Esther, 47, San Francisco
>>The prompt: 400-word autobiography
In our family we went to Mass every Sunday. My mother took all the commandments of the Church seriously, so attendance was not voluntary. Even if we were far from home, camping somewhere, or visiting friends out of town, when Sunday morning came, Mom would collect us from our disparate activities and we would tromp off to the local St. Anne’s. In those days the ceremony was still performed in Latin, with the priest turned away most of the time, so from my six-year-old point of view, it didn’t really matter where we were. I stared intently at the backs of other parishioners, and breathed in the pervasive smell of Altar Society flowers and incense left over from Easter. The monotonous repetition of prayers in a dead language, the background of brown wool in the winter and print dresses in the summer, the lack of expression on the faces of the people known and unknown, served to lull me into a state of musing quietude. I spent all that empty time daydreaming, spinning out endless, convoluted fantasies. I knew how to keep up outward appearances, repeating “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” as if I had something to feel guilty about. We all sang “faith of our fathers, holy faith, we will be true to you till death.” It was the most delicious feeling, experiencing a hundred martyrdoms in my head, all the time knowing that I was completely safe.
There was so much we didn’t know about then. When I was twelve, and the ‘60s were over, I remember looking at a LIFE magazine retrospective issue: THIS TURBULENT DECADE IN PICTURES. All of those famous images—monks in orange robes engulfed in red flames, the bodies of young college students lying lifeless in the quad, the Beatles playing at Candlestick, unable to hear themselves think because of the screaming. It must have all happened in another world. Much more interesting to look at my mother’s box of loose photos—me in First Communion white, with a real veil I kept in its white box until I was way past thirty; my sister and me tearing open Christmas presents under a massive tree; my mother, flushed and smiling at some forgotten Church social. I knew more about transubstantiation, that mysterious alchemy that only priests were allowed to perform, than troop movements in Indochina, or Martin Luther King.
Esther – Age 47 – San Francisco
from 400 Words, Issue 1–Autobiographies
page 72
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