In The God Way

Life evolves

The Story

Divine Dinny

Christmas 2006

Notes on Marie

Reflections on a Deadline

Art of Spiritual Peacemaking

Beltain 2003

April Garden

June Garden

Notes on Marie

On this particular day he was filled with reflections. Some recent and some of times many years ago when as a child he had made such important decisions that were only now being played out. In his memory he could see and hear the nuns who set so much of his life in motion, but he could not remember their names. He was only six when he decided, during a playground discussion with the older, softer nun, the one that was not his teacher, that he would not pursue wealth, but fame instead as a major life pursuit

And then, again, when he was eleven. That one he could really remember.

It was a warm spring day in San Antonio, Texas, and the required military school uniform seemed a bit much to this fifth grader, especially the black shiny shoes. Behind a pale blue sky sprinkled with high wispy clouds the sun was heating the new wing of Saint Peters Elementary School to dreamy levels. He was in a rare personal, one-on-one discussion with the young nun who was the teacher of his fifth grade. He talked about his disdain for wealth and his desire for everlasting fame. This young woman talked knowledgeably about famous men of antiquity, developing a theme she had discovered. She had noticed that many famous people had abandoned the church for the period of their life during which they created their fame. They would abandon or forgo their family experience. And then, late in their lives, when the fires of their spirits were burning low, they would return to their home in the Church, repent their sins and await the resurrection of the Lord.

John had picked at the black tie on his khaki shirt in thought. It seemed to this Catholic boy that such a choice was a big risk for the price of fame, but perhaps worth it. But what horror would happen if he died before his return to the Church? He said nothing, just nodded his head.

Sister Forgotten Name pressed her lips together. She lifted her eyebrows in a response that showed she was not surprised, and with the shape of her mouth hinted that she would pray for him.

Later, when he was fifteen, and a student at Mungret College, near Limerick, Ireland, there was that awful vow of poverty. It stung him when he made it and was often revoked in his later life. Mungret College was a boarding school. His little curtained-off section of the Dormitory Hall was in the New Wing, which had been built eight hundred years prior to his arrival. It was Saint Patrick's Day John was recalling, a feast day most solemn, and all of the boys, even the seminarians and all of the Jesuit priests and brothers were packed in the stone Chapel. A special visiting priest had been talking to the boys for days about the values of vows for spiritual development. He explained all of the various vows that had been used for ages. On that day in Ireland the strange sounding priest was at fever pitch and suddenly John was aware that he had done it. He had taken a sacred vow of poverty. His heart was washed in immediate regret. As he had gone through his early years, many times struggling to keep body and soul together, his mind drifted back to that awful moment. He would be awash with the fear that all those difficulties, the hardness for his children, was all of his own doing by making that vow of poverty.

But today he picks up the stack of bills from his desk. The stack of recent bills that had carefully been placed in front of those old piles of paper that still rested like sleeping chickens on a moonless night. These bills were still fresh even though he had expectedly been away for the last six days. He carried this stack from the bedroom with his glass of tea into the office and sat down at his computer.

Once there he remembered that just before he had left for Georgia he had found a time to install the four gig hard drive he had purchased from an auction on the Internet at lizardo.onsale.com. After the bidding stopped he was able to watch the hard drives' slow progress across the country on the UPS site. By the time two weeks had passed and the hard drive had arrived his pride was washed away by an ad in the Seattle Times proclaiming the same hard drive for a price about the same. He thought about how much fun it might be to install all of those cool programs he had downloaded from the web.

Instead of paying the bills, or installing the software, he found himself in a long thought about the past few days. The previous weekend started with calls from his sisters, concerned that their mother was slipping fast. Mother had been living with Sally for the last four years after her second amputation on her left leg. Her time to cross the gates was near. By Sunday he had purchased tickets from Microsoft's Encarta Travel web site and was on his way to Atlanta. By then she was dead.

Marie was a product of a different age. While John's life had been a wonder and an exploration into the unexpected, the lives of his parents had fallen across much harder times. Marie had been born to a young couple that had emigrated form County Cork in Ireland. They wound up, like many Irish, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father had found a bit of a living by picking up the coal that had fallen from the railroad cars that fed the steel mills. This led to a job on the railroad that, of course, involved a lot of travel away from home. Marie's mother died before she was eight. She lived with relatives from the old county who were also in Cleveland. Before she was fifteen her father died of lung disease, and she was orphaned. Then when she was finishing high school the depression started, yet she somehow managed to win her cap as a registered nurse.

Her first job was as a school nurse. She told the story of her first day, walking with eyes straight ahead in one of the poorest black neighborhoods. Teenage children taunting her as she waked steadfastly into the fenced school yard. Not even the stone that hit her back provoked a change of pace.

Then the US entered World War II. Marie and her best friend enlisted, and after a brief training found themselves in England. They were there for months setting up the mobile surgical hospitals, packing them up, and moving them again. The training had been grueling, but the nighttimes were free. There were many parties and dances and the Americans were sought after guests. While on leave she danced with an officer from Texas who was nicknamed Wild Willie. She hardly remembered him at the time, but he was smitten.

Finally her group and all of their boxes containing their mobile hospital were loaded on a ship along with thousands of troops and headed off to Africa. It was on the ship that Wild Willie found his lady and started their difficult romance. When they landed in Algiers the first of the troops left the ship under fire and attacked the German positions in the harbor. At first they were all mowed down, but in the end the German machine guns were quieted and the ramps were opened and the real unloading began. It went on for days.

The troops set up rows and rows of tents and thousands of troops assembled as more and more ships steamed into the harbor miles away. Strange music floated through the dark and beautiful African nights. One day a truck stuffed with curvaceous glass Coke bottles arrived and instigated a small riot. Somehow both Marie and Bill captured a bottle each, which they kept for the other until they connected later. It was the calm before the pattern began.

Marie would watch Bill's artillery unit move off to an advanced position. After a day or so they could hear the big guns go to work. Then the infantry would move out, raising huge clouds of dust into the hot Algerian air. Once they were all in motion, the hospital would join the rush straight towards that distant booming. Then the hospital would be set up and the river of wounded bodies would start flowing. Marie lived in constant fear she would see the big-eared Texas boy pierced and bleeding on the stretchers waiting on the floor for the surgeons' tables. The nurses and the doctors worked until they started to make mistakes, then they slept for a few hours while another crew would step up to the tables. This would go on for days until the flow of bodies dropped to a trickle.

Marie and Bill would cling to each other and find a refuge from the horrors about them. They fostered their love in this emotional desert until the attraction reached a phase transition by the time they were halfway up the boot of Italy. They got married right in the middle of that mobile hospital, the crates of supplies covered with tablecloths forming the altar. Their getaway car was a jeep and there was a broom tied to it bearing the banner "Just Married". On their honeymoon they bought a landscape created in multicolored wood of the beautiful bay where they stayed that hung on a wall in the many different houses they would live in during their life together. They attended an opera together.

Then it was back to the cutting tables. One night the the big guns on both sides found each other and some of the wounded were from Bill's platoon. She asked each one if they knew about Wild Willie. One man with shatter where his leg had been had an answer for her. "Oh, he's dead. I saw the shell go right through the roof of the command center." Then he was gone under the anesthetic and the cutting continued even through her shock. Two days later Bill came to the hospital causing a second shock. The shell had not exploded.

John was seeing this story in his mind from the photographs his niece had selected. His brother and his three sisters and Uncle Mac and his daughter and her husband were in Atlanta for the funeral. They had all sat at the dinner table with stacks of photos brought together and separated into piles for each child, then the history piles, Uncle Mac's piles and a pile of mystery people. Then John David arrived, John's cousin he had not seen for over forty years, having driven from Maryland. He identified his family members from the mystery stack. It was as if the purpose of the funeral was to gather family to console themselves for the loss and richly celebrate that part of them that was still among the living.

Of course all of these memories young and old, prevented the paying of the bills. Sometimes the flow of thought is more important than the flow of money; for John this was one of those times. He set the bills down on the table he had sworn he would keep clear with a tinge of guilt. John tried to put himself in the here and now and was rewarded with the realization of how dry his mouth was. He sipped from the iced tea he had brought to the computer table and tasted the dark taste of the tannin, and then he was gone again.

He remembered the first time he really understood his mother. He had been in his early forties married to his second wife. The children were grown up and the two of them were moving into a house on a five acre parcel of woods and walnut trees. They had just moved while his mother was visiting. She worked like a trooper at the lighter chores: unpacking boxes by going through everything in each like a detective. From time to time she would make noises, and even ask questions. "I just feel I can get to know how your life is so well by being so nosy," she explained.

John understood exactly what she was talking about and was glad to share the story of his life as much as he could. In such close comradeship Marie told a number of the worst stories of her war experience. These were stories he had never heard before; they had been hinted at darkly by references not previously expressed.

This story was about her best friend, whose picture John had seen for the first time in Atlanta. This woman had joined the Army with Marie and they had stayed together throughout Africa, Sicily and Italy. Marie described the value of the relationship, the closeness they had shared, and the comfort they took from each other. Then she talked about the night of her worst horror. She and her friend were working in the ward tents. They tended to keep an eye on each other especially when there was shelling, like this night. Marie looked up at the sound of her friends voice heard in argument. She saw her dealing with a soldier unwillingly extending his wounded arm to her care. Suddenly, before Marie could move from the bedside of her patient to come to assistance, a shell came right through the fabric of the tent. When the smoke cleared her friend was no longer standing. Her severed head was now clutched in the good arm of the soldier who was running screaming in circles, blood gushing in heart pumping frequency from the side of his shoulder where there was no longer an arm.

John sat in reverberating memory gazing for the first time at the register on his screen. Now his mother had passed through the veil. He marveled at the difference of his life from hers. In his heart there was a certainty that life was good. Even the hard one his mother had lived. And in his heart he knew that death, too was good. That, as humans walking on earth, we are but at the beginning of our journey. Our lives are preparations for greater events that take place on the distant shores we reach so easily without the weight of our bodies. At last John paid his bills.

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