Mass At Our Lady Of Fatima

Attended mass this past Sunday at Our Lady Of Fatima, R.C.C. in Jackson Heights, N.Y. The priest celebrating it gave a homily that included thoughts about the southern border crisis, the fighting in Gaza and also the conflict in the Ukraine. He neglected to mention anything at all about the systematic murder of Christians in Iraq and many other places in the Middle East as well as Africa. I remain utterly dumfounded by this silence.  What is going on?

Children And Other Living Beings

Small creatures, those that a child delights in, were no less attractive to me at a time when neither taxes nor even homework were a concern and the visual and tactile encounters with these animals were so stimulatingly new and yet they were like old friends that I thirsted to examine  and possess. Killies or saltwater minnows were riveting. So were tiny kittens that, unlike the small fishes, permitted an enclaspment so utterly attainable for little hands. Then too, their soft furriness was so delightful for one learning easily and quickly to love after being so thoroughly loved by gentle parents and grandparents alike. The warmth for these living things did not extend to insects. Whether instinctively or through the lessons planted by the angry swatting of a fly or an adult's alacrity in the process of squashing a crawling critter unwelcomingly appearing in a seemingly spotless world, a bug did not share in this world of happy, positive attention, if not affection, paid.

I recall too, a summer family vacation. It was 1956 and we were enroute to the homes of friends of each of my parents in eastern Massachusetts. I was so small that I was hardly aware of geography or state borders, but I knew that this was an adventure and again, those small critters, close to my line of vision,  literally within my grasp and so wonderfully alive (or startlingly dead), drew my attention unfailingly. The parenthetical reference first: this journey via the coastal route of Southern Connecticut brought us naturally, to many a seascape and piscatorial setting. Having dined in a clam house near several wharves we were outside preparing to leave when in the failing light I caught sight of a silvery fish floating and dead while being carried along by a swift current  under a nearby causeway. My young, inexperienced mind decoded this scene as something awesomely dramatic, exciting and even ominous. I was compelled to try and see the fish again when it passed under the bridge and would hopefully appear on the other side. It did and the thrill was unmistakable and yet to this day, still not entirely comprehensible.

Earlier, a motel, probably in rural eastern Connecticut, was our first stop in the late afternoon after a long car trip from New York.  The friendly proprietress offered us cool drinks and I remember lying down on a grassy hill adjacent to her office and under a big shade tree. A small girl about my age, along with a puppy, came toward me and the four legged youngster just jumped onto and off my stomach several times as its part of an enthusiastic kind of welcoming committee. The little lady clapped her hands in what seemed support of the canine's expression of unconditional love for this slight stranger with translucent, plastic pink eyeglasses and a usual dour look of precocity and angst. My mien was instantaneously transformed by the encounter to that of a giggling six year old without a care in the world. There was an unreserved delight in the uncomplicated fun that this pair offered and that I shared so unhesitatingly. The inclination toward introversion was at such an early stage then that I was easily relieved of it and I was taken for (and was) a normal kid who especially embraced the playfulness that so naturally possessed one of my tender years. I reveled in these tiny animals and my precocity included a pre-pubescent interest in the opposite sex. I was very much aware that this little human and probable mistress of this dog was a girl, and that somehow made the encounter that much more enchanting.

I don't remember if my family rented a motel room there. I only remember that wondrous moment in time when only the joyfulness of playing, loving and being loved was what mattered and that, looking back, we were consummate experts in this art of playing. In fact though, we were, all three of us, of course, utterly artless in our play on that hill in that minute sliver of time in that southern New England sunshine of oh, so long ago.