Category memoir

There is no present like this time

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In a world as fast paced as this, we still only have the moments that every man and woman and every creature on the planet have in experience. Whether your time on earth was a short thirty years in pre-historic time or those same thirty years in the middle of the Dark Ages, still those moments of your life come and go. All those presents are past. And when we live in constant expectation, hope and anxiety about the future, we are only partially dwelling in this present. Similarly, our minds and selves are invested and placed in the past—for good or ill—we are just residing in the present but not open to it. With so many things to occupy the mind in twenty-first century, we are blessed to have any moment where we can be present to ourselves. Other forces command our attention and some of us are easily led. We are constantly entertained but that must distract us from the original nature of ourselves on this planet. This is not to showcase the singular quality of heroes and geniuses; it is simply to note that our places in time and place and family and fortune and tribe give us perspectives that can contribute to a dialogue about what it means to live at this particular moment. It is elusive because it is background of our lives, unless we stop, take a breath and make measure.

 

We may never know this particular moment for several reasons. We delude ourselves into thinking that this particular moment is just like its sister moment before and after. This one moment will predictably lead to the next. But, in fact, this may be a singular moment; one where everything changes. Where both the past and future are re-cast and re-calibrated. But this singularity is dependent on our showing up, which few of us really do. We may be able to divide the human race into large categories by where their orientation rests—to the past, to the future, to the present.

 

So, each moment is a gift but like many gifts, we don’t acknowledge the gift or the giver. In fact, we may pass along the present because we are not ready to receive it. Maybe, to be present, one needs to meditate deeply, to be centered, to wrap oneself against the onslaught of the noise around us and most importantly, the din within.

 

I do also think that being in the presence of others in conversation or prayer can help us embrace the moment. We know when this happens because these moments are memorable. We slow down time and focus here and now. Our need to connect overrides the noise and chaos, the worry about yesterday and the troubles of tomorrow.

 

There was today

This evening

This sunset

This moment before twilight

Just when the osprey returned to the nest to feed her chicks.

That moment.

That present.

That gift.

Lessons my father would have taught me had he lived

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I thought about writing this essay as I was trying to figure out some mechanical problem. At home, I happily tackle nearly every problem—plumbing, electrical, digital–despite not ever knowing what I am doing. This attitude distinguishes this part of my life from most of my other experiences where I don’t try my hand unless I am nearly an expert. I think I picked this up from academic training where you learn to deny your interest in anything but your own area. Friends ask my opinion about all sorts of things and I can always defer, “I am sorry to say that is really outside my area.” This doesn’t work when we are trying to figure where to go for dinner but it works in lots of other areas, especially with other academics.

 

In hacking the repair of a broken ceiling fan, I was thinking about all the wisdom and know-how that my father may have passed on if he lived past the age of 45. When he died, I was 14 years of age and he was right in the middle of teaching me to be a caring respectful and contributing adult. For me, his oldest daughter, he held high expectations for my character. He could have cared less about other things I could have achieved. I wonder if I would have held the same ideals in place for my own children.

Lesson #1 Fix things
So, my willingness to tackle these projects can be traced, I think, to playing around in our cellar where my father’s tools were randomly gathered. He never had any nicely arrayed selection of screwdrivers, saws and hammers. In fact, I don’t think we ever asked permission to use his tools, or take odd pieces of pipe and plywood. We were never asked to put things back where we found them as well and I am imagining that my father must have run over plenty of these tools when he was mowing the lawn. But certainly as I think about it, had he lived and had I asked, I am quite certain he would have taught me how to fix a washing machine agitator. He already taught me how to build a motor and to understand the armature and the magnetism of the electric current through the metal bars.
He has also taught us how to mount an old lawn mower motor on a chassis so we could make a go-cart. I remember playing with the spark plug. This was all great fun. I don’t remember my mother ever warning my father that we could hurt (Our first go-cart didn’t have brakes.) This all makes me think that I would have been miserable under this current regime of parenting.
We also build a miniature golf course, digging up holes in the lawn and adding sand traps and water features. We used saws and hammers and nail and string and whatever we could find. We would regularly send divots sailing through the air, borrowing my father’s clubs and ripping up the lawn, Once again; he seemed not to mind at all—the lawn or the golf clubs. It was as if we could do anything we wanted as long as we were busy and learning things and not just hanging around. He was at the heart of him, a hacker. Someone who would apply a temporary fix and be happy with it. So from him in observation and in instruction, I learned to work with my hands and to fix things that I could. Part of this, I am certain, were the requirements of being working class. Calling in a repairman to fix the toilet is out of the question. It compromises your manhood and working class resilience.

Lesson #2 Being a man

My father was a veteran of World War II. He was a lace weaver early in this working life. I recently learned from the Census data that his birth year was estimated to be 1919. We thought it was 1917 or 1918 and his birthdate the 17th or 18th of August. It seems odd to me that much of this is unconfirmed. As a man who married late (30 years or so) maybe because of the war, maybe because he didn’t want to settle down, he was a father quickly About eleven months after they married I was born, a baby girl, when maybe a boy would have been more welcome, although I never felt like that. I think in his expectations for his children, my father couldn’t tell his sons from his daughters. We could all play baseball and drive the go-cart. He could all be good in school. We could all be crazy and silly.

My father taught me how to be a man. I considered that he was out in the world, doing things and fixing things and helping people and making money and I wanted that. I had no interest in cooking and sewing and being in the house when all the action was outside. He was to me what people in the fifties would call a “stand-up” guy, the sort of man who did the right thing, who honored his obligations and kept his word. I wanted that, too. I didn’t want to be liked in school but I did want to do the right thing. From an immigrant family with a tradition of working the fields, he distrusted money made in other ways. He urged me to save my money to buy a house as quickly as I could and to avoid the rigged rich man’s game—the stock market. He was constantly busy. I never recall him sitting with a book, except when we were on his lap and he was reading a story. As a man, he was different from any of the men on our block. He obviously loved children, loved their play, and admired their imagination. That went for all kids. While it may have been a manly thing to assign all of this to older siblings or to the women, my father dove right it. What kind of man did that? When I think about his tools, his golf clubs, his ceremonial sword from the Philippines, a cellar full of the body of washing machines, tubes of mercury and vials of oils and grease—all were available to us. In retrospect, I think, my gosh what a generous adult. What an embrace of our creativity and curiosity.  What sort of dangers did he leave for us to discover? Did we need more protection?

 

Lesson #3 Being a stand-up guy

And, he was the rare individual who could find a lonely person in a crowd and seek them out for company. Even though, he could be the life of the party and the center of attention—which he never sought. In this part of this personality, he was everything I wanted to be. A few months before he died, we went to the 9th grade father-daughter dance and he made a point of dancing with all the girls whose fathers were sitting things out. I asked him about this and he told me—in a moment that I still see in my mind’s eye, that like him, I could spot loneliness and sadness and when I did (and because I could) I was obligated to do something to ease that pain. I don’t know how his friends regarded him but I know he was a good man, always willing to lend a hand. I see much of him in my brother and his generosity and in this kindness to his children and to people in general. I remember as well how many times aunts and uncles would tell how much I would miss him and how much he loved us. Maybe, that is what one says to children whose father has passed away suddenly. I read it, however, as a sincere concern because he made it clear how much we loved us.

Lesson #4 The excitement of the tiny

I cannot look back and take an honest look at our income and expenses. I really don’t know how much my parents struggled over money. I know that my mother would have imposed a budget on my father’s spending and drinking if she could have. We lived in a house that they owned but it constantly needed repair. That wore on her; he was more relaxed about that and everything else. I share his tendency to put off addressing issues until I have to and her anxiety about things precipitously falling apart. He dreamed of living on a farm and for a while he had rabbits. I think he had other dreams for us as well. My mother, I think, dreamed of not having so much to attend to and not carrying so much of the burden of feeling not up to any of the tasks that presented themselves. Whenever we asked her what she wanted for Mother’s Day or Christmas, she always said, “Peace and quiet,” which we could never give her.

But the dreams of a farm, the possibility of a great vacation, like trips for ice cream—everything was more fun when my father was around. We would bring us snacks when he came home from the bar he used to frequent. He would be inordinately excited about this. He would buy the latest toy and happily try it out with us. I am doing my best to remember that lesson. With aging and aging friends and anticipating the next few decades, I find my mind more occupied by my mother’s perspectives than my fathers—more about loss and anxiety and less about fun and possibilities and living for today.

 

Lessons #5 Lessons about lessons

One could note that all of these lessons may be seen through rose-colored glasses. Maybe, I would have fought with him. Maybe, he would have placed obstacles in the path of college or VISTA or graduate school. Maybe, my coming out in my thirties would have been delayed until he passed away. None of this is knowable, of course. So, I do my best to piece this all together with remnants of memories, like any storyteller, fashioning one plot or the other. It seems that we would all be better off if parents would write letters to their children to answer questions that the children won’t raise until after they are dead. This wouldn’t have to be long detailed accountings of their lives but they would set forth the big questions and the big answers. To know so little about our parents and their parents is to showcase the unfortunate and existential fact of generational developments. We can hardly make sense of the present and can scarcely understand the generation that follows us, even though we were just so recently in their shoes—in the midst of building a career, carving out an identity, obsessed with raising children.

So these lessons that I am taking from my father are my own markings of his legacy. I am quite that there is plenty left on the cutting room floor and even more that I have so incorporated into my core identity that I can tell his influence apart from my own thoughts.

Dodging silver and other bullets

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Today, I nearly walked into the path of a car that was entering traffic from a parking lot. The driver was edging into the road and had carefully scoped out his exit. I am certain that he had looked up the street and down. I was the surprise—a blind spot—in his field of vision. He was moving south; I was headed east. One half-second earlier and I would have gone sailing over the hood. I am a small woman, somewhat fit and maybe athletic. I saw myself arcing in a gymnastic tumble, except, unlike those tiny bouncy teenagers who would land on their tiptoes, I imagine that my head would have hit the pavement first, a non-sanctioned Olympic move called The Double Concussion Flip and Fall. Moby’s Wait for Me was playing in my earphones and I was over-dressed on this sixty degree spring day.

To break my fall, I stretched out my hands. This failed and my chest hit the hood of the car; my head whiplashed back. I tried to resettle myself: What was I doing before I slammed onto the hood of this car? Where were my thoughts?

The driver waved his hands in apology; I waved back. It was like a silent movie. All gestures, no talk. I wanted to dance a bit, maybe skip in front of the car as I left the scene, just like Charlie Champlin would have. It was a magic moment. A minute before we had been invisible to each other; now we separate with a little memory, a shared story, and maybe a wee lesson, depending on our temperaments.

This encounter put my mind on the path of other near misses—a series of events that could have led to some serious trouble. I have sped through a stop sign late at night, distracted and tired. I have twice driven the wrong way down a busy street at twilight.. Earlier in that day, I would have without doubt faced a series of quickly moving cars, zooming up the hill. I would have been like a little cat facing the running of the bulls. We could all have been seriously hurt.

I have been in cars that have spun out, flipping on their heads in slick Alabama clay. I have been held up in Texas on a little walk in the good part of town. The man who did this looked upset enough to hurt me. I have dodged so many medical scares, that I am pretty certain that my health insurance company thinks that I messing with their premium calculation algorithm. I have had so many tests and been diagnosed with so many wrongly accused major illnesses,there must be a office pool somewhere betting on my demise. I could go on and on here but it seems with every incident I recount here, I am feeling both dizzier and bolder. With so much good fortune, a karmic calculation would have me dead pretty soon. As they say, I may be running out of good luck. Or maybe in that cosmic computation, or my good fortune comes at the costs of another’s unearned bad turn of chance.

Which gets me into the meat of what is really on my mind. Earned and unearned good fortune. the movie Funny Girl when Fanny Brice finds early renown, she says to her lover and supporter that she can’t be famous yet because she hasn’t suffered enough. I understand this feeling. It is that sentiment that much of what we have is unearned. I have unearned good health, undeserved energy, unnatural optimism. I don’t know if others feel this way about the gifts they have. I think we mainly focus on what’s missing.

It seems to me that most of us have experienced good fortune we have neither earned nor merited and of course, the reverse is true. The Just World hypothesis suggests just the opposite, that what we get is what we have earned. People are rich for good reasons, not trumped up excuses. People suffer in poverty because of bad choices. When we think about who is rich and who is poor, who enjoys good health and who falls to early disease, we frequently resort to this idea. We typically see great justice in the way of the world. It is comforting and somewhat cruel to believe that we get what we deserve. This is especially true if we believe in the power of individuals more than we do that of systems and structures. If we believe that through individual pluck and drive that the poorest child who has gone through worst schools can make it to Harvard and lead the world, we tend to be judgmental when they don’t. If we cannot see the advantage that birth and family and neighborhood bring to us, we probably believe that we are playing on a level playing field.

Twentieth century philosopher, John Rawls, suggested that in considering systems of justice, we imagine that we don’t know where in a social system we may stand. When we are making rules for running the world, we should evaluate them outside of our own interests. We should create systems that don’t favor or disfavor individuals because of race, gender, social class, national origin, cultural differences and so so. If a thought experiment like this were possible and if it could influence social policy, we would have be to convinced that we actually could stand in someone else’s shoes and represent their position fairly and respectfully. Hale doubts this can be done because of what he calls the veil of opulence—the blindness that we all have to the privileges of birth and position. We fall victim to the comfort of believing that if we fell on hard times, we would work our way out of it. The veil of opulence works like the Just World Hypothesis. It creates that delusional narrative that we are self-made, deserving human beings whose unearned good fortune insulates from caring more deeply from others who we see as not as worthy or deserving of what we have. Lots of us dodge bullets thinking we are lucky and blessed; not imaging that the cards are stacked in our favor.

The tests fail us

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When you receive a medical diagnosis that is serious, your mind moves out like a posse chasing a dangerous suspect. At first, the deputies fan out in all directions at once without much coordination. One team is off in the hills investigating where all this began, the very moment when your blood vessel bulged. A special team investigates the question: was it climbing up the stairs on the second to the last day of class in the winter session when the pressure behind your eyes pounded so hard that your brain seemed to have been invaded by a timpani orchestra? A squad of detectives inquires: was it that night when in your half-wake consciousness that you felt a sharp pain and colors swarmed in paisley patterns behind your eyes shut and you swear, your eyes opened as well? Members of the posse quickly tire of this chase, especially after learning from the Merck bible that the doctors have no idea of why aneurysms occur. You and the doctors have called back the search parties back from their assignments. So, after the news settles, the investigation begins to narrow and to focus. We find words clinging to diagnoses: we learn new vocabulary. A new word—idiopathic—flows into your conversation with friends. Idiopathic, in medical terms, means “of unknown or spontaneous origin.” Something has gone wrong; they don’t have an idea why. You think what a wonderful word. I can use this to explain relationships gone sour, missing cookies from the cupboard, and maybe, as well, unearned blessings. More about that later.

And, finally after lots of preliminary wondering about the sources of the problem, you understand that it is well beyond the point of wondering who did the dirty deed, it’s time to move to a conviction and begin the treatment. But, this neglects the long periods, or so it seems, of waiting. Every patient with a potentially troublesome diagnosis must feel that his is a cold case. The doctors and the laboratory technicians seem matter-of-fact, too measured, and taciturn. They process your case in turn as if you were ordering at the deli. In a few short weeks, I had two imaging tests and one consult with the neurologist and each encounter would have been enhanced by some training on my part in what Goffman, a favorite people-reading sociologist, calls the signals that we “give off” in impression management. Two weeks earlier, I submitted myself to a cerebral angiogram, a test where contrast is injected into your veins in order to trace your blood flow through the major arteries. The artery under suspicion was the carotid artery, specifically the choroidal artery, as the blood bearer that enters the head making its way from the heart and through the neck.   The technician was matter of fact, as disinterested in my case, as a character you would find in a tale by Kafka . Her voice modulated; her conversation as scripted as any cabin attendant warning you to fasten your seat belt and to turn off electronic devices for the first part of the flight.

The first part of the test is without the contrast, sort of to mark the ground, I suspect. Then the needle goes into your elbow crease at the opposite side of the elbow. I asked, “Will this be cold?” “No, it is warm” she replied. “For some women, it feels like they need to urinate, but that feeling will pass quickly.” I nodded and she returned to her station. The test lasted maybe ten minutes, maybe shorter. In a CAT scan machine, you enter a different time zone. One cannot be trusted to tell the time. It is suspended, in your own particular time zone, as you are when you are in the place where the long trail of medical diagnoses process.. And, that is the funny thing, I suppose. At the time of your life, when you should be most engaged, your brain recedes back and you stall. You begin not to make plans. Things are tentative.

“OK, that’s it. You can relax, Sandra.” She called my name and she was smiling sweetly and patiently. Her manner had changed and I thought, “Hmmm. I have moved or more accurately, my case has moved from “Worries-too-much-middle-aged-woman” to “Cerebral aneurysm. Too bad, she seemed like a nice person.” She helped me from the table and said that the results would be on my doctor’s desk on Monday morning. Surprisingly, the doctor called me later that day asking me to come in as soon as I could. It reminded when of crime dramas when the detective asks the unsuspecting person to come to the station and answer a few questions. Unlike a younger person with fewer medical miles under their belt, I have had plenty of health scares and I can’t tell yet which side of the equation this little medical issue will fall on. As statistics show us about tests, there are only four options:

The test could find something that really is there.

The test could correctly determine that there is nothing there.

The test could find something where there is nothing.

The test could miss something that is a problem.

With a minimal understanding of probability theory, you understand that the latter two outcomes are Type I and Type II errors, respectively. The challenge for those of us facing medical tests is that we have no idea of how accurate the tests are, how often they miss the problem or how frequently they identify problems that are not there. We assume that the tests are accurate with a certainty that simply doesn’t exist.

If I had the powers of reliable prediction, this would save me some wasted concern or it would propel me to get my affairs in order.

When this story happened, I had just one year short of sixty years old. That decade of my fifties had been a good period in my life. In fact, it is miserly and ungrateful to write “good.” These years have been wonderful and blessed. I see my left-sided brain losing its grip and see my right-sided brain coming to the rescue, allowing me to relish the beauty of the visual world. I think this is why middle-aged people find the young so lovely. The visual world begins to kick in and perhaps, in some cases, quiets that noisy interfering left side. It is the lesson of dwelling in the moment that comes with some aging. It is also the age where your contemporaries have survived medical crises. Heart attacks, breast cancer, skin cancer and others. Some close friends have died; our parents have passed away or may be in a steady decline. These incidents all line up and one hardly pays close attention until one takes her own turn. This is not to say that we are not sympathetic to the medical challenges of others but we don’t listen as carefully as we might. I think with deep shame of how not there I was when my mother was admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery. She seemed so intact, so independent, and so not needy of me. I did my duty but I probably was not that loving daughter that I am certain women dream of when they are carrying their children, hoping for a girl with whom to share the pains and promises of womanhood. One can be completely blind to one’s sins if convinced that duty is being done, especially if it is done out of obligation, and not out of love and the opportunity to love more generously.

During that episode, I wrote a question in my journal for consideration, “If you wrote a book this year and it would be the last thing or the most important thing you would write, what would it be about? Who would you want to read it? I have a lifelong friend who has been urging me to write this book for years and I have delayed doing this, believing that I have all the time in the world. I wrote in my journal that if this medical scare passed, I didn’t believe that I would change my life very much. Here is a quotation from that journal entry,

There are people who swear they will live every day to the fullest, that they will greet every day as a gift from God. I am not that sort of person. I am too programmed, too average, too much in my head. I would go on my way, thinking about squeezing in time and space here and there.

A few days later after that first troubling test, I visited the neurovascular surgeon. The doctor was very likeable and easy to speak with. He ordered an angiogram to further study the aneurysm. They are trying to locate the exact place of the aneurysm to determine if it is as dangerous as it looked in the image they had taken earlier. Another procedure. This reminded me of the stories in children’s books where the hero faces a series of challenges, running the gauntlet to slay this dragon or the monster until he is redeemed and can go home again a braver and more courageous person. And, in the same way, the hero is very much alone in this quest, even as the doctor says, “We will try this new procedure to see how we do.” The specialist reveals that discovering the aneurysm was an auspicious event because the original tests to chase down the cause of pounding head pain is completely unrelated to the suspicious blood clot in head. In other words, we are pursuing a villain for an unrelated crime. While potentially life-ending, the blood clot is completely innocent of the crime of throbbing head pain.

A few weeks later, I checked into the hospital for the cerebral angiogram. I took a careful look at the other patients in the waiting room to see if I could draw any conclusions about how sick I might be. I could draw no conclusions. A little girl. A ninety-five year old man. A middle-aged man who had to be lifted from his wheelchair to the hospital bed. I listened to the conversations between the patients, their caregivers and the nurses—all assuredly similar. We had to recite our names, our dates of birth, and the names of the procedures scheduled for us and had to point to the surgical site. I signed some paperwork, including the one document that warned me that the procedure could result in serious damage to my brain or death. I wondered if, perhaps, this was a good time to ask for a second opinion when mercifully, one of nurses brought me a heated blanket. This simple act of care and concern anchored me in a place of dispassionate observation where Buddhists hope to dwell. I was partially sedated and felt calm throughout the procedure as the doctors inserted a tube in my thigh where the dye would travel up to my brain to light up my blood vessels where more images would be taken.

After all the examinations and MRI, the angiogram revealed nothing suspicious. The MRI mistook a congenital bulge in my blood vessels for an aneurysm, sort of the like making a serious error in identifying the wrong suspect in a lineup. I learned that these malformations are common and most of them undiscovered. So, the average patient begins to wonder about these tests and their veracity. The first test that led up to the angiogram was wrong in that it concluded I did have one. The most recent test argued the opposite case. Who knows and should not the doctors tell us, like the pollsters do, about the margin of error? Shouldn’t there be a disclosure on these procedures, some clear labeling? This might read something like, “This MRI misses 15% of the tumors it is looking for and mistakes innocent cysts and congenital abnormalities for cancers/aneurysms 20% of the time. See your physician or a statistician for more information.”

A recent article in the NYTimes makes these points convincingly. Patients are typically not informed about the risks in treatment and tests and they typically over-estimate the benefits of procedures. We believe that each new procedure provides us with an invisible shield of protection when in fact the added benefits may be small. Without this information, we go blindly into the world of medical care. Some may argue that patients cannot understand this sort of information or that they are better off believing in good outcomes, even if these are not the most likely ones. There is a fruitful debate to engage here. But, that shouldn’t deter us from expecting more.

Someday I will write an article one day about my history with false positives tests and their effect on the psyche and the body and the spirit. Every time I receive one of these diagnoses (torn rotor cuff, pancreatic cancer, blocked carotid artery, heart attack, intestinal blockage, and leukemia) I could readily think the worst but these episodes have worn down my anxiety response. I used to think about my will. I fantasized about some lovely and noble ways for the managers of my family foundation to spend my fortune once I am gone, but no longer. With every test that releases me from my near-death sentence, I am reborn as the fool I am. Maybe, my brush with death is not close enough. Maybe, I am too suspicious of the field of medicine. I am growing cynical and suspect that when I die it will be of no cause at all. They will take an autopsy and find no grounds that led to my death–an idiopathic end. And, then I am certain the doctors will suggest to each other that they should have tried one more test or two more medications. I am going to take noncompliant patient to new levels of perfection.

The courage of children

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My pretty enough mother was always worried that we, her children, would have large noses. She would point to her own and my father’s as examples of noses that were simply too big. It seemed, however, that with sufficient and sturdy conviction, she and we could will these away. And, as fate and faith would have it, my sister, brother, and I are blessed with average, nearly admirable noses.

She also despised the color of her eyes, calling them yellow––“Cat’s eyes, they are.” I would stare at her as long as I comfortably could to get a good look but she would catch me and I’d have to quickly swing away my gaze. When I did sneak a look, I didn’t see the yellow at all. I saw brown which was the only color those nice people at Motor Vehicles would let her put on her driver’s license. To this day, I don’t know where she got this idea.

My mother was a devoted fan of blue eyes. She could list a whole series of notable and smart people she knew with blue eyes and for a while I thought that we would be blessed with these someday, as well. I thought this despite the fact that all my cousins, my aunts and uncles––all of them with very few exceptions––had dark brown eyes. I just suspected that if we prayed hard enough, the treasure of blue eyes would be ours.

Our parents sent us to an Irish Catholic grammar school even though we were descended from French-Canadian and Portuguese-Azorean stock. My sister and I have talked about this, about how strange we felt in this school. We were dark-skinned compared to our little Irish friends in this school which took its Irishness seriously. A child did not have to be Irish to attend this school. A devout Catholic family or a family that was headed in that direction was all that was required. My mother made it clear to the principal that she wouldn’t mind being Irish herself. This was decades before a child could be proud of her ethnicity and could demand accommodations for culture, language and customs. This was an era where we child considered the foods we ate at home and the festivals their parents dragged us to an embarrassment. At St. James, we sang Irish songs, spent a week celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, learned the jig, and brought home Irish culture–whatever that was. In the mid-1950s, it was as good as any other heritage and as disposable, for the most part. Our parents laid their Americaness like a thick blanket over their nationalities––intending to suffocate it for good. My father fought in World War II and taught us the lessons he learned from that conflict. American people were heroic. As Americans, it was in our nature to know and do the good and noble thing. We were blessed to be American and doubly blessed to be Catholic and American.

These were the chief lessons of our eight years at St. James. The blessed good fortune of all this was weighed heavily with the awesome responsibility of being a good Catholic uniformschild. Even now, four decades later, the language of this formation–grace, blessings, contrition, penance–remains like scaffolding in my brain and in vocabularly, even though I have attempted to destroy and expunge it many times. A good Catholic child lived in two places­­––in the real world full of temptation and in the temple of the Holy Spirit. We children easily comprehended the architecture of faith, enormously difficult for men of God to explain. We learned all this complexity easily, the way French children breeze their way through verb tenses that elude college graduates.

We learned this arcanum readily because it provided a clear way to understand the world. Children seek clarity and order. They struggle against it, of course, by asking questions to see if this adult-given explanation makes sense and is compatible with their own developing stories about the world. But, as they bang their wills against the rules, they learn the boundaries of their adventures and just how far adults will let them go. The 1950s in the Catholic Church were a stark testament to this fact. Without benefit of referred journals, supported research, conferences, government grants or other artifacts, our teachers––all nuns. Sisters of Mercy––created an intact, tightly woven, bullet proof method of teaching us things that we would remember forever.

Of course, the habits they wore made them both strange and fearsome, as well as comforting and familiar. Long black robes, rosary beads worn like large necklaces, black shoes and stockings. Their faces were completely framed by a starched wimple at their foreheads, which wrapped around their heads, set off with a stiff bib that stretched over their bodices, nearly reaching their waists. We learned to read a subtle body language. It wasn’t much beyond second grade when we knew what they were all about. But, their real power spun around their knowledge of what we children we all about. Our mothers th-1 warned us against wrongdoing, as all mothers will and used as ammunition the fact that no matter where we were, what we were doing, they would know. We could get away with nothing. This served as a magnificent check on our behavior, especially for the girls. But, even more powerful that our mothers’ omnipresence was the specter of the nuns as representatives of God who was truly all being, all seeing, all there and everywhere. And the Sisters, as his lookouts and lieutenants, could not only see around corners and under desktops, but could detect a whisper when you didn’t even know you were talking. They could not only see, hear, and smell what you could be sensed––they could also peer into our beings, see our wretched little souls and examine the sins we might be entertaining in our lack of grace and prayer.

Although we were very young, only six or seven years old, we were sorely tested by the devil and his workers. We faced daily temptations like calling each other bad names, dishonoring our parents, failing to bow our heads and recite the requisite prayers, and having impure thoughts. But being good was only half of the challenge. Important as the commandments and Catechism was a duty to suffer for our faith.

On selected Friday afternoons, we watched films in the school basement. The older students set up rows of folding chairs and we sat with our classmates in our assigned seats. We were led quietly downstairs and were not to speak with each other or with members of other classes. We paid a small fee to see movies like Cheaper by the Dozen, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Heidi, and the like. We also watched religious movies about the miracle at Fatima and the stories of saints. We were supposed to pick up lessons from these movies. It was a new media-savvy way to reach the young barbarians.

During missionary season when the parish was visited by a priest, brother or nun who had been converting the heathens in poor countries, we would watch black and white films of the missionaries at work. I clearly remember a movie about a Maryknoll brother and the work he was doing he was doing to bring Christ to the pagans in China. In this movie, an army of Chinese peasants surrounded a tall, strong, dark-haired Maryknoll in a black cassock. They carried sticks, waving them angrily above their heads. and marching CO-FOUNDER OF MARYKNOLL FATHERS AND BROTHERS PICTURED IN CHINA IN 1918in a circle around the priest on a dusty barren hilltop. His head was bowed and his hands were tied behind him. The film was very grainy and the camera seemed to jump around. The narrator spoke deliberately about the priest and his devotion to God, how he had not betrayed his faith despite being tortured to renounce Jesus. The crowd led him up the hill where a wooden cross stood. I cannot remember if the film showed the priest on the cross but to the mind of a second grade, it seemed like this would be next step in the story.  I remember that we were terrified and that some of us were crying.

We walked back to our second grade classroom saddened and silent, filing quietly into our seats. When Sister Frances stood at her desk, she placed the small tin missionary box on a student’s desk. On these Fridays, we were told to bring in a donation for the missions. The children who had spent their money on candy and treats at lunch sunk in their seats, their souls stained with the sin of greed and filled with regret. They quickly passed the can over a shoulder without looking at it. Children, who had saved their money, shook the can, loudly clanged in their nickels and passed it back with a smug look of victory on their faces. We were warned against this sin, a demonstration of pride, but some of us could not help ourselves. The nun pretended not to notice all this and busied herself with an attendance chart or something on her desk. After the bank made its way around the room, we placed our hands on our desk in anticipation of the last lesson of the day and homework for the weekend. Instead, she spoke about the film and about the beautiful sacrifice that was only available to God’s chosen people. She told us about courage and the importance of living our lives as children in Christ. “Denying the Lord is the very worst sin you can commit, children. You have been blessed to be born in the Faith.” We had heard this many times and took it seriously.

Then she asked, “How many of you are willing to die for your faith?” Our hands shot up as fast as they could. The boys yelled out, “Me, Sister! Me, Sister”, competing with each other to be the first to be sacrificed. The girls were quieter, polite, stretching our arms, waving them to catch her attention. She had us. We were all going to be martyrs and saints!

No child hesitated and said, “Excuse me, Sister, I will have to ask my parents.” No child asked, “Can you tell me when I will die and if it will hurt a lot?”

We were ready to go, happy to, in fact. Today, I try to put myself in that teacher’s place and I think, “Oh, my God, they are ready to go wherever we will take them! Do they know what they are saying? Do I know what I am asking?” And, I think, “What kind of game is this nun playing? What a crazy insane thing to ask a child!”

I also consider other parts of this scene. I think about being in the first row, third seat down, a member of the top reading group, looking at the other students so eager to die for Christ, feeling very grown up. I was proud of making this courageous and correct decision on my own. This was my way to certain sainthood. There were other paths, of course, but this was offered in a manner that we could understand. It was compelling and seductive. Being slaughtered by a pagan because we refused to renounce the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church seemed noble and good. I don’t remember a second of doubt. I filed away this promise to die for my faith expecting that the good Sister would inform the proper authorities when the time came for me to go, to be crucified, burned at the stake, buried alive or otherwise disposed of in the most gruesome manner.

Perhaps, children at that time were more susceptible to adult direction. Perhaps, adults were less careful about the terrors they willingly placed in the paths of children. Perhaps, both contributed to our growing up terrified, not of the man next door, or the predator down the street, or the gun toting madman at the fast food restaurant––but of large, mysterious things, like the heathen anti-Christs, communism, and polio.

And, of course, we were frightened by the atomic bomb. We did exercises in school, practicing in the event of an attack by the Russians. Sirens would go off and we would file into the fallout shelter at school. We asked the nuns where our parents would go when the bomb went off and they comforted us by reminding us that our parents could take care of themselves. I worried that my father who drove a service truck around the state would not be able to remember the location of each and every fallout shelter when the bomb fell. It seemed to me that he was always in danger.

At the distance of almost fifty years, I can see clearly how children are trapped by the fears of they adults they grow up with. Our own terrors create demons for them to avoid. Children can put off some of these fears to parental weirdness, but others resonate for a long time. When the whole culture creates and animates these bogeymen, children must take heed. They must take cover and run.

In addition to warning us away from big noses and wishing us blue eyes and lighter skin, my mother also guarded us against profligacy, against pride and gloating, against being too pretty, too smart, too anything, lest this draw the attention of God and engage his punishments. Sometimes, I wonder what terrors and frights I would have instilled in my own children had I given birth.

It seems that children survive childhood by creating play and joy to counter the admonitions and fears visited upon them by their parents and teachers. Sometimes they do this deliberately. They cannot figure out why adults are not happier than they are. So, they act silly. They giggle. They try to entertain and distract us. At least for a time, children face their parents without fear, with abiding trust, with the assumption that they are loved and lovable. Although we adults think we are amusing and comforting our children, it is, in fact, the exact reverse. The truth is that children assure us as their caretakers. Children enter a world that we have created and they begin to build it again, weighing all that we have taught them and tossing off what seems wrong headed and mean spirited. And so, a seven-year old can pledge her faith in afternoon, take her teaspoon of cod liver oil at night, bite her tongue when someone calls her a bad name, and still sneak a book to bed at night when she is supposed to be asleep. She can read this book of stories about St. Dom Bosco, who juggled for Jesus, and about Saint Theresa, the Little Flower, who would rather die than entertain impure thoughts. She can try to make sense of those tales of childhood heroics. And, she can struggle to be a model of virtue while scheming to avoid detection and punishment from vigilant adults.

And in these conflicts, children work things out. They soon understand that there is the world that adults would like them to fashion, where you as a child are kinder, more forgiving, more tender, and wiser than the adults guiding you. And, very quickly, children take their own counsel and assemble their own views of the world, their own stories that set them apart from the place their parents know the world to be.