Confession Station

I hail from the land of Chicago Catholica, circa 1970.  Growing up, the church was my world, and our parish my passport.  If you’d have told me as a child that Chicago was known as the city of neighborhoods, I’d have thought you were talking about St. Ita’s, Our  Lady of Lourdes, and St. Gertrude’s—the whole north side was mapquested in my brain not by streets and avenues, but by churches.  Back then I thought everyone was Catholic, everyone.  When the one oddball kid on my block went to the local public school instead of St. Greg’s, where the rest of us went, I pitied him and assumed his parents just couldn’t afford the tuition.  I knew kids went to Pierce, the public school with the gravel baseball field on the other side of Ashland Avenue, but just who those kids were was a mystery to me.  My naïve, narrow little mind could only make sense of it by deeming them disadvantaged.  Everyone went to St. Greg’s; ergo, everyone wanted to go to St. Gregs; ergo if you didn’t go, it was because you couldn’t; ergo, you were poor.  It wouldn’t dawn on me until years later that my own family, with only one working parent and seven children, was probably way poorer than the vast majority of those public school families.  Live and learn. 

When I went away to college the blinders really came off.  Most people at my university weren’t Catholic. For once, I was in the minority.  I was living with Lutherans, Methodists, Unitarians, Jews even!  I knew, because I asked them.  I went around interviewing new friends about their religious backgrounds.  No one else cared but me.  Everyone had an answer, everyone was something, but nobody really much cared about it.  “Well, we’re Unitarian,” they’d say, or Methodist, or whatever, “We’re X, but we don’t really practice.  We never really go to church, or anything.”  One girl in my dorm called herself a Baha’i, something I’d never even heard of before.  She explained that her faith was a sort of melding of all religions, a unity of all faiths for all mankind— and really, who could argue with that idea?  I felt like Alice in Wonderland.  Eileen in Carbondale, a strange land where 25,000 18-25 year-olds from all walks of life banded together, generic Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Muslims (thanks to SIU’s ambitious foreign exchange program), agnostics and atheists; all of us comrades united with a dual purpose:  to study and drink beer.  Religion didn’t matter.  It was about love, and laughter, and higher education.  It was Utopia.  It was John Lennon’s Imagine.  I was completely swept up and away.  Just like that, into the thick of 1980’s techno rock, another lapsed Catholic was born. 

Fast forward twenty years.  I’m married to a wonderful Jewish man who was born in Soviet Russia and immigrated to America with his parents in the late 1970’s.  I’ve lost my father to cancer.  My mother just passed away from Pulmonary Fibrosis.  My husband’s mother is suffering from terminal lung cancer.  We feel like a tree in the boreal forest, whose trunk has been axed to the core.  We are childless, having spent our time together working and traveling, and then caring for sick parents.  We decide we don’t want our tree to topple.  We want the cycle of life to go on.  We want to have a baby. 

I get pregnant, and miscarry, get pregnant, and miscarry again.  I am 39 years old.  My doctor tells me my eggs are old, I’m coming to the end of my fertility cycle.  I am starting to get desperate.  My aunt tells me about the St. Gerard medals that have been passed around the family, to female cousins trying to have children.  There are two medals on a chain, and they’ve gotten several cousins pregnant— one with twins.  “I only want one medal!” I say.  “Can you get me one of them?”  The last cousin to get the magic medals can’t part with them.  She’s grown attached to them and feels like they’re protecting her precious, hard-won child from harm. 

I take myself on a 45 minute drive to a Catholic missionary with a gift store that sells St. Gerard medals.  I feel ashamed and sheepish.  I haven’t been to Mass in years, with the exception of my parents’ funerals, and haven’t considered myself a Catholic for decades.  Here I was now, turning up on the church’s doorstep desperate and desolate, like a prodigal daughter. 

I buy the St. Gerard medal, and decide to stop into the missionary’s church on my way out, to light a candle for my parents, and drop a donation into the collection box—it’s the least I can do.  The big church is dark and empty.  I walk up and down the aisles like a museum-goer, taking in the stained glass and statuaries.  I light two candles, inhaling deeply, enjoying the waxy, honey, smoky scent of the votives, and stuff a ten dollar bill into the box.  I walk over to a wooden pew and sit, reaching down to pull out the kneeler.  The bench creaks loudly, protesting my weight.  The thud of the kneeler as it hits the marble floor echoes all around me.  I say an Our Father and a Hail Mary, and then I just kneel for a while, missing my parents, and thinking, for the first time in a long time, of those days back in the 1970’s, when churches were as comfortable to me as the living room sofa in my parents’ old two flat. 

I’d have him baptized, I decided then and there.  Or her, if it was a girl.  If by some miracle I was able to have a baby, I’d have the child baptized in a Catholic church, as homage to my mother and my father, and the church, who raised me, and gave me the heart and the capacity to love without borders, to look to the good in all people, and to hope for things yet to be. 

Chicago

I was just three years old!!!!!

What do I remember about that time?

It was winter, just before St. Nicholas. Everyone was more than a little excited, because the Saint and Black Peter were supposed to come. I was playing around with my brother who was four years older…when all of a sudden, my cheek touched the red-hot coal-burning stove. Screaming and crying from the pain, my brother was all upset and my mother tried to calm me down by pressing a cold washcloth to my cheek. What a shock, (since that time, I have always been afraid of fire, and I find that lots of appliances get too hot far too quickly).

Then, that evening, the doorbell rings…and there are the Saint and Peter in the flesh. And St. Nicholas knew about everything that had happened, because he gave me in consolation for my fall on the stove a little child’s bike: a brand new tricycle.

For years, I always wondered how the Saint and Peter could have known about my accident and my wish for a tricycle. Until many years later I found out about the myth behind the story.

How marvelous such an unquestioning faith about the world around you. So pure and unspoiled.

Remembered on the 12^th of November 2008

Truus Palmen, from the Netherlands, born 4^th of June, 1947

There was also the time when Pasquale stole a car because I needed a carburetor.

My car was our transportation, and I had an Oldsmobile, and this time I did successfully rebuild the engine, I was 17 almost 18 at that point, but I needed a new carburetor. None of us had any money, and we somehow  learned that there was this car dealership that was selling all these cars, and they would leave the keys behind the license plate or where the gas cap was or somewhere - that was how they kept track of the keys. So we found a car that was identical to mine, and decided to take it one day and take the carburetor. Naturally Kenny didn't want to drive it, Kenny had a license, Joey had a license, and I had a license. I was the only one who had a car. Pasquale didn't have a license, but he wanted a license so we told him this is your opportunity to drive!

So we gave him a little training on my car, the cars were identical naturally, we taught him how to put it into gear, and two hours later we went and pulled up in the used car lot and Pasquale went and got the keys. He got in the car and drove behind us, I told him to follow me and we literally parked, it was stupid, in the parking lot next to where I lived. There was a church parking lot there. We were very obvious. It was wintertime, and it was dark early so as soon as the dealership closed we did it. And there we were in this church parking lot with two identical cars with the hoods open, pulling out the carburetor and we figured we would pretend we were trying to start the car, you know, jump the battery, and we just took the carburetor and left the rest of the car there.

USA

The seed story is just absoluely unbelievable. When we started it we didn't think at all that Pasquale would fall for it. But Kenny worked in produce in a grocer store, we were all kids, and he was very close with his boss, as a matter of fact he worked in produce all his life. In fact eventually Kenny moved to New York, and just got locked into produce. But Pasquale needed a job and Kenny and I came up with this idea this idea that we would persuade him to apply for a job at the store where Kenny worked to be the seed injector. We persuaded him, you know I said to him, how do you think the seeds get into food and things, you have seedless watermelon and seeded watermelon, the seeds have to get in there somehow, same thing with grapes. There are guys in the back who do this.

So Pasquale initially thought we were pulling his leg, but eventually we were so convincing that he thought he'd be foolish not to believe us. I remember, the whole night, once he did believe us, we spent the whole night drinking beer, and Kenny instructed him how to answer questions the boss who is going to interview him might ask, and Pasquale was taking notes, reviewing notes, and this went on for several days as  he was preparing for this interview. And Kenny told him not to tell anyone, because it was this really cushy job, and if he told anyone they would go and snatch it before he would have a chance.

All of it was really harmless and nobody really got hurt. We loved Pasquale and we were always protecting him. So he did, he went applied for the job, and Kenny was there the whole time, just absolutely dying, because Pasquale filled out the application and Kenny's boss accepted the application and he interviewed him. The boss told Pasquale that unfortunately someone had just taken the position but that he would keep his application on file in case. The strangest thing is, I don't know right now if Pasquale ever caught on at that time, after the interview. I'm sure he knows now, but not while we were hanging out together.

USA