Called Out of Darkness Page 0,9
that she had learned from movies. She described movies to us which we all thought would never come to the theaters of our time again. So anything one learned from the radio, from film, from museums, from church - all of it was a rich and wondrous stream in which one could thrive.
The radio brought us not only shows but broadcasts of the Rosary being recited, every evening for fifteen minutes. The Sunday Mass was broadcast over the radio too. My grandmother, long unable to go to church because of her broken hip and her built-up shoe, listened to the Mass in the dining room as she said her Rosary and read Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic newspaper, all at the same time.
When I went to school and began to read, I lost an immense world of image, color, and intricate connections, but undoubtedly I retained more than I lost.
I gained in school a poor understanding of things through written text. School was when excruciating boredom and anger and frustration really began for me. The mystery and calm of the early years were destroyed by school. School was torture. School was like being in jail. It was captivity and torment and failure.
But what remained forever, what continued, was the sense of God and His Presence, of His embracing awareness of us and all we said and did and wanted and failed to do, and of His love. School couldn't destroy that faith. And alongside it, I retained the sense that the world was an interesting creative place, especially if one could get out of school.
Let me emphasize this again: Christian faith was in no way opposed to the world in which I grew up. One didn't leave the world to go to church. Church was simply the most interesting place in the world that I knew. The fact that the school was Catholic and the school taught about God didn't come between me and God. Nothing could do that when I was a child. I simply thought the school was a boring and miserable place. And I think I was right.
Chapter Three
Be re ll i eve d . I don't intend to describe eleven years of Catholic school in the same detail as I've described the world before school. I hated it too much to describe it here. It's much easier to try to draw useful conclusions from what happened than to relive it and wind up in a padded cell.
Before I go on to deal with school in any way, I'd like to talk a little more about my mother. And also I need to talk about my father and my older sister.
If I hadn't known my mother was the primary source of my education when I was little, I certainly knew after a few years of staring out of the window in school.
My mother's whole presentation of the world is what I took away from the first fourteen years of my life.
As I mentioned earlier, she'd read poems to us from before I could recall. My sister, Alice, and I would snuggle up with her on her bed in the smallest and coziest bedroom in the house. The book was called Two Hundred Best Poems for Boys and Girls compiled by Marjorie Barrows. It was a small hard-cover with a drawing of three timeless little children against a black flowered backdrop.
The poems were illustrated with small silhouettes by Janet Laura Scott and Paula Rees Good. The publisher was the Whitman Publishing Company, in Racine, Wisconsin.
This was the only book from which my mother read to us in the first years. "Song at Dusk" by Nancy Byrd Turner set the tone of my entire life.
The flowers nod, the shadows creep, A star comes over the hill;
The youngest lamb has gone to sleep, The smallest bird is still.
The world is full of drowsy things, And sweet with candlelight;
The nests are full of folded wings -
Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.
Other poems in the book were filled with pirates, dragons, fairies, and general mystery and magic. My older sister, Alice, liked the more action-packed poems, but I think we agreed on "The Tale of Custard the Dragon" by Ogden Nash.
Belinda lived in a little white house, With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse, And a little yellow dog and a little red wagon, And a realio, trulio, little pet dragon.
The poem goes on for over twelve stanzas, and the gist is that Custard the dragon was a coward who nevertheless proved