This essay was recently published in "Your Story Matters: Finding, Writing, and Living the Truth of Your Life" by Leslie Leyland Fields
By Ann Conway I do not remember the precise moment that I felt God as a child, because I cannot recall Him not being present. My first memory is of looking out through crib bars; was that when I first discovered God? I’m not sure. But I am certain that, very early on, I felt God was incarnated everywhere, that He was waiting to be seen. This was not because my family was devoutly Catholic, and our lives infused with religion, but because of a primal sense of grace. This was embodied in the presence of my Aunt Gabe, my mother’s unmarried sister, who lived with my parents, two brothers and me in a small grey house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. My mother had gone back to work as a teacher when I was four, so I was cared for largely by Gabe, who worked a “split shift” at a nearby hospital cafeteria and thus was free during the hours between breakfast and “dinner”, as we called lunch, and before supper. Gabe, as everyone called her, was in her forties when I was born. She was perhaps an unlikely candidate to be God’s emissary-- handsome, wisecracking, full-bodied and pretty much toothless. My aunt had dropped out of ninth grade and by the time I came along, had worked for 20 years in a hospital cafeteria. “I had my fun, kid,” she said of her youth in gritty, Prohibition-era Providence. After a day on her feet, in the evenings Gabe often drank Narragansett beer and smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. She loved delicacies like liverwurst and pigs’ feet and drove the first Model A in the neighborhood. But she always went to mass, never swore and never wore pants. Gabe had a lot of the child in her and thus was without pretense. “I’m the dumb one!” she’d crow, speaking of her more educated brothers (two were priests) and sisters. In recent years I have speculated that my aunt may have been dyslexic--which would account for her cafeteria job, office work being out--but I believe that Gabe enjoyed the cafeteria because it was work she did with her hands and because it was social. She was never ashamed of who she was or what she did, which to me meant that God was close by, as security in the self can bespeak deep faith. The outings I took with Gabe as a small child reinforced my sense of grace. I seemed to smell God everywhere, especially via the luscious scent of moist earth and ripening tomatoes in the hospital greenhouse, which a man named Vito ran. I felt God in the small rippling brook in the middle of Pleasant Valley Parkway where my aunt and I floated twig boats during her breaks. I heard God in the ticking grandfather clock that graced the large empty dining room where I sat and colored while my aunt, who was the cashier, sat at the head of the adjacent cafeteria line, laughing and joking with the doctors and nurses. I felt God when I sat with my aunt after work in her tiny bedroom off the parlor, where she polished her shoes with white liquid polish and let me make dolls out of all her Marcal Kleenex. It was peaceful and safe, and I felt I was under the shelter of God’s mighty wing. On her days off my aunt showed me how to further encounter God by strolling down Chalkstone Avenue, the main shopping district of Mount Pleasant. What may have seemed mundane to an adult was to me emblematic to me of the world’s splendors. I felt that sumptuousness when we visited Walcott’s 5 & 10, with its numberless shelves of cheap toys, cosmetics, including the rouge, powder and crimson “Tangee” lipstick my aunt favored, all kinds of school supplies and funny (comic) books. I felt God when we visited the cobbler, a bent old Italian man who sat at his bench in a tiny storefront on the corner of Chalkstone and Academy avenues, and in the Superior Bakery with its enormous glass cases full of row upon row of jewel-like pastries –Amaretti, Sfogliatella, Tiramisu… The sumptuousness of God was also evident in storytelling, which in those days was the main recreation of everyone in the neighborhood. Gabe and I often visited the three Lombardi brothers, who ran a Sunoco station around the corner from our house. There was always a group of men laughing in the tiny office which smelled of peanuts from the vending machine. Gabe and I talked to neighbors, we talked to the relatives who came to visit once a week. God was in “Goldilocks and The Three Bears”, which Gabe read to me dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. Occasionally, she altered the narrative, which made me indignant. When I learned to read, I was amazed, thinking that I could go anywhere now, back in time, forward, to all countries. Gabe read mostly movie magazines, but my wonder came from the intense early engagement with storytelling, which heightened my reading experience. I knew that the startling miracle of reading came from God. Gabe showed me that God wanted us to treat each other with honor, so when I tried to steal a comic book at the barber shop where I got my hair cut, she made me apologize. The barber laughed, but I have never forgotten that lesson. God created people as equals, so Gabe greeted everyone. She talked to “The Ragman”, Abe, who trundled down the early morning streets in his wagon, yelling “Ragman, Ragman!” and whom many of the kids feared. She let me play with the red headed McMore’s, who lived above a barroom and were ostracized by some of the neighbors. Throughout her life, my aunt took on special requests from God, such as loving people who were difficult or lonely. She was always running errands for somebody; in my early life, she shopped for Kate Mohan, an ancient, miserly spinster whose family had owned the “The Beehive” barroom (above was the home of the unfortunate McMore’s) down the street. I remember Kate, impossibly old, hunched in a kitchen chair near her manic parakeet, Jippy. As she dictated a grocery list for Gabe’s trip to the A&P, I wandered through her tenement. The parlor was stuffed with marble topped tables and old-fashioned lamps with crystal prisms, a la the movie “Pollyanna” with Hayley Mills, which Gabe and I had adored. Opening drawers, I found dozens of unopened packages of linens, which seemed a warning against being niggardly. I have never forgotten Kate, whom I found fascinating, probably more than someone who was easier to love. When she died, she left $200 to Gabe and $60,000 to the St. Vincent de Paul Society, which made Gabe roll her eyes and mutter darkly. She got over it. I have never met anyone so unattached to possessions, to money. She was generous, buying me souvenirs when we went to New Hampshire to visit one of my uncles, Father Ed. I believe that she bought most of my clothes and toys. I recall her standing for hours in front of an enormous doll display at a local Catholic high school Christmas bazaar; she was determined to win the raffle, so I could have a doll. Maybe I had such a vivid sense of God because He was silhouetted against the dark. The years ahead would be difficult for me and for Gabe. In this account of my early years in Providence, I do not mention my parents because I retain no early memories of them at all, although I know I was petrified of my father. “I never saw a man walk by his own kids without looking at them,” said Gabe of Daddy, who was a tyrant in his small kingdom, taking out his frustrations and failures on his children and wife. As much as possible, I tried to stay with Gabe, away from both of my parents. They were a bad match from the beginning (“you marry the man who asks you,” was my mother’s mantra). I never saw an iota of affection between them. When my mother returned to teaching in 1958, the marriage had broken down completely. In those days, a wife who worked outside the home was a sign of a husband’s failure. My father had not gone to college and never made enough money. He told my mother that he would “break” her. And not her alone. My father warned that “the Irish have a way of crushing the spirit of their children”. Both my parents were damaged people and not surprisingly, my two brothers exhibited serious behavior problems when I was young. Eventually they were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and were in and out of the state mental hospital. Despite Gabe’s ability to protect me in my early life, she couldn’t be there all the time. I remember almost nothing of Terry, my oldest brother, in those years, but my brother Brian, who was hideously bullied at school, tormented me, choking me until I couldn’t breathe, hitting me hard in the head and locking me in closets. In my teenage years I’d be trapped with my warring parents and disturbed brothers in a 1,100 square foot ranch house. My parents moved us to the suburbs just after I turned nine, without Gabe. She did the best she could to continue to provide a refuge for me, but the next nine years were very difficult. However, that story is no longer my life’s central narrative. I wrote this essay because I know why I am alive—because of Gabe and God. Though I have long since returned to my religion, for many years I turned my back on God and did not attend Mass. It took a long time to get over feeling buried by all that had happened to me since I was a shy, cossetted little girl nurtured and cared for by a “nobody”, an ordinary aging woman who spent her days on a high stool, handing people change from an old-fashioned cash register. When I accompanied my aunt on our simple excursions to buy a hot dog or window shop at Kresge’s, Gabe always remarked, “Isn’t this lovely?” as if to underscore the experience. I thought that her love, which was God’s love, was just lovely. When I held tightly onto my aunt’s hand, I knew that God was a miracle of opulence, although I also understood scarcity—of love, of money, of parents who were parents. But to me, sparseness caused love and goodness to stand out more clearly against the darkness in the world. I was not asleep. I knew that goodness and spiritual largesse should never be taken for granted, ever. In my mind, every instance of them was cause for rejoicing. When I was very small, I sometimes looked in the mirror and thought, “Me!” I was thrilled to be alive. Looking back, I do not think this was narcissism; it was innocence. I was amazed that that God had created me and every other unique person; indeed, everything else, created the universe throughout time. Evil was real, but how beauty and virtue flourished, how they shimmered and vanquished the dark. It still astounds me. ,
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May 2024
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