I assumed that authority came with position, not an attitude. I was always the youngest, so I never had any authority. Now, in public school, as a sixth-grader, I would be accorded a dignity and authority I’d never known. Just by going to a different school.

On my block of 60 kids there was only one other kid who went to the public school -- Lynette Haines. Lynette’s dad was a trucker and sat at the dining table in his undershirt. He scared me. Lynette’s mom said things like “your hair goes down to your butt.” That was also scary. Lynette’s sister Geraldine -- Gerry -- had a boyfriend that she entertained in her bedroom.

But Lynette was a neighbor, there was nothing to be afraid of. I left my home, at 11 years old the only one in the house at 8 o’clock in the morning, and walked half a block to Lynette’s house.

Then we walked to school.

There were two classes for each grade, and I was glad I wasn’t assigned to strict, tough, athletic Mr. Lagreid’s class. I had the new teacher, Mr. Saari.

I’m glad we didn’t have the words “geek” and “nerd’ then. Mr. Saari was young (though as an adult, he was automatically old to me). He was tall and pale, with a small gap between his teeth, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. He was Finnish, and he had a slight accent.

The black boys dominated the classroom with their sheer energy. There was Freddy, who was handsome, Eugene, who was dark, the clown. Sylvester who was big and heavy and slow and shy. There was Ray who was small and heavy and sophisticated, cool at eleven years old.

Ray scared me deeply, even though I think I knew even then it was bravado in his mixed-up boyish mind, when he leaned over my shoulder and said quietly to me, “We’re going to rape you, Margaret.”

In that school, in that class, I was known as Margaret, my full formal name. Nobody knew that I was really Margie, that I hadn’t been called Margaret since the day I was baptized. I can’t remember the Sisters ever calling me by name except when I’d been ordered to leave the classroom in first grade, and when report cards were given out, and that was a formal ceremony.

I hated Margaret. I hated her shyness, her love for authority, her ugliness, her unlikeability, her desire to be a princess, instead of a tough girl, her prissiness, her inability to pull off a joke.

When I said at the Tobin’s lunch table, “…like I need to get in bad with some more nuns,” no one laughed. Later Rissa Tobin asked me why I’d said “…like I need to get in bed with someone” right in front of her mother. But I didn’t say that! That was what they heard, and now Mrs. Tobin thought I was immoral and smart-alecky. Mrs. Tobin, who hefted her breasts one at a time to see which one had more milk to nurse her latest baby.

But at Stevens Elementary I was Margaret, beginning to realize I was cute and smart, but still Margaret.

And Mr. Saari was Wilho.

When the black boys learned his name was Wilho, they mocked him with that. “Wil-HO!” they’d yell gleefully as they came into the classroom, and “Sor-ry! Mr. SOR-RY!” Not knowing what else to do, Mr. Saari smiled.

Mr. Saari patiently smiled and plowed through classes that year. Geography, English, history, arithmetic, social studies, but when it came to music, Mr. Saari beamed.

He loved the Negro spirituals and that classroom would jump with joy and unrestrained, impersonal humanity when we sang. “It’s me O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer” and “Swing low, sweet chariot.”

Everybody liked Mr. Saari then. Everybody liked everybody else. Everybody liked me, I thought and sang happily away, carefree for the only time that winter.

At the end of the school year, as we “graduated” to junior high, Mr. Saari’s wife came to school. If I didn’t fit in to that urban, hip, tough culture, if Mr. Saari didn’t fit in, his wife was the most alien individual you could imagine in an inner-city, struggling school in 1961.

She was dainty, small and beautiful, frail, blond, with huge blue eyes conveying simple goodness, innocence and trust. She was a good girl who’d been nurtured into goodness, into trust, into believing that she had need of no other ambition than to support her husband and be there for him when he came home. She was fine with that, she was content with that. They were young and starting life together and it was scary and rough, this school, but it didn’t threaten her the way it did me.

Lenten duty

2007-05-01T15:46:00.000-07:00

We ran through the dark, Mrs. Peterson and I, so that we wouldn’t be late for 6:30 Mass.

Mrs. Peterson slipped out of her child-filled house for the peace of the dark and the voice of silence and private thoughts, broken by bells and Latin murmurings.

I crawled from my warm bed into the sharp bite of cold air and duty. This was my Lenten sacrifice, to give up that last hour of sleep to run five blocks with Mrs. Peterson to the church and sit in the cold and wait for the Introit, the Kyrie, the Confiteor, the Gloria, the reading, the sermon (it was almost always less than two minutes) the Creed, the offertory, the lavabo, the consecration, communion and dismissal. Tick tick tick, now it’s over and I can run back home, and turn around a half hour later run to school.

If I do this, I will resemble a good Catholic, and hope of hopes, maybe I will be like Mrs. Peterson -- tall and beautiful, calm, not like my frantic mother, but loved by a dominant man who’d been a World War II fighter pilot, and the mother of my sister’s best friend. Maybe I could belong to a beautiful and secure group, maybe I wouldn’t be ditched.

“Did you have to bring her too?” Pat, the younger sister, sneered, as I tagged behind my sister, tall and painfully skinny in the tight skirt she had to have.

My sister looked at me with the hatred she knew she wasn’t supposed to feel, yet her friendship with these older girls was never secure she was never assured that her friendship was solid.

“You’re so im-ma-ture,” she dragged out the epithet as she spoke to me, then turned to her friends, “My mom made me.”

They looked at her, and then suddenly Pat yelled, “Ditch!” and the three older girls, including my sister, ran for the nearest back yard and the alley, ran and ran to get away from me, to lose me.

I ran until I was out of breath, and then roamed the alley looking into every back yard to find my sister and her friends.

Magnificat

2007-05-01T14:24:00.001-07:00

My soul doth magnify the Lord

And my spirit rejoices in God my savior

For he has regarded the humility

Of his handmaid

For behold

From henceforth

All generations shall call me blessed.

Crowns for Mary

2007-05-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

Margie Doyle never got to do it, Margie LaCugna I’m pretty sure got to do it at St. Edward’s Seminary, for the whole frigging diocese, which the Doyles never went to because it was so far out in the country.

I do remember my mom , who was not artistic, making the most beautiful dainty little crowns out of rockery flowers and wrapping it in wax paper to preserve it on the trip to school until about third grade, when just ripping off a lilac bough and twisting it in a circle was good enough.

Now, 50 years later (gulp) the Christian school puts a potted flower on everyone’s doorstep on May 1. I’m sending cards out to my friends today. Hopefully you’ll all get yours before it’s June.

Sister Bede Comments on May Day

2007-05-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

I remember my devout little bedroom altars with a chalk statue of the Blessed Mother draped with my First Holy Communion rosary & surrounded with vases of lilacs & how jealous I was of Janie H, that bitch, because she was the littlest she always got to be the one who crowned Mary in the garden at HNA. That little bitch. Didn't Margie do it one year?

'Tis the month of our Mother
The blessed and beautiful days,
When our lips and our spirits,
are glowing with love and with praise.

All Hail! to dear Mary,
the guardian of our way;
To the fairest of Queens,
Be the fairest of seasons, sweet May.

Oh! what peace to her children,
mid sorrows and trials to know,
that the love of their Mother,
Hath ever a solace for woe.

All Hail! to dear Mary,
the guardian of our way;
To the fairest of Queens,
Be the fairest of seasons, sweet May.

Limbo officially gone! Russia and U.S. share missiles, peacefully coexist!

2007-04-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

I love studying history, but a glance backward to recent history can be a little embarassing. For example, a few years back, my son gave me a DVD of the movie "Easy Rider." It was so facile and embarassing! And to remember how moved I'd been by it when it first came out, how righteous...
My only material inheritance from my dad, who died when I was 21, was his 30-year collection of Time magazines, from 1939 to 1969. I'm proud that in my moves since then, I've packed this collection along with me, never chucking the less-than-mint magazines.
So, last month, as my choir rehearsed the moving, meditative Polish anthem "Totus Tuus," written in celebration of Pope John Paul II's homeland trip in 1982, I retrieved that year's "Man of the Year" issue featuring Lech Walesa. I read of the faith of the Polish people in their religion, and their icons, among them the Virgin Mary and the Pope himself. This deeply-held belief nourished the labor movement Solidarity that was criucial in overthrowing the Communist regime in Poland.
Last week I browsed through the Time magazines again, concentrating on the 50s, hoping to find information about the Suez War -- 1956?-- and instead was struck by the number of covers dedicated to the prospect of nucleur confrontation with Russia. Month after month, the Time covers forebode the threat of missile attack on the U.S.
Now it hardly seems real, as I read: "Pentagon invites Kremlin to Link Missile Systems: The U.S. is offering Russia a new package of incentives to drop its opposition to U.S. missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic."
What a difference 50 years make!

In the passion and horror of the moment, the long view is often hard to see.
How fervently we prayed for the conversion of atheistic Russia to a free and Christian, if not Catholic, country.

I also learned through the NY Times today that Pope Benedict has wiped limbo off the map of Catholic doctrine:

The netherworld of limbo, long speculated in Roman Catholic teaching as the destination of babies who die unbaptized, has been replaced with the “prayerful hope” that they reach heaven. Pope Benedict XVI signed a theological report, years in the making, that effectively demoted limbo, a place neither in heaven nor in hell, where unbaptized babies would not be in communion with God but would nonetheless enjoy eternal happiness. Many in the church felt the idea, never formally a part of church doctrine, was outdated and caused undue worry for parents.
Well it may never have been formal church doctrine, but our teachers made sure we knew about limbo, as they taught the importance of being formally baptized. There is a sense of betrayal or abuse, that as impressionable children, and even gullible, or faith-centered adults, we were taught to fear concepts like Communism, missile attacks, and limbo.

Confession - Sin and Suffering

2006-04-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

CONFESSION

Sin started before birth – though I was called a brat, and even more humiliating, a “little” brat at home, it wasn’t until 1^st grade at St Joe’s that I learned of original sin. Original sin was actually comforting to me: I couldn’t be held responsible for the human condition; that was Adam and Eve’s fault.

Once we were enlisted in our grubby sinful original state, then the very next year, in second grade, when we obtained the Age of Reason and could then be held responsible for our sins, we were the stars of the greatest childhood Catholic production – First Communion.

But before the glory of First Communion was the humility of First Confession, “Penance.”

Being seven years old, we had now attained the “Age of Reason,” which meant no more getting away with impulse. Now you could think for yourself and control yourself, and exercise Self Control and Offer It Up, because you were no longer a baby or a little child whose parents had to control you. From now one, you would not automatically go to Heaven because with the Age of Reason, you had to earn your place in Heaven.

We had learned about the Creation of the World and the Garden of Eden, a paradise for the first humans. But the snake, the devil, the tempter to self-indulgence offered Adam and Eve an apple they couldn’t refuse. An apple – even then we knew the lowly apple symbolized something more than a piece of fruit.

The apple symbolized the one thing God had withheld from them – the true knowledge of good and evil. But he gave them Free Will, the ability to choose: right or wrong, freedom or subservience, health or pain. Free Will means we choose our life, no such thing as destiny.

But Adam and Eve blew it for everybody. Satan, that snake, got to them in the Garden of Paradise, and talked them into believing in their own glamour, their own importance, their own ambitions, were more important than obeying God. They disobeyed God, who had given them Free Will to choose right or wrong, and now we were all born, with life, yes, but also with Original Sin.

Original Sin was sort of like the inevitability of new clothes getting worn: we were human, we were born with this stain on our souls, we couldn’t be perfect, we were going to fail, so admit it and start again, admit it and start again, admit it and start again.

St. Michael’s feast day was September 29, so early in the school year we heard the story of Lucifer, the head angel, who wasn’t satisfied, who wanted to be God, and so he and Michael fought and Michael slew the dragon (Lucifer) and Lucifer went straight to Hell and lost his pretty lacy name, Lucifer, and was forever after called Satan, the Prince of Darkness. The Devil was worse than the worst bogeyman, for if we gave in to his temptations, he made us hated in God’s sight, and we wanted to be on God’s side. Well, maybe not hated, but if we offended God, we had to make it up to Him.

God had respected Satan enough to give him Free Will, but was Satan grateful? No, bad old Satan used that will to try to be better than God. And now he is pure evil, and wants to snatch our souls away from God. But we have to resist.

Because we have Free Will.

And no one is greater than God especially not you.

Free Will meant that we were responsible for what people thought of us, good or bad. I could choose to be a good girl and live by my conscience, formed by daily reprimands; or I could go my merry way and then burn in hell for all eternity, much longer than even a long lifetime.

So to start off, you had to do what you were told. And suffer for the one true faith, like the saints did.

That was Free Will.

The stories of the saints were our holy fairy tales, and from them we learned the drama of blood and violence. Many of the saints were tortured and died horribly, stoned to death, crucified upside down, torn apart by lions. This was darkly exciting.

The novenas in March to St Francis Xavier, the missionary Jesuit to the Philippines, was the big priest celebration of the year, not Mass or even preaching from the pulpit could compete with the thrice-daily gathering to pray and sing. We didn’t have to do it, but everybody did.

But what really appealed to me in the saints? The drama of their lives, their heroism in defying authority? the cruel and imaginative torture the natives inflicted on missionary saints? The saints’ devotion to the poor and downtrodden? That St. Francis loved the animals and the simple life; that St. Therese of Lisieux died young, advocating “The Little Way,” living reverentially every day, invoking God in the least little thing she did?

In reading of the saints, I gravitated towards the women who had married and had children. I wanted to be a holy celebrity, but I also wanted to be normal, to have a husband and a family. Elizabeth Seton, who came to the United States with five children, was widowed, and founded the Sisters of Mercy, was a godsend to me. I could be married and still be a saint!

Saint Elisabeth of Hungary trumped even Elizabeth Seton, for she was a queen, as well as a wife and mother and saint. And of course, I visualized the women saints as beautiful, who could dream of ugly celebrities? The dark niches of St. Joe’s church were dimly illuminated by rich stained-glass windows of fair women with long soft hair and sweet faces, dressed in beautiful robes and piously taking their place in history and eternity.

Missionaries gave up all the pleasures and freedoms of America to go to poor and alien countries where they helped end disease and poverty and by the way, convert the ignorant natives, and all the thanks they got in this life was oppression and persecution and torture by the officials in power. Their reward was a one-way ticket to paradise.

In the face of their horrible suffering, we were chastised to offer up whatever grievance we had, whatever discomfort we may be suffering for the poor souls in purgatory, those everyday people like you and me who’d died with some smattering of, not evil, but let’s just say imperfection, on their souls and had to be cleansed by the fires of purgatory until they were pure enough to pass judgment and enter heaven.

Suffering and offering it up for the poor souls in purgatory meant we couldn’t whine or complain because there were others so much worse off, who were patiently enduring the flames and unpleasantness of purgatory. So if I’d just shut up about my own little hangnails and chilblains, I could get them out of purgatory and into heaven sooner.

But all this wasn’t much comfort as I got out of bed to an unheated house and my bare feet hit the ice cold gray-and-white woven-patterned linoleum of the bedroom floor, and I scurried to the even-colder tiled bathroom floor (once six other people had gotten out of it) and I ate the cheap and crummy oatmeal for breakfast and ran in the cold biting wind to school. There my lips stung, chapped from licking them in the cold winter wind. Chilblains burned my feet in their short cotton anklets; my arms itched mercilessly from the stiff wool sweater.

Oh I knew suffering, nothing can be done to make it better: offer it up. And how about the suffering of poor Mr. Donnelly across the street, who’d had a paralyzing stroke in his 20’s and who dragged his crippled leg as he painfully and strenuously walked down the street to the bus stop? How about the suffering of the sad lady up the street who never smiled, who had an equally taciturn husband, who seemed empty of warmth or joy? All offering it up for the poor souls in purgatory.

Even if you went to purgatory, it wasn’t so bad, because eventually you’d enter Heaven. And you had all the time in the world to go through the process, because eventually you’d get to Heaven, and Heaven was eternal, never-ending.

Thinking of eternity made my stomach hurt. It was okay for God to be eternal: always was, always will be, always remains the same, but for me? I knew I always wasn’t. I didn’t start to exist until I was born, but now that I was born, I would live and die but my soul would live forever.

Everything had a beginning and an end except my individual soul, like everyone’s: it would go on forever. At least the poor souls in Purgatory knew that Heaven awaited them. The worst part of Hell was knowing it was forever, no reprieve. So the ideal of dying and going “straight to Heaven” was better than a first class ticket to Disneyland.

Confession was the way to get that ticket and you could do it! It was attainable when summer camp, skiing, and Disneyland were wishes that were answered with the finality of “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” But back then, we believed that God could be on your side whether you were rich or poor.

Every Saturday, you made your confession in the dark booth at the back of the church and received your penance, usually a list of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, and emerged clean as a whistle, ready for you Saturday night bath. If you died in your sleep, you’d wake up in Heaven, before you had the opportunity to commit another sin. Yippee!

But before you could examine your conscience and confess your sins, you had to decipher the Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have false Gods before me.” Well duh, of course there was only God, who’d be dumb enough to worship the sun or an animal? We have the Trinity! Three in One! The Father (He was the one we really thought of as God) the Son, (the nice one that mean people crucified) and the Holy Ghost (kind of ineffable, this bird that once sat on people’s heads, and after all, you don’t want to think too much about ghosts — that’s nightmare stuff)

But oh no! It says right in the catechism that “A Catholic sins against the first commandment by not believing what God has revealed, and by taking part in non-Catholic worship.” Mom! You led me right into the Devil’s trap by taking me to that non-Catholic baptism!

“Oh that doesn’t mean you,” Mom said breezily. “That baptism was family.” I knew Mom wasn’t really a good Catholic, but it says right here that taking part in non-Catholic worship is a sin against the first commandment. The very first one! Mom read the anxious look on my face and said, “You’re also supposed to obey your mother. You were obeying me. I’m too blame. Quit worrying, for heaven’s sake!”

My mother, with her lackadaisical religion had let me off the hook.

Now, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” This one came right up against my hot temper, and my homelife. Neither Mom nor Dad swore in the slightest, but my older brothers slipped in the casual “Damn” and Mom was always telling me to stop saying, “Gol…..” in disappointment, or “Gad!” in exasperation or sarcasm. But I didn’t have to confess that, just stop saying it.

The Third Commandment , to “keep holy the Lord’s day,” was a cinch. Aside from the fact that everyone went to Church, unless you were so sick that you couldn’t get out of bed, and that all stores and businesses —everything! — was closed on Sundays, it was my one chance to dress up and sing, and afterwards, back home, Dad cooked sausages and rolled them up with mustard in crustless bread and wrapped them in tin foil. To sit on the living room floor with sausage rolls and orange juice and read the funny papers, that was one of the week’s highlights, and the only price to pay was going to church.

So far, nothing to confess. The fourth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother” was confusing because it didn’t say what you couldn’t do, only what you should do. The Sisters at school told us to think “Obey” instead of “honor,” so disobedience was the sin at hand. Plus, Mom and Dad were too busy with housework and business and paying attention to my brothers to waste their time telling me what to do. Just be happy and be quiet.

My problem with disobedience was that Shelagh, and my older brothers, all felt it was wrong, if not sinful, to disobey them. And disobeying them led to fights. I knew I was not supposed to fight, but I wanted so much to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed, and everybody was always telling me to shut up or go away and not be such a showoff. It appeared that disobedience and fighting were inevitable.

Which led me right into the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. Of course I’d never kill! But the Sisters told us that fighting, and even angry words and complaints, were kind of like killing. And they knew what could land us in purgatory or even hell. And if it’s hard not to fight or argue, just remember: you have Free Will. You can choose to avoid the Near Occasions of sin. Those were the situations where you knew you’d get into trouble. Like Mom always said when I ran crying to her from my brothers’ teasing: “Oh just stay out of their way!” Mom was too busy to help me avoid the Near Occasions of sin where I’d be tempted to fight my brothers.

Then there was the squirmy one the 6^th, commit adultery, which meant any impure sin, and what’s impure? How do you find the words for that? I was nasty; I was impure; but what is “purity?”

All I could think of was Ivory Snow detergent being 99 &44/100’s percent pure. And not getting fractions until the 4^th grade and percentiles till the 5^th grade, all I knew that caustic laundry detergent held the corner on purity. Anything that had to do with nakedness and the bathroom was impure.

Shelagh’s neighborhood friends, Kathy, Pat and Martha were a year older than she. Kathy and Martha were the only girls in their family, and the eldest. They were motherly, bossy, and cool. Pat had a mean older sister Gerry who bossed Pat around, and her mom was strict and demanding, and devoted to her big husband. Pat’s family was wealthy and Pat urged Shelagh on to ditch me, or when it wasn’t possible, to oppress me with her maturity and innate superiority. After all, she was older than me, wasn’t she?

“Maggie, ask Mom where babies come from,” Shelagh taunted me, with Pat, Kathy and Martha smirking behind her.

“Mom where do babies come from?”

“Oh you’ve been talking to that nasty little Murphy girl again! “ Mom fumbled, “Ask me again in a year!”

So was asking about babies a sin? Was I being nasty?

The seventh commandment was “Thou shalt not steal.” No I’d never steal, though in boring moments I’d contemplate the prospect of being in a “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers” situation; or I’d remember my brother saying, after he’d grabbed the funny papers out from under me, or snagged the last cookie on the plate, “Possession in nine-tenths the law.” The other saying that my brother quoted repeatedly was “I’ll slap you into the middle of next week” but instead of being frightened, I was fascinated. What would that feel like? How could that happen? Where would I be when everyone else caught up with me the next week? Where would that place me in eternity? Whatever, I knew it would be a powerful blow, so I’d best quit whatever it was I was doing.

And then the 8^th commandment: thou shalt not bear false witness (lying).

Everything just happened, there was no anticipation. In second grade, the Brownie troops formed. How did it happen that I was not in a Brownie troop?

Mom called up one of the leaders, the dour, prim-mouthed Mrs. Degnan. At the second meeting, I was kneeling on her living room floor, unintroduced, with the other Brownies.

“How come you’re here?” they demanded.

I squirmed, embarrassed. “I’m just here!” I bravely announced.

Other Brownies’ mothers were having babies. They were strangely glamorous to me, young and sweet with big bumps of fullness and belonging swaying in front of them.

“My mom’s having a baby too,” I declared.

“OOOOOhhh?” the Brownie leader questioned, her eyes big with disbelief and incipient gossip, that my mother, now well past 40, could be having a baby after three rowdy boys and two skinny little girls.

I had to lie, I wanted so badly to believe. It wasn’t a lie; it was just a truth that only I knew.

The questions presented by the 9^th and 10^thcommandments about not coveting, and what was coveting anyway, and if you didn’t know what it was, how could you not do it? The Sisters didn’t understand it much better than we did, but explained that coveting meant wanting what your neighbor had, his goods or his wife. Well wasn’t that part of the American Dream, to want things better than what you had? I complained to Mom about having to clean out the bathtub everytime I wanted to take a bath, “We’ll never ever have a shower!”

I should have known Mom would reply with one of her favorite bromides: “Never is a long, long time.”

And who cared about your neighbor’s wife, or even husband for that matter? The trick was to get a husband or wife at all. That’s what all the stories were about.

Not to want something: that was almost heresy if you stop to think about it! What about ambition, what about getting into heaven, what about being a martyr? What about saving the world from Communism?

Now that we’d reached the Age of Reason, instead of reciting the prayer Dad had taught us as we went to bed, (“Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take”); the rhythm and simplicity of the poem blinding us to the morbid possibility of dying in your sleep and never waking up; we learned to Examine our Conscience.

To Examine our Conscience, the Sisters taught us to lie in bed and think about all the bad things we might have done that day. So we were encouraged to focus on sin and guilt; how we’d offended God. Then we’d recite the nightly Act of Contrition: “Oh my God I’m heartily sorry for having offended thee because of thy just punishment but most of all because they offend thee my God who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.”

Then we could recite the comforting prayer we’d learned in first grade: Angel of God my Guardian Dear/ To whom God’s love entrusts me here/ Ever this night be at my side/ To light, to guard, to rule, to guide.

The trouble with thinking about how bad you were was that the potential for other evil or tragic acts came into your head.

In those quiet, uneventful days, two terrible things entered our consciousness.

The first was kidnapping. Most of our older brothers had the city’s daily newspaper route. It marked a time of the day, just as the milkman, breadman and morning newspaper announced daybreak; the Morning Offering (with its daily intention changed every month) started the school day, lunch was preceded by the Angelus bell, and the evening newspaper along with the Mickey Mouse Club meant that dinner was just around the corner.

One afternoon the newspaper headline screamed:

Girl, 7, Kidnapped in Tacoma.

It was a mystery, but not a holy mystery that we had to believe in, a terrible and evilly fascinating puzzle as to what had happened: a young girl stolen from her bedroom in the middle of the night. The only evidence was a sheer curtain blowing in the air fro the open window. Never found, no traces, footprints, weapons, whispers, notes, nothing. Taken from her own home, her own bed.

For no reason. Vanished.

I became consumed with fear and worry. What if the kidnappers were hiding behind the hydrangea bushes between the Seering’s and the Borthwick’s houses, ready to jump out in the dark and nab me as I ran across the street from Patty’s house, where we’d been playing dolls and singing, to my own home, where the light from the windows promised warmth and safety? The threat of being swept away by a boogeyman, by a bad man, was real. I could smell it. I raced those hundred steps as if my life depended on it, for indeed it did.

I made a run for it, raced up the cement stairs two at a time and flew in through the front door to warmth and light and the smells of dinner cooking.

“Help me get dinner on the table,” Mom said. “Shelagh had to do the dishes two days in a row.” We were supposed to do the dishes after school, but I hated to do them. The house would be cold and the dishes piled in the sink would be soaking in cold grey water. Mom had gotten a job as a secretary at a meat-packing plant. She hated it, but it helped out, and we were gone at school all day, so Mom had to “go to work,” and we had to do regular weekday chores.

But that night, neither Mom nor anyone else appreciated that I was even there, and had not been stolen in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.

And though I may have escaped the kidnapper, most nights I still had the horror of nightmares to live through. I’d wake from a macabre chase to crawl in the dark, threatened at every step, to my parent’s bedroom; sometimes to be taken in, sometimes to be turned away to creep back down the hall with terrible criminals grasping for me from every shadow.

The second specter to haunt my mind as I searched my conscience for personal evil, was the Holy Angels school fire in Chicago, where a hundred children died trying to escape from their burning school. The Holy Angels fire screamed of innocent loss and stricken parents from the newspapers.

That tragedy occasioned fire drills and heightened fire precautions, for no one wanted to die, even if you went straight to heaven, as we were told Sisters and children were sure to do.

So if you’d successfully examined your conscience, you should have a list of sins ready for when the priest heard your confession. For most of us, the one-to-one meeting in the confessional was our first performance, the priest our first audience.

Sometimes on a slow Friday afternoon, the Sisters would shoo us over to church where the priests would hear the kids ‘confessions.

You’d enter huge, dark, silent St. Joe’s, and queue up outside two of the six confessionals that lined the walls at the back of the church. You’d hear the murmurs from behind the darkened wooden doors.

Then it was your turn. You had your list of safe sins, but maybe you had one you were too ashamed to tell: the words weren’t even there. You couldn’t tell it, but if you didn’t tell it, you were in the state of mortal sin. And if you died in the state of mortal sin -- straight to Hell. And if you didn’t die, but you went to Holy Communion the next Sunday, you added another mortal sin; but if you didn’t go to Communion, everyone would notice. So back in that cold wooden booth, you knew you had to tell your terrible sins, not just your safe ones.

But now you were there in the dark, and the unknown priest was focused on you. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was… “ and you were soon ticking off your sins. The priest would give his measly penances, three Hail Mary’s and two Our Fathers, or maybe the other way around. The penance was as boring as your sins. We’d be in and out like a revolving door.

If you went to confession on Saturday afternoons, and especially Saturday evenings, the confession scene grew more serious. Usually a neighborhood mom would be going to confession, and a gang of kids would go with her to get it over with. If it had been a month since your last confession, that was too long. I worried about Dad, because he only went to confession a couple of times a year, and he was a long time in the confessional.

The parish pastor, Father Rinn sat, invisible and threatening, behind the door at the first confessional on the left. Without a word being spoken, you knew that he was for adults, especially men and their really bad sins. What would a really bad sin be? Maybe you’d think of murder and fighting and being a coward, or denying your faith, unlike the saints. It wasn’t exactly a sin to be poor, but it was better to dress nice and hold yourself strong and important. Oh, and to be funny and laugh – if you were a man.

You sensed the women’s sins were more of a desperate nature, but really, how could women sin? Their job in life was to tell you what YOU’d done wrong, how bad you were, not to second-guess themselves.

So you went to the younger, milder priest on the other side of the church. If you missed confessions on Saturday afternoons and evenings, you still had one last chance before Mass on Sunday mornings. But a kid could NEVER go to confession on Sunday morning. That was like telling everyone you had a mortal sin, and following Saturday night, well…. that was for adults. No child was bad enough to commit a mortal sin on Saturday night.

But the Sisters were there to tell you how important, destructive and serious your sins were, as when Sister pulled me aside in 3^rd grade to ask was that my bright little hat she saw in church? How vain of me to call attention to myself in that way: that was wrong, not a mortal sin, but wrong.

They’d educate us in the intricacies of sin; not just breaking the Ten Commandments, but the more subtle forms of wrong-doing. The one that really got me tied up in knots was Culpable Ignorance: if you had a chance to learn something was a sin, but weren’t paying attention, you were still held liable for that sin. I was afraid of not knowing something I was supposed to know, and going to Hell.

After you learned about your sins, you learned about the great heresies, the faulty thinking that threatened the One True Faith. The Sisters taught you about Jansenists, who were too scrupulous in examining their consciences; or Manicheanists, who believed in the gods of light and darkness, of good and evil. But wasn’t that kind of like Jesus, the Prince of Peace, and Satan, the Prince of Darkness? No you silly girl of course it isn’t the same: the heresy is believing that there are two Gods, one of good, one of evil.

But then what about how we believe in the Trinity?

That’s a mystery: we can’t understand how there are three persons in one God; all equal, just different roles. We don’t have to understand, we just have to believe.

What if you don’t believe?

Then you better pray for the gift of belief.

Focus on your sins, not your beauty (vanity) or potential (pride) or education (covetousness): you were only to probe and purify yourself.

And then you were to examine your regret for your sins, in perfect and imperfect contrition. You were supposed to be sorry because you’d offended god, and oh yeah, a little bit because you feared punishment and burning in hell.

The pagans didn’t have this chance and you had to do it for them by sending money to the missionaries to ransom pagan babies, nickel by measly nickel. The colorfully beautiful chart on the second-grade bulletin board measured the progress towards the bounty, until $50 had been collected and a pagan baby became a holy innocent, thanks to you!

You prayed the Communists didn’t rule the world; you prayed that there would be no mushroom cloud destruction of the world, as you scrambled under the clunky wood seats of your desk on runners, two or three desks strung together, ass-backwards, with the bench seat of your desk forming the back of the desk of the person behind you

Priests: what were their sins? They couldn’t sin, just like doctors and bankers and policemen couldn’t make mistakes and your mother always knew what was best for you.

I was a remarkably innocent child as far as sex went, or as Mom called it, “the man-woman thing” but I sensed one priest to stay away from. Maybe it was just prejudice, he was a big raw-boned man, but whereas I was terrified of Father Rinn and Father Reager, and thought Father Eckstein was just OK, I avoided Father X.

Priests were men to be flattered and entertained for their approval, but you knew that they had given up women and children and a family life. Giving up these normal things for a higher aspiration (were they coveting something?) made priests superior and pure to focus on cosmic, eternal, spiritual things. You had to study for years to be a priest.

The social hall was a huge room with a kitchen at one end, and a stage in the middle. There the women socialized, the kids ran wild, and the dads lingered by the doorways, or outdoors, waiting to take their families home.

Mom was an assistant leader of Shelagh’s Brownie Scout troop. The Girl Scouts were putting on a show about trees after Mass one Sunday. Shelagh had willow branches woven through the loop on her beanie, she was a willow tree. Jackie Stafford was the chestnut tree and recited “Under the village chestnut tree the mighty smith stands, the smith a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands.”

On Girl Scout Sunday, all the troops, from the Brownies to the green-uniformed Girl Scouts to the older, blue-clad Sea Scouts, filed into Church, their scout banner and the US flag paraded before them, and sat in the first rows in the center of the church.

Father Rinn, the big, grim-faced Pastor of the Parish thundered from the pulpit. The younger girls were restless, you could see them squirm, their shoulders shaking. The Moms in the side and back pews fidgeted nervously. Suddenly a bubble of giggles erupted from the second pew of Scouts. Hands went up to mouths, and red-faced Jackie Stafford looked like she was about to explode, or Heaven forbid, wet her pants!

“AND YOU STOP THAT, YOU IN THE SECOND ROW!” Father Rinn roared, his face huge and violent with indignity. He shook his finger at the little Brownie in front of the whole church. “I MEAN YOU, RIGHT THERE!”

This was mortifying; torture, hell, couldn’t be worse. The giggles turned to silent tears of embarrassment and shame.

“Who was he yelling at?” I whispered to Shelagh on the dark cement stairs leading from the church to the social hall. She told me, but to my surprise, there was no pillory to be whipped at, no hole for Jackie Stafford to drop through. Her disgrace had been complete and apocalyptic in church, and the women who ruled the social hall swept in behind the Girl Scouts as they disguised all the disappointments and embarrassments in their lives.

“You girls go play now, get ready for the show!” they told us with smiles and eyes that were softer and kinder than usual, pretending that nothing had happened, that the priest wasn’t anger-ruled and mean to a little girl.

We looked to the future with fear, of a Last Judgment, of nuclear holocaust, and of the periodic Days that the World Comes to an End.

From nowhere a rumor would spread that on a date certain, usually no more than a week away, the world would come to an end. The dread, the praying, the trying to be so good personally that the world wouldn’t end.

You’d be going along like normal and then suddenly remember that the world was due to end in four days, or two, or tomorrow. There was nothing you could do about it but pray desperately. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease God!

The apprehension! And if on a rare occasion, by a fluke of our ordinary lifestyle, we’d confide in our parents, they’d dismiss it scoffingly.

“But Mom, everybody says so.”

“Oh everybody always says so, and they have for years. The world’s not coming to an end, and if it was, what can you do about it?”

Mom was so matter-of-fact in the face of the threat of the world coming to an end. She was no help at all. This was REAL.

And what made it almost worse was that the next day, the world continued on as it always had, and you didn’t even think about the world coming to an end until the day after, and hey, wasn’t the world supposed to come to an end yesterday? Well, it didn’t and Mom was right. So I slapped Shelagh right back when she casually slapped me.

Then there were the occasions when spontaneously, it appeared that the world WAS coming to an end, as at Ann Conroy’s when summer sheet lightning flashed across the sky and in our pre-adolescent hysteria we were certain that chariots and apocalypse were coming right behind. We clambered onto the living room sofa, six little girls, and prayed for mercy, for a reprieve so we could go back to our playing.

Things went back to normal until a year or so later when again, quietly but with a growing urgency, it was announced: the world is coming to an end next Thursday.

We learned of the miracles at Lourdes and Fatima – in this century! When the Blessed Mother had appeared to children, to dumb little Bernadette Soubourous, but a miraculous curing spring of holy water appeared at the spot where the little French girl had seen her. At Fatima, in Portugal, the Blessed Mother had appeared to three children, and one of them was still alive! We learned that the Virgin Mary had written a letter to the Pope, through the children at Fatima, with “promises” —future predictions— to be revealed. When Pope Pius XII read it, he cried. The letter would be opened, in 1980 and it probably said the world was coming to an end. There would be chaos, fires, bombing, destruction, separation from loved ones, death alone and then judgment. Would you be happy ever after, ever after having no end, or would you be tormented by Satan and his pitchforks and burning and unending pain?

It all depended on if you used your Free Will to chose to be good, and confessed your sins to the priest if you chose to be bad.

The Sacrament of Baptism

2006-01-26T12:07:00.000-08:00

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.

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!

Work in Progress "The Wild and Holy Days"

2006-01-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

Remember the 50's?
Sitting in St Joe’s I hear seagulls cry
Over the priests murmured consultation with the decorator A House of Prayer needs quiet
I remember when they redecorated the church columns, painting the cement with vines and branches
The dark recesses lit by the stained glass windows of the saints
The wrought iron altar rail
The gory crucifix of Jesus is gone
The cold cement floor and the grates where women’s high heels would get stuck
The swish-swish of their nylons as they sashayed back from communion

Kneeling, standing, sitting, fasting
Benediction and the songs
The bingo hall, the stage, the smorgasbord, the brownies and girl scouts
The processions
Bless throats with candles, foreheads with ashes, palms given out on Palm Sunday

copyright Margaret Doyle 2006

Memories

2005-10-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

I feel like a kid who has to stay in school as the last of the beautiful Indian summer passes by outdoors.
The grey chill is in the air, knowing that the start of a long slog is ahead.
I'm going to the 125th anniversary of the establishment of my school. My daughter's going with me. It was a place of recognition for me, a prison for her. Now we both have pride that we went.

New Sisters may be logging on soon

2005-04-18T15:32:00.000-07:00

Oh I'm so excited. Three new sisters have been invited to join us. I do hope they call themselves, Sister PeaceInYourPants, Sister Kuan Yin, and Sister of the Holy KoolAid -- do you recognize yourselves Sisters.
What think you Sister Most Holy Bede?
Sister Maggie

First Confession

2005-01-20T13:37:00.000-08:00

Oh dear Sisters, is this a mortal sin? I confess to trying to log in using Sister Bede's password and it wouldn't let me! How does it know? Is Blog really God? oh dear, is that another sin, being blasphemous? Do I get extra credit for spelling it correctly? Is Sister Bede culpable for divulging her password to me and thereby creating a near occasion of sin? I was only trying to see if I could do it, do my good intentions count for anything?
Sister Maggie
PS What's my penance?

Another Day!

2005-01-20T10:48:00.000-08:00

Oh Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, .... today's intention -- that we get a rhythm to our postings! remember "Natural ryhthm is the only sanctioned (Made Holy!) method of birth control Catholics could practice?
Sister Maggie

Sister Maggie's Red Sweater

2005-01-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

Wearing my red $185 Irish sweater today, not an Aran fisherman sweater, as Sister Bede's mother knit for her entire family (that means 9 sweaters in different sizes!)No, my sweater is deep red, my favorite color, with a Irish cottage knit into the design, it's so pretty and I never wear it because it's so warm, but it is FREEZING here on Orcas Island, and I'm coming to Seattle tomorrow for a retreat with the other Sisters of the Holy Blog, and I hope it doesn't get any colder -- after all temperance is a virtue!Sister Maggie

Sister Bede's Frustration with Flogging -- I mean Blogging!

2005-01-20T10:45:00.000-08:00

Dear, dear, Sister Maggie. I'm having such a difficult time with this. What's the difference between your Holy Mystery comment & your Irish Sweater comment? I'm so confused but at least I'm finally in! I wonder how old you were at your 1st baptism? I, of course, went to many baptisms being the 2nd of nine &, of course, never stepped foot in a church of a pre Vatican Council unacceptable denomination since all my family is (& ever was) Catholic. How mysterious you must have found it & life. I always felt that being Catholic was like voodoo or some such. Kinda like step-on-a-crack-and-break-your-mothers-back. As long as you followed the rules, confessed your sins, said a Haily Mary & an act of contrition, you'd go to heaven. Not to mention avoid impure thoughts, something I've been a total failure at. But, what of Irish Sweaters? Of course, I grew up wearing them. Mom ordered her yarn from Ireland because they didn't strip out all the lanolin that was natural like American yard sellers did & so the sweaters were water resistant - you know, in case we fell into the sea or something. Mom would ask us to hold the skeins of yarn or roll them into balls & I remember having soft hands because of it - the lanolin again.Well, back to work! Bless you, Sr. Bede

The Holy Mystery of it All

2005-01-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

I think the first Baptism I ever went to was an ((Episcopal)) Baptism that my mom said to keep quiet about and I thought Why? because it was in dark, dank old St Mark's Cathedral ((Episcopal)) but it was because my aunt and uncle weren't Catholic! and how could they not be Catholic if they were my aunt and uncle, and why was it suddenly shameful.
The first mystery

Oh Fraptious Joy!

2005-01-12T15:06:00.000-08:00

Sister Maggie!

How exciting dear. This may be the most important task you have ever commenced! Already memories & emotions are flooding back! Unfortunately, I'm at work so I can't give it my best. However! I promise to be a frequent contributor to our Holy Sisters Blog. Thank you so much for taking this first most important step.

Yours in Christ,

Sister Mary Bede of the Most Holy Rosary

2005-01-12T14:36:00.000-08:00

Sisters of the Holy Blog

Capitol Hill Click - The Beginning

2005-01-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

Hi m'friends
This is the beginning of a collaborative effort to retell the glories, or the drearies, of yesteryear. Who knows where it will lead?
Do you have memories of parochial school during the 50's? Do you remember those days as "benign neglect" where we were free to roam during the day, once we'd done our "chores" which varied from doing the dishes to minding the baby?
Do you remember being"poor" like everybody else and being hungry but not starving?
Do you remember worrying about The Bomb and mortal sin? When you really could be devastated by someone who was "holier than thou?" Holy being the operative word, not wealthier or mightier or prettier?
Blog along with me, and let's see how funny this can get
Sister Maggie