ONCE AGAIN, TO WALK IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CHRIST

            Once again, I watched in horror today as ballistic missiles streaked over the night skies of Israel, some aimed at the ancient city of Jerusalem, sacred to the world’s three great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In the center of the walled city of old Jerusalem stands the magnificent Dome of the Rock, topped by a signature golden dome, visible to nearly the whole of the surrounding city.  It is the third holiest site in Islam, believed to be where Muhammad took his night journey into Heaven.  Underneath the Dome of the Rock are the ruins of the Second Temple, sacred to Jews worldwide.  It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.  Only the Western Wall remains of the Temple.  A short distance away is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed by Christians to be built on the site where Jesus Christ was crucified and buried.

            I have been fortunate to visit the ancient city eight times, most recently in 2022.  Tourists can now view the ongoing excavations of the Second Temple.  I have stood in the cobbled compound of the Dome of the Rock.  And like millions before me, I have knelt at the Altar of the Crucifixion, which is revered as the site of the Tomb of Christ.

            All of Jerusalem has been under Israeli control since the 1967 Six Day War.  It opened the old city to all faiths and provided protection.  I am grateful to the State of Israel for making it possible to visit these sacred sites.  And I pray that the Israelis continue to protect this ancient city.  So, when missiles no longer streak over the skies of Israel and the guns fall silent, I may return for yet another visit, and my children and my grandchildren may one day walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.  

 

SHE WAS MY MEMAW

In his speech to the Republican National Convention, J D Vance gave credit for his success to his grandmother, the woman he called Memaw.  As he spoke with such love about his hardscrabble grandmother, it took me back to the northwestern hills of West Virginia and the woman who was my own memaw…

Her name was Margaret Jane Rush Green.  To me she was Aunt Maggie.  She was born in 1887, the fourth of eight children of Irish immigrants; in 1910 married a coalminer in Grantown, West Virginia, welcomed her first child a year later and was pregnant with her second child when her beloved Charles was killed in a mine accident in 1913. 

A year later, her small, five room bungalow home on a hill above Pitrolo’s Garage in Grantown was bursting with her elderly parents, her dead brother’s five orphans, the youngest of whom was my mother Kathrine, and Aunt Maggie’s younger brother, Patrick.  The bathroom facility was a two-hole outhouse about fifty or sixty steps up a rise from the back door.  Clothes washing was done in Paw Paw Creek.  And Saturday night the heavy porcelain coated steel tub was pulled from the pantry and filled with water heated on the wood stove.  Adults bathed first, then children.  It was the same routine when I came to live with Aunt Maggie, except she bathed me first, herself second. 

My father saw me after my birth.  And stayed mostly absent after that.  My mother found a nurse’s job with the State of West Virginia in Charleston, 140 miles south.  It was early 1941.  The Great Depression continued its grip and WWII was still months off.  I was left with Aunt Maggie. 

Maggie Green was an amazon of a woman, standing five-foot-nine or ten.  Her wardrobe was made from fifty-pound flour bags, cut from a single Butterick pattern, and put together on a Singer treadle sewing machine.  She planted and tended a large garden; shopped for her other needs at the coal company’s store in Grantown.  A devout Catholic, she wore her lone store-bought dress to Mass every Sunday, cooked the main meal for the parish priest for the better part of four decades, wore her long, salt and pepper hair in a bun at the back of her neck, and cursed like an Irish sailor.  Damns and hells were as frequent as the’s and and’s along with a smattering of the Lord’s name being taken in vain.  When her patience was sorely challenged, she would exclaim in her gruff voice, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”  Then she would look down at me with those stern blue eyes and explain, “Just praying, Alice Ann.”

Aunt Maggie never attended school.  She was taught to read and write, probably by her mother, giving her just enough skill to read the Bible.  Lost in those parental lessons were punctuation, starting sentences with a capital letter and spelling.  Deciphering Aunt Maggie’s letters and postcards could give birth to a new game, Hillybilly Scrabble.  Before I passed my second birthday though…she had taught me my ABC’s.

In mid-1943, my mother collected me and we traveled to California where she found work at an Army hospital.  Aunt Maggie made the same five-day train trip in late November, 1944, to celebrate my fourth birthday, traveling cross-country in wartime, when civilians could be bumped to make room for any military heading to the west coast.  I remember Aunt Maggie in a three-quarter length black wool coat, a somewhat crumpled black hat held in place by the largest hat pin I ever saw, then or since.  On her arm was a sturdy black leather purse.  Inside was a coin purse that held the money she would be spending more immediately.  Safely nestled between her ample bosoms was a tied hanky pinned to her brassier that held the remainder of her travel funds.  Maggie Green was such a gruff-spoken, formidable figure, I do not believe such an extra precaution was probably necessary.

In the ensuing years I spent the better part of every summer with Aunt Maggie, even sometimes during the school year.  I can still feel the warmth of her arm around me, holding me close as she pushed the porch swing back and forth with her large feet, telling me how proud she was of me and that I could be whatever I chose to be.  And about those size eleven feet.  She never left her house without washing her feet first, then pulling on a pair of hose that she would secure at the knee with strong garters.  I recall my childhood impatience waiting for her to complete the ritual.   When I once questioned why the foot bathing, she replied simply, she did not want to meet her maker with smelling feet.  Perhaps it’s an Irish thing.

Aunt Maggie was nearing seventy when she left Grantown to move to New Jersey to care for her youngest grandson when her daughter was dying of cancer.  There she would spend the rest of her life.  I last saw her on a chilly September morning in 1974.  She was about a block away, walking home from Mass, wearing the same black coat she had worn to California three decades earlier, the same crumpled black hat shadowing her face, the same black oxford-styled leather shoes with thick elevated heels.  Her legs were swollen.  “Bad knees,” she explained, brushing aside my concern.  She would pass away two years later.

Aunt Maggie never drove a car, never had an air conditioner, never voted for a Republican, never had more than a hundred dollars to her name until she sold her home in Grantown; never complained about her lot in life.  She never failed to drop something in the collection plate on Sunday and in later years she would enclose two crisp dollar bills inside a folded sheet of paper and send it to the Irish Republican Army in Ireland.  I once dared mention the Marxist links of the group, at which she scoffed, and dismissed my concerns in a gruff voice saying, “They’re my boys.”  Though born in northern England, she despised the British to the end of her days.

Maggie Green cared for four generations of her family.  For me, she was a surrogate mother, a principled example, a strict disciplinarian when I disregarded her principles, a loving shelter during the storms of my childhood.

I hope to see her one day.   She’ll probably be wearing that black coat and hat and carrying the large purse on her arm, brushing past St. Peter at the gate with her trademark scowl, my Memaw opening her arms to welcome me back.    

 

REMEMBERING ROD

            This is a day for remembering – remembering the call that informed me he had died on this day two years ago, and for peering back in time to 1963.  That was the year he was born, a healthy eight pounds, thirteen ounces in a small Catholic hospital in Paris, Texas.  St. Joseph’s Hospital is remembered now only by a placard.  So to, is he.  Two bronze placards atop the marble mausoleum tell of the man buried there, in a Catholic Church he helped build in Honduras, just steps from the pristine beach where the assure blue waters of the Caribbean lap gently over the bleached sand.

            He was my son, the third of my five children.  And like the waves of the Caribbean, memories lap softly over me this day.  I recall his first outing.  It was just him.  His two siblings were spending a week-long sleepover with grandparents in Fort Worth.  We bundled him in a soft blanket, put a bottle of milk in a plastic warmer, and took him to the only movie theatre in Paris at that time.  To Kill a Mockingbird was playing.

            There was a line outside the ticket office.  We paid our fifty cents each and walked inside.  Most who stood in the line did not enter with us.  They went instead to a wooden staircase on the side of the building that ascended to the theatre balcony where the outside door was marked “Colored Only.”  Jim Crow laws were still enforced in Texas in 1963.  Later that year, Dr. Martin Luther King would stand before a quarter-million people on the Washington Mall and declare he had a dream that one day all of us would judge each other not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. 

            No work in American literature better depicts the brutal unfairness of segregation than To Kill a Mockingbird.  It should be required reading for every American student.  We were so moved by the movie that we left only long enough to warm another bottle and return minutes later to watch it a second time.  Four-day old Roddy Scott lay cradled in our arms, sound asleep, through both showings.

            Sleep well, my son, sleep well.

              

 

 OUR GALILEO MOMENT

Covid 19 almost certainly resulted from a leaked virus experiment at the Wuhan Laboratory in Wuhan China.  That is the conclusion of scientists at the Department of Energy and investigators at the FBI after nearly three years of research; results that were leaked to the Wall Street Journal.  Worse, the researchers suspect the virus was engineered in the Chinese lab.

Thank God for leaks.  Covid claimed more than a million Americans and nearly eight-million people worldwide.  Victims of the virus are still dying.  These victims and their families deserve the truth.

The conclusions of the American researchers are a win for common sense and another black eye for the American media.  Led by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and trumpeted by reporters and anchors at CNN and MSNBC and the legacy networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, those who dared suggest China was at fault were derisively dismissed and denounced as racists.  Worse, their views were banned from Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.  Call it America’s Galileo moment. 

There was widespread support of such censorship by mainstream media outlets.  To their credit, Facebook and Twitter have since revoked those bans, but not before the damage to our sacredly held freedom of speech, enshrined in the second amendment, had been done.  Worse, this comes after the American media has suffered yet another embarrassing episode for paralyzing the Trump Administration in its early months with near constant headlines about the former president’s alleged involvement with Russia.  That story has since been debunked.  For its erroneous reporting, both the Times and the Post were jointly awarded journalism’s most coveted honor, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

Facts and truth are stubborn things.   

 

 Baseball Memories                                                

Watching Ken Burns’ superlative documentary, Baseball, these past few weeks has transported this octogenarian back to my wonder years in the post-war 40’s.  On any summer day but Sunday, unless it rained, kids from all over Peacock Park in Fairmont, West Virginia would scramble down the dirt path to the holler below my Aunt Alice’s house where someone had laid out a scruffily defined baseball diamond.  The bases, including home plate, were defined by an X dug by someone’s shoe heel.  Most days we played until lunch and often returned in the afternoon.

My playing prospects were generally uncertain. I was a scrawny first grader when I initially descended to that holler. And worse, I was a girl, the last to be chosen and only then if my cousin John Freeman or one of his friends picked me in a show of sympathy or if there weren’t enough kids to fill out a team. Either way, I was quickly banished to the outfield - my throwing skills being imprecise, my catching skills even more lacking.  But I could hit.  And I could run. 

Money being scarce in those days, baseball gloves were shared.  So were bats and balls.

When we got home after a day in the holler Aunt Alice would be sitting on her wooden stool in the kitchen.  I can still see her there as if it were only yesterday, kneading bread dough or stirring whatever was cooking for the evening meal.  A radio would be blaring out the play-by-play whenever the Pittsburgh Pirates took the field.  It was from her I learned to love the game.  For that I will always be grateful.

In 1956, the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, we returned to Kansas City, where, for a buck and a quarter I would sit along the first base line in the old Blues Stadium and see the likes of Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto come to bat when the Yankees were in town. Defending in right field was Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, a tall, gangly alumni of the fabled Negro League who became my favorite on the old KC Athletics.  Sadly, he is the only A’s player I can even recall.  In those days, the Athletics were mostly a major league farm team for the perennial pennant winning Yankees.

While a sophomore at the University of Tulsa trying hard to win a place on the school newspaper’s roster, I covered an appearance by St. Louis Cardinal veterans Enos Slaughter and Pepper Martin.  Martin was once a charter member of Dizzy Dean’s “Gashouse Gang.”  Enthralled and regaled by their twangy accounts of baseball past only deepened my love of the game.

Moving to Texas in 1960, I switched my allegiance from the Pirates to the Cardinals, a move forced by practicality, since St. Louis was the only team broadcast I could find on my transistor radio.  While the ballplayers played, I would take the sprinkled starched shirts from the refrigerator to iron while being treated to the best baseball play-by-play team ever – Harry Caray and Jack Buck, and for a couple of those years, the gregarious and funny Joe Garagiola. Years later I met Garagiola when I was fortunate enough to be seated between him and astronaut John Young at a ceremony honoring Gus Grissom at Spring Hill State Park in Indiana. He was even funnier in person.  And Garagiola came with an appetite that rivaled his sense of humor.  At his insistence we both went for seconds in the buffet line.  I could finish only a small portion of my second serving.  Garagiola pointed to my plate and asked, “You want any more of that.” When I nodded no, he reached for my plate and quickly cleared it.  Then made another pass at the buffet line returning with yet another heaping plate.  Despite that hearty appetite, Garagiola maintained his playing days weight well into his later years.  Oh, to be endowed with such a compassionate metabolism!  

The last time I played baseball I was 65.  It was on a makeshift ball diamond at my son’s home in Indiana during a family reunion.  Armed with a new bat, fresh off a rack from Walmart, I approached the plate and with shouted encouragement from my teammates, mostly grandkids, I hit the second ball thrown.  Up, up and away it went.  Outfielders scurried after the ball while I lumbered around the bases, slowed by bad knees, a couple dozen extra pounds and a regrettable abhorrence for exercising regularly.  I jubilantly crossed home plate thanks more to the benevolent slowness of the rival players than my baserunning skills.  But it remains among my greatest moments close behind the birth of my children and grandchildren.

My fondest baseball memory though, takes me back to an early spring morning in Joplin, Missouri when I was nine.  For Christmas I had received a baseball bat and ball.  No gifts were more welcomed.  As I tossed the ball in the air to take a swing as it descended my mother walked over.  She started pitching the ball to me and went darting after it if I managed to connect bat to ball.  She was tall and lithe.  I had never seen her run, or throw a ball, or catch a ball.  From my earliest memory she had gray hair and always seemed older than mothers of my friends. It was only after she passed away that I learned she had been a star basketball player in high school in rural West Virginia and for a time, played women’s semi-pro basketball.  She had simply never mentioned it. Katherine Mary (my mom) is the reason I feel such a connection with Kevin Costner playing catch with his on-screen dad in Field of Dreams.  It’s a scene that never fails to summon tears.

It’s been half a century since I last attended a major league baseball game.  To sit in the stands today would require mortgaging the house and maxing out the credit card just to buy a hot dog and soda.  So, I’m content to remember sitting on the first baseline in the old Blues Stadium for a buck and a quarter and watching Mickey Mantle hit a towering ball to right field and Suitcase Simpson stretching out his long arm in hopes of turning a sure double into an out.