A Good Word

My father died last week.  He was 94. His wake and funeral were the most beautiful I've ever been part of. All the testimonials, all the affection, all the gratefulness for his many, many years of service. I presented a short eulogy at the end of his funeral Mass.  I share with you an excert: Dad liked words: he liked words so much he created his own and appropriated standard words and put them to new use. He had names for us, starting with his mother whom he called Minnie, his baby sister, Alice who was Nellie Hamburger or Adrian Zilch. Our brother Gene became Jasper, MaryEllen was McGinkly Old Girl and Giggles McGuirk, Peter was Pierpont, Alicia was Lovely Leesh, the old Peach, Gerry was Reginald Von Bimburg the Third, shortened to Reggie, I was Kazook, or more fully Juli Kazool the silliest girl in Kalamazoo, Mom was Millicent, My dear and Pasta Fagioli.

When he was annoyed, Oof e gad popped out. Oof e gad was heard quite a bit in our home. When he thought his children were not acting up to their potential as his offspring we might hear “Balloon head” or "Balliftina" directed our way.

For all his affectionate naming he didn't much care for malarkey or jibberjab and he didn't have patience for a rigamarole when things became more complicated than they needed to be.

He had many qualities: he was a scholar, a thinker, a speaker, a writer, a pray-er, a husband, a father, a brother, and perhaps the quality that showed itself in brilliant colors these past six and a half years, he was a fighter.

When he landed in Marseille in December 1944 he entered what was the coldest winter on record in Europe. The temperature ranged from about zero to ten below.

The army trained him as a Mechanical Engineer and because of his sharp strategic abilities he was sent over as a scout. As he put it, he was good at the Cowboy and Indian games. This strategic ability of his coupled with his natural leadership saved the lives of countless of his fellow soldiers during The Battle of the Bulge. Because of his heroic leadership he was given a Battlefied Commission to First Lieutenant.

On March 22, 1945 German bullets caught up with him at the Siegfried Line in his head, shoulder and back. The men in his squad told him they saw who shot him and they were going to get him. He immediately said, No, Don't Do It.  He didn't know the young German kid, of course, but he recognized in him a similar fate. He didn't want to be in this bloody war any more than Dad did. He believed that boy’s mother was home praying for him just as much as his own mother was keeping her rosary warm with persistent Hail Mary’s for his safety.

You see, above and beyond all the qualities of our father, beyond his sharp wit and penetrating intelligence, beyond his movie star looks as a young man, beyond his strategic mind and leadership, Dad was a Catholic, the kind of Catholic it might be difficult to find anymore.

That order forbidding his squad to kill the German soldier who shot him uttered from a deep and true part of his soul. He took seriously the Gospel which he breathed in and out in all his years of formation at St. Elizabeth’s and St John’s and his natural bent toward holiness. Yes, holiness.

In these last difficult years he was the soul of grace, enduring, uncomplaining, through a stroke, countless infections, bouts of pneumonia, and for the last two years, a respirator, robbing him of his ability to talk.

He was a man of deep faith, his Catholicism informed every aspect of his life. I believe he was able to not only endure his suffering because of this grace, but he transcended the pain and, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, transformed his pain into redemptive suffering, a lesson learned from the crucifix.

Dad lived 94 years, something incredible in itself. 68 years ago he was all but killed on the battlefield. The Army told him he would never work, that he was 80% disabled. He said goodbye to the Army, turning down a promotion to Captian, immediately went to Law School, married my mother 64 years ago, had six children, became a NYState Supreme Court judge and retired at age 72. See what 80% disabled meant to him!

It will take a long time for me to unpack the lessons he provided, maybe the rest of my life.

Dad, I send to you a “Whack on hine, Kiss on Snout.”  We love you, you  old Curmudgeon.

Celebrating???

I'm too old to care about being cool, though I like to think I never cared about being cool. Same goes for PC. Not as in personal computer, but as in Politically Correct. I disdain group think, I believe bandwagons and many causes are just opportunities to check your brain at the door and leave all answers to the loudest, brashest and most annoying person with a megaphone. I am a registered Independent, though there is some irony in that statement. I am Catholic, but with a strong streak of "yeah, but... let's look at it this way" coursing through my veins. I have always been a "feminist" but I refuse to go along with equating feminism with the right to destroy life.

Ah, see, there's the rub.

I live in Texas, raised in NYC. The big story here is the crowd, huge, massive, noisy crowd, cheering and hollering in Austin for the defeat of a bill which would have further restricted access to abortion.

What a terrible word. It sticks in my throat, it hesitates in my mouth before tumbling out. Abortion.

I am an advocate for women and women's health care. I know personally the difficulties and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. I have four children and have been through life threatening situations with some of their births.

I realize that many women have no "choice" when it comes to sex. I realize many women are abused, physically, psychologically and emotionally. I know my own church has bullied women for generations against exercising any control over how many children they could bear.

I want to shake the men, whether they wear a suit or a cassock or torn up blue jeans, to just shut up when it comes to women and their reproductive lives, since even the most well meaning really knows nothing, not a thing, about what it is like to be pregnant, to give birth, to be the main, and too often sole, provider for that child.

But that's what "it" is. No matter how you would like to toy with words and play semantic games of what grows inside a pregnant woman, "it" is a child.

With all the celebrating and partying and reproductive "rights" rejoicing, let's be honest and at least remember that much of the truth.

Wrap Your Mercy

I have a favorite song. The title is Last Six Hours of Summer, but I always refer to it as the mercy song. You might get a better feel for why it is my favorite if you heard the music, but that I don't know how to do in this space.    Wrap your mercy around me.  Bury me in light.

   All the days get older and older then die every night.

   Last six hours of summer,  driving 'round the lake,

   Silver lights dance over the water 'til day starts to break

                Follow me back home, let the daylight into our bones

                Starts and it stops, breaks all the locks, there'll be peace

                when the morning comes

   Take these chains from my body, hang them over your door

   I don't want to carry the weight  of my sins anymore

   Give me back to the water, lay me down across stone,

   Let the moon call all her waves back to shore,  take my bones

            Follow me back home, let the daylight into our bones

           starts and it stops, breaks all the lock there'll be peace

           when the morning comes.  Repeat

(© Mike McCullagh)

I've been part of a Tuesday Morning Prayer Group since we moved to Texas more than twenty years ago. We were, at the time, a gathering of mothers with young children. Now, twenty years on, our kids are grown and some of us are grandmothers. For all these years, we have been with each other through good times and tough times, through births and deaths and struggles with faith, with life.

Just this week we had an emergency meeting to pray for one of our mothers and her family because they are going through a terribly difficult time. Seven mothers were able to attend, seven mothers praying the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary with the hope and faith of sending hope and faith and relief to this family, who are dear to us.

These small communities of faith are perhaps the best kept secret of the Church. Many times they are the only face of the church that its members can belong to, for a very, very long list of reasons. Dark nights of the soul, family troubles, illness, depression, confusion, spiritual warfare, just to name a few. The struggles of life that many of us might succumb to if we didn't have a manageable faith group to catch us. There's the Church and there's the church, the small gathering of saints and sinners meeting in each others homes, holding each other together in prayer and fellowship.

Wherever two or more are gathered, you know.

Girl, Ferocious

We have two refrigerator pictures of the grandkid's visit to Santa. One is the before shot which Katie took while they were waiting in  line, a very long line. Both Jude and Sophia look happy in their Christmas finery, though Sophia is scratching at the stiff fabric of her fancy dress. Fast forward an hour, and three and  a half year old Jude is smiling like the proud and happy little man that he is and his just about to turn two year old sister is squealing and squirming while the man with the big white beard has his broad arm around her belly. Typical, huh? Yes, it is. (Now we have no pictures of our youngest child with Santa because the few years we attempted it, he screamed from his stroller. He was not going to sit on a giant red-clad bearded man's lap.)

I had both pictures on the refrigerator until one of my son's bandmates-- thank you, Rob-- commented that this was one unhappy little girl who didn't want to sit on the creepy man's lap. (I make no judgment on that man in the beard who puts up with all variety of children, some damp and smelly, some thrilled to be in the presence of the king of fairy tales.)

Rob's comment brought into sharper focus my initial reaction to the picture, that is, we need to respect when little girls and big girls do not want to sit on someone's lap, or however you would like to extend the metaphor. (Really, I am not leaving out little boys, but this piece is about girls. I have much to say about little boys and the broad 'taming' of them so they sit still in school, but that's a different piece.)

A few weeks ago I attended a GirlsRising/Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org) presentation of the conditions of half the world's population and their systematic abuse decreed by state, family, tribe and 'tradition'.  Tradition.  A term used to evoke a nostalgic feeling of the good old days where families were always warm and loving and, within the protective arms of 'the way we do things' peoples lives are safe and ordered. Ordered, perhaps, but safe has nothing to do with it.

Girls around the world are discarded, sold to pay family debts, married off as nine year old children to grown men who can use them any way they desire and are bearing children their tiny bodies are not designed to accommodate. Then, when they are broken in childbirth, they are exiled to live out their short lives where their problems present no offense to their families.

Many girls are taught to be docile, pretty, compliant, uncmplianing and illiterate. Then they are blamed if a man cannot control his sexual desires toward her for having these very qualities they are told will provide them with security.

Our little Sophia likes pink ribbons, pink shoes and pink polish on her tiny toenails. She is also fierce, fearless and ferocious. May those traits never be educated out of her.

Tucked

It’s been ten years since my mother died. But no, that’s not right. When I snuggle into the cool sheets on a February night I am again seven years old and the heat rises through the grates under the window in the pink bedroom I share with my sisters. Just a few hours before we billowed the just-out-of-the-dryer sheets, the best part of making the bed, and then tucked blankets and stuffed pillows with pink flowered cases. Everything is new again with this simple bit of housework, or is it homemaking? The next morning I will try to repeat the techniques of bed making that my mother performed so deftly last night. The day after I will return to my hasty pull up the covers move that is a poor relation to her expertise. Something I still do, I admit.

There are moments that can get lost if they don’t tap you on the shoulder when you’re not looking and return you, giggles and all, to the most innocent of times. If we are not careful, or if those whispers abandon us, we can color the past in the wrong shades of blue and neglect the light that was there, tucked away maybe, but there just at the end of your fingertips.