40 DAYS AFTER DEATH in Woonsocket

THE 40 DAY GATHERING AFTER THE DEATH OF PETER VANGEL

 Although Roman Catholics have a mass celebrated a month after the death of a loved one, I do not think that it is the same as the tradition in the Christian Orthodox faith to have a gathering 40 days after the death of a Church member.

I  did some research and  learned that the tradition flows from the belief that the Soul must make a 40 day long ascent  up to the Gates of Heaven.This ascent marks the last time that the forces of evil, the Devils, those like Lucifer who have been banished to Hell and are always seeking souls to take to Hell, can battle for the soul of the dead person.
The Orthodox believe that the soul is in transition and its fate is uncertain for that time.

They believe that the soul is protected and helped by its Guardian Angel--that is an individual Angel that is appointed to guard each soul from birth to death and after death into eternity.The Guardian Angel pleas the case of the Soul. Sometimes the Arch Angel Michael appears with his flaming sword to fight  off the attacking Devils.

The soul must go through TWENTY terrible toll-gates during these forty days.  Each bitter tollgate records and recounts one particular sin or failing such as pride, envy, lust, anger, etc and the accounts of the recording Angel are brought forward. The Guardian Angel and sometimes the Saint that shares the person's name  and/or  birthday speak on behalf of the fearful trembling soul.
  
This idea of a series of toll gates is quite a dramatic and vivid one.   It is certainly true  as I learned in the year as a Fulbright Senior Fellow that I lived in Romania, which is an orthodox majority country, that people there have a  sense that the dead are still around  for the first  forty days after death,

To serve and help them through this trial, the Romanians bring food to the  grave site and leave it there. Sometimes in the winter they also bring cloaks and wrap the stone monument over the grave to show their desire to help the dead  keep  away the frigid air. They also light long lasting votive candles on the grave.
   
It is not that they are frightened of the dead.  No, they do not want the Dead to be frightened during this period of trial and transition. And of course, they pray for their beloved dead daily. 
Such elaborate and community habits do not seem to be exercised  in their entirety in Woonsocket today, but the 40 day gathering and meal is a reminder of that tradition.

The oasis of peace that is Oak Hill Cemetery cast its spell on this warm and dry day. A landmark that was created by  men and women of Woonsocket who were ardent Abolitionists and were prepared and fully expected to sacrifice their lives to secure the end of slavery in THE LAND OF THE FREE. They planned a burial place that would be like an old forest of strong Oak Trees. They marched and drilled in this space, and some even dug their own graves before they went off to battle in the Civil War. What spirits must inhabit those sacred woods!

On  Saturday we could still feel their benign presence  as we drove into the gates and began the ascent to the grave site. Once there, I met the priest who was presiding over the ceremony and who so  carefully lead us in prayer. Father Morar of Saint John the Baptist Romanian Orthodox Church set the tone of  reverence and also friendship.  He is blessed with a high intelligence and expansive personality; he engages people easily and creates an immediate sense of community,
Known for his superb craftsmanship in wood, he also brings a creative and artistic temperament to the spiritual guardianship that he personifies.

Speaking to him  reminded me of the many people I met in the year that I spent teaching as Senior Fulbright Fellow in Romania.  Father  Romar had  just returned from a visit to his homeland. It was a great  blast to my memory to be able to share a few reminiscences of that  beautiful country.

I was impressed by both his simplicity and his worldliness. He exuded a sense of tolerance and wide understanding. I felt that he  sees, as our Savior did, the sharing of food as one of the  key acts that bring about human  harmony,

He reminds me of the host that Jesus praises in one of his parables who sets a lavish table for his son's wedding banquet and the invited guests decline. He sends out his servants to the roadways to invite people from far and wide to join the feast that has been prepared.

That is the sense of inclusiveness that marked the grave side  40 Day event and it so matched the personality of the gracious educator Peter Vangel whose passing into his eternal reward we were celebrating. I imagine that his soul passed through the tollgates unimpeded. On that perfect July day I believe that he was  looking down at  those of us below who must still one day face that same treacherous ascent.  May we have the grace to follow  his  footsteps into eternity.

BEWARE THE IDES OF JUNE

So much new grief in June

Yesterday, Saturday, I attended a funeral at Oak Hill Cemetery in Woonsocket for the father Peter Vangel of my good friend and  champion of Oak Hill, Elizabeth.  The ceremony was grave side and so I was able to drive in and watch from my car.  I wish that I could have  been  more active. He was a jewel of a man and had a great career as an educator and superintendent of schools. It was a beautiful  occasion with a ceremony led by an Orthodox priest and a  Cantor. The sounds that filled the grave site were  holy and soothing.

 My friend Elizabeth has cared for both her parents for more than ten years. Her devotion is  only surpassed by her refusal to allow the dictates of others to tell her how to conduct her life and prolong the lives of her  parents. She regularly amazed friends and neighbors by spiriting both parents off to Block Island where they rejoiced in the ocean views and invigorating fresh breezes. 
She once told me that after her father's first hip replacement a phrase came to her head. You can either live dying or die living. SHE chose the die while living and that meant to her living life to the full.

I also mourn the death of a friend who did die living.  My dear friend from Cincinnati Jackie Demaline. She was the  Drama Critic for many years at the Cincinnati Enquirer  and we became close friends  when I was the drama specialist at the University of  Cincinnati.
 It is rare to meet anyone in life who shares  your passion for a subject. So meeting Jackie added greatly to my life and my work. She and I would concoct schemes for new  organizations or events to promote drama. 
To name just two-- I began with her help and instigation and with other interested people  the Theater of  the Mind--a play reading series at the Mercantile Library and The Cincinnati Playwrights' Initiative to produce  readings of new plays by local playwrights at the Aronoff Center.
She was a great Provocateur and she was witty, feisty and dynamic. Also loving and kind.   I will miss her and so will the many friends that she made. 
 I made the move to get to know her better when in the 1990's I was invited to one of her legendary Birthday Parties --I missed the last in May. 2018.  There we were in a  small restaurant--Jackie ate most meals out in public. And I was  late. When she saw me, she rose from her chair and came forward to greet me with a hug.

 I don't know what  inspired me but I was moved by the warmth of her gesture to  answer in kind.  And without expecting to and without planning, I recited out loud a little poem that I knew as a child.
(with apologies to Leigh Hunt who wrote "Jenny Kissed Me")
I  proclaimed:
JACKIE KISSED ME WHEN WE MET
JUMPING FROM THE CHAIR SHE SAT IN
TIME YOU THIEF WHO LOVE TO GET
SWEETS INTO YOUR LIST, PUT THAT IN

SAY  I'M WEARY,  SAY I'M SAD
SAY THAT HEALTH AND WEALTH HAVE MISSED ME 
SAY I'M GROWING OLD BUT ADD
 JACKIE KISSED ME.

So I send to Jackie in eternity this last kiss. May she continue  to  make us aware of her love and care by prodding us to do more  with our creative  energies. She always did.

Sometimes writing this blog I feel like the spider that 
Walt Whitman describes in his poem--

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

This is how spidery  I sometimes feel as I weave the warp and woof of these blog entries and toss them out  to the wilds of the internet. I guess that being old makes one feel more isolated and for me the   exploration of my own creativity  seems like the only and best option open to me.

That is why I am grateful  to my readers who comment--not because of what they say,  but because now I know they are there and it gives me  proof that some of the gossamer threads I throw out from here in Pawtucket do catch somewhere.

O MY SOUL

Apples in the Bucket

One of the things that I missed most in the decades that I lived and taught in Cincinnati was the experience of Autumn in Rhode Island. And key to that experience is the chomping of an apple from a local orchard. But not just any apple and not any orchard. I longed for a Macoun from Phantom Farm. I never found any like them in Ohio and I hoped each year. But now that I am back here I have found myself taking one of my favorite and most familiar rides up Diamond Hill Road to the orchard there. It is a favorite route because it was one I often traveled with my aunt Grace Jenckes Hartley to visit the graves of my mother in Mount Calvary and nearby the historical Cumberland cemetery on Dexter Street where my grandmother Ida Mowry and her first husband and her father and her mother are buried. Then we trailed up to Diamond Hill stopped to reward ourselves at THE DREAM MACHINE--a great and under-praised but always busy ice cream place across from Diamond Hill State Park. Then on to the glorious Oak Hill cemetery on Rathbun Street in Woonsocket to visit the Jenckes memorial and the graves of my father, Grace's brother, and all the Jenckes' who preceded us. On the way home we stopped to buy apples and cider at the Phantom Farm also on Diamond Hill Road. My aunt would buy RI Greenings for pie making, she made the best pies and taught me her pie crust secrets. I would eat the apple peels as she pared the apples.But for out of hand eating, I only had eyes for the Macouns. They are the crispest of apples; their skin is taut and sweet and the moist flesh of the apple seems to explode in flavor. I could never wait to get them home but ate one in the car. "You are so like your father; Norman made a religious experience out of eating an apple." I feel that whatever health and vigor I have I owe to the apples and cider. They help me and my body make the seasonal change. I love all the seasons, but as a child autumn was my special time. I felt it coming on in late August--you know what I mean there is a day in August when the breeze suddenly turns to a chill wind and you wish you had a sweater and you know the brief ecstatic summer is already leaving. She is very fickle here in Rhode Island. I always hope for a long lingering Indian Summer. Something to fend off the onslaught of winter. I liked the sledding and skating of winter and of course, the coming of Christmas. But the two months after Christmas, January and February, are cold and fierce. And the piles of snow freeze and re freeze and long out wear their welcome. As I am older now, I fear winter--with its snow and ice and freezings-- it seems scary and keeps me house bound. But let's not go there--not yet. This autumn due to my surgery and recovery I left my pilgrimage late. I did get to Phantom Farm and enjoyed sitting on their side deck in the painted rockers, sipping coffee and having an apple dumpling. But the Macouns were gone by. I took a bag of excellent Macintosh--but they are not the same as a Macoun--not as sweet and tart and not as crisp and firm and not as dark red. But learning as I am to treasure what I can do, I enjoyed the visit and relished the sparrows coming for crumbs and the "mellow fruitfulness" of the entire scene. Another Fall without Macouns-- how many more would I have to savor that special fruit. But I was wrong. A few days ago my friend Elizabeth called and said she was driving to an orchard that she loved in Wrentham to get apples, could she get some for me? I grasped at that straw and said--if they have any Macouns left please get me a bag. They did and she did. So this story has a happy ending--there are Macoun apples in the bucket. Every one is perfect and every one is like a time machine taking me back to sitting on the second floor porch of our tenement in Pawtucket and sitting with my father eating the crisp fruit and talking about it as we looked at The Daily Racing Form and he circled the "winners" for tomorrow's races.

Cemeteries that I love

I am a person who is fascinated by old cemeteries. I have a love for the old stones and for the poetry that is often carved there. I have visited cemeteries in Canada and Hollywood, Paris, London and Dublin--even Venice. I have been taken to visit the graves of my ancestors since I was a small child. My mother would take me to Valley Falls to Mount Calvary where her parents are buried and her brothers and sisters. And now she lies there too beside her own daughters, my sisters, who are also buried there. The stone that has their names and birth and death dates carved is full and so are the plots. When my mother took me there as a child she would clean the gravestone and she brought a plastic bucket and a brush and some soap and would get water from a nearby faucet. She would scrub the stone clean that she had purchased many years before. She said that when she was a child and her mother came to the graves there was no stone and they would pace off the grave site that sits beneath a large oak tree. But now there is a stone and the only information that is not yet there is the year of my Aunt Anna's death--you must wait a year after the death to place that date and so I will have it added soon. My father's sister, my Aunt Grace Jenckes, took me to a cemetery in Woonsocket to visit the graves of my father's family. Oak Hill is an oasis of peace and forested beauty in the middle of Woonsocket. It is hidden behind a row of three-deckers and when my aunt would turn into the drive from Rathbun Street it felt like we had found a door to a secret garden. What amazed me there was the prominence and beauty of the Jenckes Monument and to see that my father's people were buried there and had been for many generations. Grace would tell me what she knew about the Jenckes family; but most of her tales were anecdotal and were part of an oral tradition. I have since learned more about the History of the Jenckes family in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island Historical Society. But the person who has most brought it alive to me is Elizabeth Vangel who through her research uncovered so many of the illustrious histories of those who founded the sacred oak grove that is Oak Hill.