Memories Dreams Reflections 10: Kindergarten, Churchgoing, First Experience of Death, and a Digression on my First Communion

In previous entries in this series I've talked about Bernon Heights Elementary School, the grade school I went to back in the 1980's. What I haven't mentioned is that I didn't go to kindergarten there. For kindergarten, I went to a private Catholic school at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church (OLQM for short, though it has a new name now: Holy Trinity Parish). But I was only there for that one grade. After kindergarten my parents enrolled me at Bernon Heights: being a public school, I suppose that was the less expensive option. Later on, my 3 younger brothers also all went to Bernon Heights, and they got to go to kindergarten there. Growing up, I was very jealous about this, because it seems like they got the fun kindergarten experience, whereas my own kindergarten experience was kind of dour and serious. 

Like many of the ancestors of Woonsocket's original French-Canadian immigrants, my parents were Catholics, and that’s how my siblings and I were raised as well. We even went to Mass every Sunday, at the aforementioned Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church. I wasn’t baptized at this church (as at the time of my birth my parents belonged to a different parish, though they switched to Queen of Martyrs not too long after I was born), but I did receive my First Communion there (on May 14^th, 1989), and my Confirmation took place there in 1996. A number of years ago I described Our Lady Queen of Martyrs in my short story collection Autopsy of an Eldritch City, though I used a different name for it there, Our Lady of Sorrows:

“Our Lady of Sorrows Church had been founded back on September 1953, though the church itself hadn’t been completed until March of the following year. The inside of the church was made from red cedar imported from Oregon (funded, as it were, almost entirely from small donations), and visually it resembled the interior of an ark. In the 1970’s, the decision was unfortunately made to modernize the place, and the tile floor was replaced by red carpeting. Also, two furnished reconciliation chapels adorned with bronze decorations were created for the sacrament of penance, and a special devotional chapel was erected near the main entrance. This devotional chapel was dedicated to the Virgin Mary (who, after all, was the Lady of Sorrows that the church was named after), and within it was a statue of the Blessed Mother, a statue that was continually spot lit and surrounded by red and blue votive candles. The fourteen Stations of the Cross could be found on the walls to the left and right of the main aisles in the nave. Above the doors leading to the vestibule was a large statue of Christ on the cross, while high up on the wall behind the altar was a statue of Christ resurrected. That was pretty much the extent of the decoration of Our Lady of Sorrows Church.”

The impression that the above passage should leave you with was that, architecturally speaking, Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church was a pretty staid place, as far as churches went, and I can easily think of several local churches (like St. Ann's Cathedral with its colorful frescos) that were far grander and awe-inspiring. I suppose you could almost say that in aesthetics it resembles a Post-Vatican II-style church, despite being built BEFORE Vatican II! Here are two pictures of the interior, both looking at the altar and looking away from it, as taken from the "150 Churches" blog: http://150churches.blogspot.com/2015/06/church-25-our-lady-queen-of-martyrs.html

For some reason, though (and while on the subject and all) I’ve always been nostalgic about my First Communion. I have even kept all of the cards I had received from my friends and relatives for my First Communion, though some I preferred more than others. One of my favorites was a white card manufactured by Alfred Mainzer, Inc. and given to me by my grandparents. On the front of this card there were the words “God’s Blessing on Your Communion DEAR GRANDSON” in gold gilt lettering, and below that was an oval-shaped image (also surrounded by gold gilt) which depicted a boy dressed in a white robe and his hands were held up before him, clasped in prayer, and floating in front of him was a golden grail, and emerging from this grail was a Communion wafer inscribed with the letters JHS, and this wafer was surrounded by a golden halo. Inside the card there was a generic inspirational message and a quote from the Bible, Proverbs 28:20, “A faithful man shall abound with blessings.” 

Another card I received that day was a pale blue card, also manufactured by Alfred Mainzer, Inc., though this one was given to me by my parents. On the front of the card were the words “For you, dear Son, on Your Communion,” and below those words there was an illustration of another boy, this one clad in a white and blue robe, his hair blonde, and he was standing in the middle of some field and in his white hand he was holding up a fistful of palms and in his left hand he was holding a golden grail, yet another Communion wafer emerging forth from it like a tiny white sun. There was a biblical quote inside this one as well, from Isaiah 60:19: “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.” 

But to get back to the main subject at hand, that is, kindergarten: one of the only real memories I have about kindergarten at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church was that it was there that I first learnt about death. I can still remember that morning vividly: I suppose I must have been 5 years old or so. The nun was showing us a book about death and inside this book there was an illustration of two airplanes: the plane at the top of the page was new and shiny, while the one at the bottom was old, rusted and falling apart. I can't remember the name or even the cover of this book, but I can remember the page with the two planes. The nun told us that the same thing would happen to our parents one day, along with ourselves… along with anything that lives, really. Most of my classmates appeared blissfully confused, but I was the only one that burst into tears. Perhaps I grasped the concept of what she was saying faster than they did: or maybe I was just overtly sensitive. But on that day I realized the true names of the Adversary, and it wasn’t Satan or the Devil: rather, it was Time and Death.

Time tends to assume a malevolent, almost parasitical nature in many of my books, such as in my first novel Confusion or my short story "The Yellow Notebook." Perhaps this is why, at a young age, I gravitated towards Ancient Egypt and its myths. Something about the Ancient Egyptian obsession with immortality and their desire to triumph over death appealed to the young me (and I suppose still does). And I adore the following 12th-century Arab proverb: "Man fears time, but time fears the Pyramids." 

I should stress that apart from attending Mass every week I wasn’t particularly religious (spiritual would be a more fitting term), and to be honest, the only reason I went was because my parents made us: it wasn't until my late 20's that I took a serious interest in the subject, though I suppose that it could be said that Christian iconography and symbolism has pretty much appeared in almost everything I've written. We did have a copy of the Bible in our home, the 1963 Saint Joseph Textbook Edition Confraternity Version with a green cover and red-lined pages, and every now and then when I was bored I would crack it open. I never read the whole thing, but there were certain sections that I would go back to over and over again because they had captured my interest. The Book of Genesis was a favorite: I liked reading about God creating the Earth from nothing, the Serpent’s temptation of Eve, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Cain’s slaying of Abel, and the story of Noah’s Ark and the Flood, though after that I found most of the rest of it boring. The Seven Plagues of Egypt fascinated me, as did the pessimism of Ecclesiastes and the Four Gospels of the New Testament: Christ was a source of endless fascination to me back then, and he remains so to this day. But my favorite book of the Bible, by far, was the Book of Revelations, which captivated me like no other section of the Bible did. The lurid descriptions of multi-headed beasts rising from the oceans to lay waste to the cities of Man reminded me of the Japanese monster movies I so enjoyed watching on Saturday afternoons (to quote from Revelation 13:1: “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy”). One thing I loved about this Bible (so much so that in 2019 I would end up buying my own copy of it, off eBay), was how when you first opened the book, on the inner cover pages, there were pictures of Old Testament patriarchs and prophets, along with two images of Yahweh, one of which depicted Him as a very Illuminati-looking "Eye in the Pyramid." This was an illustration that fascinated me, when I was a child.