As the firemen set up the
truck and microphone and speaker, the entire student body somehow became arranged on the grass strip between the
school building and the parking lot.
Nuns moved among us like Chain Gang deputies, but without the whips and
shotguns. Soon we were ready for the
two smartest kids in eighth grade to deliver their “Fire Safety” talks. The thirteen year olds
Ronald’s speech, “Fire
Safety in the Home, School, Church and Beyond,” treated the specter of accidental fires breaking out in your
kitchen, in the school’s lunch room, and
on our church’s candle-lit altar. This
last possibility jarred me, frankly. I
had never considered the inherent danger of
attending Mass, especially a high mass, when candle lighting shifted
into high gear. I made a mental note to
spend some time thinking about balancing the need for
Margaret’s talk began on a
light note, with babies and young children playing and laughing, tumbling down
the hills in the back yards of cute
little white houses on tree-lined streets,
populated with the homes of attorneys and senior level bank officials. In one such house dwelled Billy and Mary
Magdelen and Mom and Dad. The little
family lived an exemplary life and prayed the rosary each evening, before
watching the News with John Cameron Swayze.
But Dad forgot to have the furnace maintained one year and the house
blew up.
“Ka-BOOM!!” shouted
Margaret into the microphone, as she
stood on a makeshift pulpit just aft of
the fire truck’s cab. The Lieutenant, leaning
against the fire engine’s intake valve, jumped when the girl bellowed. She was a hefty young lady and had a prodigious voice that would have
eventually served her well as a fifth grade teacher, had she not become the District
Attorney. The girl followed her
exploding sound effects with the whooshing noises of
debris flying through the air. Some of the younger children in the crowd
began to look frightened..
Margaret continued her
parable. The young boy and girl arrived home from school on that
cold and snowy winter afternoon to find pieces of their life all over the
neighborhood. As brother and sister
made their way along the familiar streets,
they first spied Mary Magdelen’s doll up in a tree on Bonnie Brae Place, and then the
twisted remains of Billy’s bicycle over on Ferris Avenue. Dad was still
at work. Mom had been in the basement
doing the laundry, but now pieces of her
were arriving steadily in heaven. The
children sat down in a snow bank (this was Utica, after all) and cried their
little eyes out, knowing Dad would be angry when he finally arrived to find a 30 foot crater where his home once stood. All this grief was the consequence of not
keeping a list of home maintenance reminders.
“And by the way,” Margaret said
as she slapped her forehead a little too forcefully, “where would they eat supper tonight? How terribly, terribly sad,” she said.
Sparky, the Dalmatian, was
apparently quite touched by Margaret’s tale.
He began wailing and whimpering and snuffling until the Lieutenant
lovingly took hold of the dog’s collar.
It could have been my imagination, but the man seemed to twist the choker rather tightly. Sparky’s crying stopped abruptly, but he soon
got loose and jumped off the truck into
the crowd of children. Our cries of
surprise and delight quickly turned to disgust and laughter when Sparky lifted
his leg against the black skirts of Sister Bunny. You really couldn’t blame the dog. The nun indeed resembled a street lamp, with
her jet black attire and the bursting white “flying nun” hat on top.
Billy and Mary Magdelen
were taken off to an orphanage that definitely did not serve desserts. At that point in her talk, Margaret smiled broadly, looked around the
crowd and said, “Thank you all very much for coming to see me. I am extremely grateful to have been chosen
from among hundreds of children (true, if you counted everyone all the way down
to kindergarten) to deliver The
Distinguished Annual Fire Safety Lecture at this prestigious institution.” (That would be our elementary school.) With that, she jumped from the truck,
alarming the Lieutenant, who was now holding on to Sparky for dear life.
The students began to grow restless as their minds turned
to warm baloney sandwiches and government subsidized milk in tiny bottles … 2
cents for white, 3 cents for chocolate.
Even the nuns looked tired. The firemen reminded us once more not to play
with matches. They revved up the siren one last time as we all
held our hands over our ears. Another
successful visit from the Utica Fire Department came to a close.
My mind turned from the
fire trucks to other topics. Question
No. 372 had begun to bother me a little and I wondered why Mom seemed so
pleasant to that man in Woolworth’s last week.
She told me he was a friend of Dad’s.
Ah well, it was my favorite time of year and I tried not to ruminate so
much in good weather. Later that morning, I wrote a note about the Woolworth’s incident on a candy wrapper
and stuck it in between the pages toward the back of my catechism. We wouldn’t get there until March, and that
was an eternity of time, far awa
copyright 2008 by David Griffin
Another memory from
O.L.O.Lourdes, this time in the depths of winter. February 11 was the Feast of Our Lady of
Lourdes and it was a very cold day in 1955.
There I was in my brown gabardine pants, cowboy shirt, plastic western
string tie, buckle-up snow boots, imitation Navy Pea Coat and sheepskin lined bombardier
hat from Bernie Phillipsons Army-Navy Store (don't ask whose army,) forced out
of Our Lady of Lourdes School on a February afternoon, ejected from our
over-heated, over-populated fifth grade classroom by Sister Mary Wenceslas, to
stand like a group of miniature prisoners in snow up past our knees, as the
wind howled and boogers slid down my nasal canal and were snap-frozen right at
the edge of the nostril by a temperature hovering near ten below, trying to
hold my body against the 40 mile an hour wind as I grasped the little paperboard song
book containing a selection of 973 songs of praise to Mary, an entity we were
forbidden to worship ... but I guess under a thousand songs is OK .... trying
to hold the little book in my German Alps Ski Commando leather mittens,
gathered around the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and led by Sister Majestyria
in songs of esteem, including Sister's favorite, Queen of the May, bizarrely
set to the clank of tire chains out on Genesee Street.
Having spent the daytime
hours of my formative years with religious women, I’ve always been careful to
not get on the wrong side of Mary, and have always hoped she has a sense of
humor. It just now occurs to me she must,
since her Lourdes apparition means she landed in France. You can’t
possibly survive in that country without a sense of humor.
The Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet, South Carolina
