My Life in Pieces

The life of pieces comes here for disassembly.

posted by Paul Frank Walters @ 23:34 1 comments

Five Nines in 2

In two days I will turn forty-five years old. That is the same age as my father was when I was 13. The same age my mother was when I was 18, when I graduated, for cryin' out loud. You know how you go through that thing with your parents, they're not really that old, 45, 50, whatever. I do the same thing with myself. Sort of putting off homework all weekend until 7:00 sunday night and then, oh well, let's watch Disney, and well there's still an hour before bedtime. Not old yet...nope. 55, nope, still not 60...and what about 70? Well, this time of year brings back a personal vignette from long ago, 1969 to be exact.

I was eight years old, and it was at that age, in the second grade, that Catholic youngsters in my Church (and probably the whole diocese or maybe Earth itself) made their first holy communion. Now we didn't call it Sunday School, at least not any more. When I had been in first grade we had a School at my church that was held on Sunday and we called it Sunday School. But by the next year those in circles far higher than me, my teachers or my parents, had vetted a more uniquely identifying moniker, CCD--short for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. Perhaps some considered Sunday School a distastefully evangelical sounding term (unaware of the incipient Charasmatics at their own feet).

So off I went, on a Saturday morning, the last of the opening song to the Archies' TV cartoon fading through the screen window of our living room, up the street to St Mary's Church, where we were to learn all of the doctrine required to enable us to plumb the mysteries incumbent upon new first communicants to know before receipt of the mysterious sacrament.

Our instructor was a nun. A lady nun. But a lady nun with a man's name: Sister Robert Something... try as I might the last name just won't pop back in after 37 years. Curious, my eight-year-old mind whirled, that she should have a man's name. I remember our first class... We sang "Sons of God, hear his holy Word. Gather round the table of the lord. Celebrate this happy day, close to Christ we'll always say, 'allelu, allelu, allelu-u-u-ia." Subsequently an alternative verse came out, equally legitimate but more bacchanalian in its import: "Eat his body, drink his blood, then we'll sing a song of love..." Hmmmm. But that is my 45 year-old man's hmmmm after running it through my TV and tabloid impaired mind.

I remember the first class we learned the word "saviour." They had the people at the bottom, God at the top, and in the middle the "saviour" and said that it was necessary to have it this way. We learned about sin, but not as a collective noun but in the more juvenile sense of itemizable occurrances: sins. I stole, I cheated, I lied, and so on. I don't ever recall an attempt to impute us with the sense of vile Original sin in the Calvinistic sense. The distinction between temptation and sin was emphasized, and that you didn't have to confess your temptations, just your sins.

I went home and all of this mixed around in my head. It must have really moved me, because I remember the saturday of my first confession, or maybe a week or two before, around 5 pm, aimlessly puttering around the barn and by the kitchen door, with my seven-months-pregnant mother on the phone to my grandmother and noticing my being near tears, which I knew perfectly well I felt and which were for absolutely no good reason. She said I looked like I was going to "ipcky" which is my mother's well-englished version of the arabic word for cry. Most words for strong emotions or intimate bodily functions had their discreet arabic-english-babytalk version at my mother's disposal. It was certain wet-your-pants laugh to hear my father try to say those same words. It was how it must seem in those tribes where there's a men's language and a woman's language, when the men make sport of each other's attempt to speak the feminine tongue. But ipcky I did, until the time finally came for my first confession, behind the curtain with the red light that went on when the priest was ready: my first sin--I was 'inconsiderate.' The original version was "I was inconsiderate to my mother," but that last part got edited out by its object of restitution. I think she didn't want the presumably Irish priest to get the notion that our family ran like a matriarchy.

So there I was, ready for my first communion, except for the blue suit that my father, my grandfather, and I would go out together to buy at the department store, Jordan Marsh, and which my grandfather never got to see me make it in, as he had died just after leaving for his New Jersey home after seeing us. I still can see all those 'last' photos that we took at the local shrine to Our Lady of Fatima. And my premonitory sense was already such that, when I saw my grandfather wave goodbye from the car, I wondered, was I looking at him waving at me for the last time? And then the funeral (kids never went)--who watched us? I don't recall. But I think that introducing the notions of sin, salvation, confession and death in a couple of short weeks is enough to make any sane second grader 'ipcky,' don't you?

posted by Paul Frank Walters @ 22:18 1 comments

The Judas Season

The season for Jesus not yet upon us, I fear, we face the season of Judas. Who has not betrayed one or another soul in his passings? How great a betrayal on a massive scale, is about to occur within the tiny sphere of my influence on cosmic karma. I have been blessed with power, temporal to be sure, but nonetheless authority and credentials to permit ease of transit and cloaking of intent. I seek to succeed where I have failed before, and to do so, I have to do some things that I thought, nay, said, I would never do. How high a regard for yourself you must have, Mr. Frog, said the princess fairy. How very hard it must be for you to make up your mind each morning, whether to have toast or eggs, knowing what monumental fortunes hang in the balance of your decision. Well, it is not at all like that for me. I have reached a watershed in my personal and neofamily life, where they intersect with my work life. The two are at loggerheads and I have fundamental allegiance to her to whose flesh I cleaved nearly ten years long past. As to my paleofamily way of life, the leviathan hull of the erstwhile home vessel admits passage of little in the way of true feelings or current displays of status through the few-bit-wide medium of electronic mail. The instant messaging of Yahoo and MSN, the Webcams, all fail to replace the smell of your brother's scalp when you're rolling on the rug in mock brotherly duking it out.

posted by Paul Frank Walters @ 22:02 0 comments