ONE YEAR ON YORK AVEnUE

TERRIBLE NEWS--WE MUST MOVE FROM ENGLEWOOD AVENUE

When I was in the second grade we were forced to move when the three-decker that we lived in was sold. 

 We could not find a place to rent in our neighborhood. I was only six but I decided to go from house to house and ask if there was any open rental in the house. I could not find anything.

  The neighbors must have told my mother of my secret activity. She yelled at me for my doing it secretly, but she also said that it was a good idea and wished that it had worked. This is a good example of the double messages, and also shows me how at the age of  six I had already accepted that if  our family had  a problem, my job was to help to find a solution.

 We moved to another parish Saint Teresa and another school and rented an entire house on a busy street, YORK AVENUE,  that ran along railroad tracks and was semi-industrial. My mother hated it there—all the familiar friends and nearby stores were gone.

 I realized on some deep level that my parents were unhappy. Once I recall my mother standing at our kitchen window watching my father as he walked down the street to the bus stop, and she was praying that he would be hit by a car. I must have gasped or cried because I was very close to my father. 

 She said she was sorry then added --you are his daughter that's for sure. In some ways you are just like him.  I never knew what to make of the mixed messages. My mother redoubled her prayer  efforts and built a shrine to Mary in my bedroom and each night we all knelt and said the rosary there before going to bed. She had been to some kind of  Catholic rally and often repeated the phrase "THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER, STAYS TOGETHER."

That year was filled with  change not all for the bad. I had my own room, there was a  shrine to Mary on one of my walls. The school Saint Teresa's was in an old  public school  building awaiting the new school's construction. So we had double classes. Although I was in the second grade that grade  was combined with the  third. So to keep busy I did all the third grade work as well and I was never bored.

There was a movie theater close enough to walk to 

THE DARLTON on Newport Avenue. One  week night they featured old movies and it was a cheap ticket. I took Janie with me to see movies from the 30s and 40s And even now when I see Cagney or Cooper or Robinson in an old film on TCM, I remember that I saw them first at the DARLTON.

We were praying for some improvement in our lives. Our prayers--those daily rosaries-- were suddenly answered when our next door neighbor. Marge White,  from the old street came by and told my mother that we could move back and into their second floor. She and her husband had bought the house where they had been tenants and she wanted to help my mother. 

Her husband, John White, was an extremely kind man, and he knew the problems that my father created for our family . He told my mother that he would never raise the low weekly rent that he charged us as long as he owned the house. With this undreamed of security, we all joyfully moved back to the house just next door to our old one, I was convinced of the efficacy of prayer and of the power of the rosary.

Another unexpected result of the move back to my old parish school is that I was skipped into the fourth grade. This happened because the second grade in the new parish was combined with a third grade, and I had picked up all of the third grade lessons  and so was able to move from the second to the fourth.

 This felt good at the time and it banished all my secret fears that I was also intellectually delayed in some way--a fear that I got from the fact of my stuttering. I was glad to be back with the nuns that I knew and had missed in the new school,

 One disadvantage was that I was suddenly with students who were a year older than me, but at least I was not to be bored.  And the big reward was that I was now in  the same class as --my new girl friend LUCILLE.

Of course, the devotional practices at home increased. My mother put up another shrine to the Blessed Mother in the bedroom that I shared with my sister Janie. My mother also took up a devotion to the Infant of Prague and my mother made several different garments in different colors to change through the liturgical year. We also began constant Novenas to the Infant of Prague.

 Another new devotion started since my mother who was born on 28 October learned that Saint Jude was her patron saint. She became devoted to him—especially since as she explained to me-- he was the patron of the hopeless and despairing.

"Angels Unawares" and Other Childhood Spiritual BELIEFS

I know that my mother felt that she was caught in a very helpless situation with her two daughters with Down Syndrome and her gambler husband. She enlisted me to help more with my sisters care. She read a book by Dale Evans about her experience of having a child with Down Syndrome.

 She explained that Janie and Sheila were incapable of sin and that God had entrusted their care to us. They were the”angels unawares” that we were sheltering. Repeatedly, she would explain to me that I must never yell, or get angry or hit either of my sisters. She said that at the judgment after death God would ask us only about how we had cared for Janie and Sheila—the innocents that He had entrusted to us. “We will be judged by them.” I believed her—on some level – I still do .