loved. She talked about Madame Curie the great scientist, and she passed on to us bits and pieces of information about her own studies, lectures she'd heard, wise people she'd known, and books she'd read.
I would say she was an irresistible talker, and she did something which now seems to me intensely and distinctively Catholic. She addressed a multitude of questions which had never come up. For example, I remember her explaining to me almost casually why there was no conflict between theories of evolution and the words of the Bible.
Genesis tells us God created the world in six days, she would say, but Genesis doesn't tell us how long a day was for God, in God's time. End of conflict.
We were as a family quite interested in evolution, and speculated about it all the time - what had life been like for cavemen? How had they communicated, how had they learned things? My older sister was always finding fossils in the gravel in the backyard. And these were true fossils, some of them, though the stories she told as to what they were had more imagination than scientific preciseness.
There was almost nothing precise about anybody in my childhood.
As the years passed, my older sister brought home fascinating books from the public library, and my mother and my sister read these books together, while I listened to what they said. I remember the whole family becoming enthralled with the life of the ballerina Anna Pavlova. Around that time, we went to see the ballet Giselle.
This was an overwhelming sensuous experience - sitting in the fourth or fifth row of an elegant theater (The Civic on Baronne Street downtown, the very same theater that played all the foreign films or artistic films), and watching the exer-tion and the execution of the dancers at close range.
We also attended a performance of the opera Carmen when we were still in grade school; and we started going to the Municipal Auditorium for concerts when I was still in grade school as well.
This was my education, this world of my sister and my mother talking about books, the world in which the radio continued to pour out suspenseful dramas in the evening, and in which classical music was played all the time on the phonograph because we could rent records from the uptown music library, records which we could never have afforded to own.
This was the place where I learned just about anything of importance that I now know.
I cannot imagine my life without my mother or my father or my sister Alice.
My father took us to the library when we were little, and he introduced us to books, yes, and he was a brilliant man.
But the core experience for me was not reading these books, because I couldn't. But of discovering that while he was in the Redemptorist Seminary, my father had been a writer, and that in his desk was a treasure trove of poems that he'd written and some short stories as well.
Again, I couldn't really read these things; I couldn't make them my own emotionally by reading. Reading was too difficult. My mind wandered too much. But the idea of my father as a writer was something that blazed like the Burning Bush.
My father also wrote a children's novel at this time, called The Impulsive Imp, which he read to us chapter by chapter as he developed it. This novel was never published in my childhood, but my father did seek a publisher for it, and even had a friend do illustrations for it, dark paintings, as I recall, which we liked very much.
I, too, wanted to be a writer and struggled with stories and poems even though I could hardly read. This was the first thing I wanted to do with my whole heart and soul, and the idea that I had to wait to grow up to do it was untenable, and gruesome. Though of course that is what happened.
Let me briefly describe our house. It was a long lower flat in a duplex on the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Philip, and it had two porches on the front, one enclosed by screens, and the other open. French windows opened onto the porches from the living room. Sliding doors divided the living room from my mother's bedroom, and from the main hall. The entrance to the flat was from a side porch, through an alcove that held shelves of books. These books included Chesterton, Dickens, and a