So, a few days ago Sally came to visit and have a look around the monastery. If indeed this Sally is my guardian angel, it is truly bizarre! Before Agnes set out with her on a tour of the facility, he asked me to round up everyone and assemble them in the Pit, where most of us were working anyway. Fifteen minutes later Agnes brought my angel to the top step overlooking ten quizzical monks. His introduction of Sally was perfunctory and short.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’d like to present Ms. Sally Prendel. She is a real estate broker and she will be working with us on our financial problems.”
Waiting for more information, a few of us glanced at each other with looks that were just short of derisive. We waited to finally hear something about our future, which by now seemed more dark than ever. But Agnes quickly ushered Sally out from our presence. Still under the Rule until after supper, we remained quiet. We weren’t conscientiously keeping the silence. We were too shocked at being told nothing. I thought of my older brother’s term for this style of managing employees in his corporate world: Mushroom Management. “Keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em horseshit.”
I went looking for Terd when I noticed he was not with us in the Pit. But he wasn't just absent. He had departed.
Despite what many might think, Christmas Day did not find myself and my Brothers sitting around a manger scene set up in our Scriptorium. True, we spent what can be called an ordinary day and also had our usual meal of lima beans and rice, but there was a festive feeling to the day nonetheless.
However, can you imagine how tired we're getting of beans and rice? In my opinion, Lima beans are the most odious of legumes. And that's without consideration of their effects. Eleven full grown men on a diet of those green devils produces a pall of bad air from one end of the Chapter House to the other. Coming into The Pit the morning after the previous day's vapors have aged overnight can be an unsettling experience. I can't imagine the reaction of a visitor getting a nose full. They’d think they were visiting a crypt!
Still, food is food and none of us ever feel starved. There's too much gas to feel empty. And so on Christmas we were festive ... for a bunch of monks ... while we ate our dinner and afterward sang hymns and the old Bing Crosby Christmas tunes. But the highlight of the evening, as it is every year, was Harpo's rendition of Blue Christmas sung in the great style of Porky Pig, including the lisp, the stutter and the ribald asides. Harpo does a great rendition of what Father Guido Sarducci called "the worst Christmas song ever." Maybe that's why we love it.
I don’t know what will become of me. For some time I have been wondering if living with the same ten men for so many years was good for my soul. How can God speak through his people to my heart when I’ve essentially excluded the entire world, aside from those few brothers. And now I discover we may be forced out of our home and off our beloved mountain. You’d think I’d prefer to stay or go, one or the other, but I can’t make up my mind. I don’t want to leave here. But at the same time, something inside tell me I will.
I can feel the anxiety roil my stomach as my mind wends its way through the puzzle of Agnes and Terd. It just seems that something bad lurks beneath the surface of those two. But I’m not a person with a positive outlook and perhaps I am imagining more trouble between them than actually exists.
I don’t know how I will ever forgive those responsible for shutting down the monastery and kicking us off the mountain. I don’t know how I can forgive someone for that. But there’s nothing I can do.
I worry a lot. I’ve always been a worry wart. Even when I was a kid. I’m sitting down here in the cellar looking up through the tiny window at a surprising blue sky. Big puffy white clouds drift across my time machine and take me back. Back to other days when I worried, sometimes without quite knowing what I worried about.
On a crisp fall day just before Halloween, we sat in school on the edge of our seats, watching the clock. The city firemen were due to arrive at 10:00 a.m. for their annual visit. Sister Majestyeria worked her way down my aisle, asking questions from the Baltimore Catechism, the answers to which I was supposed to have memorized the evening before. If Sparky the Fire Dog and the men from the Engine Company Number 4 didn’t arrive soon to save my sorry little ass, I'd have to fake an answer to question number 374, "Why must we take more care of our soul than of our body?"
Just two seats in front of me, Mary Ellen McMeany parroted a perfect answer to question number 372. In her deadly serious ten year old voice, she intoned, “The sixth commandment forbids all unchaste freedom with another’s wife or husband.” I couldn’t imagine what my Mom would do with another lady’s husband, but this thought was interrupted when outside our second floor window a sixty decibel siren blast rattled the window panes and sent 52 highly strung fifth graders right off the top of the excitement scale. Blown out of our seats, we almost mowed down the screeching nun as she attempted to restore order. She had to get us down the stairs and out the door without injury into the arms of Sister Saint Buonfiglio of Monaldo, known to us as Sister Bunny. The old Italian nun would perform the minor miracle of ensuring we behaved like little scholars instead of howling chimpanzees.
As the firemen set up the truck's 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 smartest kid in eighth grade to deliver her “Fire Safety” talk. The thirteen year old young woman’s great grandparents began a dynasty of wizards in the last century and it had produced high IQ descendants ever since. Each of the family’s generations played a role in the great affairs of our fair city. Kathleen would in the coming years continue her family tradition by running for office and becoming one of our rulers, judging our legal transgressions and prosecuting the worst of us. This kid was so eloquent, she’d been on the speaking circuit since third grade. Kathleen had few friends. She evinced warmth and compassion, but was rather needy and could be quite adamant. When her mother didn’t produce the requested baby sister, the girl asked for a dog and named it Mary Margaret.
Kathleen’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 liturgy and the sin of putting myself in the way of mortal jeopardy. I reasoned it was an apt topic for consideration. Too bad it wasn’t spring, when I always began a list of interesting topics to ponder while imprisoned at The Stations Of The Cross after school each Friday afternoon during Lent. The year before, I spent Friday afternoons between stanzas of Stabat Mater trying to recall every line in the film, “The Glenn Miller Story.” By Good Friday, I was two thirds of the way through the script. I saw the movie four times. I was in love with June Allyson.
After reviewing all of the terrible fire possibilities on her imaginary tour of school and church, Kathleen’s talk turned to a brighter scene, 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 employees. 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 Kathleen 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..
Kathleen continued her parable. 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 (after all, this was Utica) 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. “How terribly, terribly sad,” Kathleen said, leaning on the fire truck’s safety bar, a young prosecutor in the making.
Sparky the Dalmatian was apparently quite touched by Kathleen’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 with a little screech, 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.
Finally finishing her talk, Kathleen 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 city 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 away into the future. Who could guess? By then, anything might happen. The church could go up in smoke, Mom could run off with the milkman and Sparky could get accidentally strangled.
