Who knew we were Catholic?
In Oklahoma City, where we were born, we were too young to know that. In Wichita, where we lived when I was 3 and 4, we lived nowhere near a Catholic Church. Mother walked to the nearest one all dressed up in her high heels every Sunday that she could, but we never went with her. It was way too far. She didn’t drive yet, and Daddy didn’t offer to take her. He stayed home with us while she went.
In Missouri, where I was 5, the nearest church was several towns away, in Kirksville, so Daddy drove Mother to Sunday Mass about once a month while he did errands there. Again, we did not go with her.
But when we moved to Maple Lake, well, WHOA!
We were always told the town was 95 percent Catholic and I believe it. The town was dominated architecturally by St. Timothy’s Catholic church, by far the grandest and tallest building in town.
All the kids except a handful went to St. Timothy’s Catholic school. A handful attended the small public school.
It was my first experience with nuns.
My first day of school in second grade, with Sister Michelle, I was introduced rather rudely to the class.
“Class, we have a new student, she said. “Her name is … Linda … Pigg.” Emphasis on the last name.
And the classroom erupted in laughter.
I was shy to begin with and had no idea why they were laughing. In Missouri, the were dozens, no hundreds, of Piggs. It was a common name. There’s even a Pigg Family graveyard – no kidding! My dad was later buried there and the headstones attest to it.
Their laughter caught me off guard and I blushed fiercely and held back tears as kids oinked like pigs and pointed at me.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
She went on. “And her father is NOT Catholic, so if she doesn’t convert him before he dies, he will go to hell.”
Sudden silence.
I nearly fell through the floor. I wanted to run from the room but there was nowhere to go. Sister Michelle, not a very nice person despite her calling, finally quieted the class and went on with the day.
That night, at home, I burst into tears and told Mother and Daddy what had happened. Daddy was furious, but Mother said she’d talk to the nun. I guess she did because the good sister never humiliated me like that again, but the damage was done. It wasn’t the last time Mother would berate a nun on our behalf.
At first, nobody played with me at recess. I was the “new girl” which I think I still remained until about fifth grade. It was a small, clannish town and it was hard to break into its closed ranks.
My only friend in second and third grades was a chubby-cheeked girl with auburn hair (that gorgeous dark red color I envied). Her name was Colleen Conlin. She was the only person I invited to my birthday ‘parties” and she once gave me a small ceramic figurine with the words October Angel across the skirt. I still have it.
At the beginning of fifth grade, she didn’t show up for school. For years, I didn’t know what happened to her. (Many years later, I tracked her down and found out her parents had lost their farm and moved away, that she had become a nun, eventually left the sisterhood, married a man with children and raised a family.)
One good thing about going to Catholic school is that everyone wears the same uniform. Nobody knew how shabby my real clothes were and how few of them I had. Mother bought us the 19 -cent white blouses at Atlantic Mills to wear under the navy-blue jumpers. Even if a button was missing, who knew? You could buy the uniforms ready made or you could buy a kit and sew them yourself. Because the latter was so much cheaper, Mother opted to sew then herself. She particularly hated sewing the little blue beanies with a covered button on top. Tedious work, at best. As I might have mentioned earlier, she hated sewing!
One of the downsides to going to Catholic school was eating lunch there. The food was disgusting. Sloppy Joes were a smear of orange-red grease with a few crumbs of hamburger meat on a stale bun. Yum. There was a particularly nasty thing with a viscous, almost clear gravy with fine shreds of pork and slimy slivers of onion over stiff mashed potatoes. I don’t know what it was called but I could think of a few unflattering names. Oh, and I can’t forget the Minnesota staple – hot dish – a weekly regular. Overcooked macaroni, a few chunks of tomato and crumbles of some kind of meat with more big slimy chunks of onion. Mmmm.
And you had to take something of everything and a nun stood by the trash can where we scraped our plates to make sure we ate it. I got good at hiding food inside a crumpled napkin or inside my empty milk carton. My stomach often rumbled during afternoon reading time.
The town was so Catholic, the local little movie theater only showed movies approved by the church, and whenever there was a religious one, like “Ben Hur” or “The Ten Commandments,” the whole school went. It wasn’t far away, so we’d march in double file from the school a few blocks to the theater. We did a lot of marching from school to church, and this wasn’t much father.
Grandad and Grandmother Mares lived right across the street from the church, and Grandad often remarked that every time he looked out his front window, “those dang kids are marching to or from church.” He wanted to know when the teaching actually happened.
But being the staunch old German Catholic, he never voiced his reservations to anyone but Mother.
We did like going to the movies, though. Way better than catechism class anyway.
The movie that left the biggest impression on my sister and I was “The Miracle of Lourdes,” about St. Bernadette, who reputedly saw a vision of the Blessed Virgin.
One night, not long after we saw the movie, Cindy and I climbed into our double bed, turned out the light and I turned over to face the door.
And there she was. The Blessed Virgin. Standing behind our half-closed door. Blue mantle over a white dress, hands folded in prayer. I froze. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I shivered. Felt frozen in place. I stared and stared, thinking it must be a mistake.
Finally, I rolled about halfway over and nudged Cindy.
“Cindy, Cindy,” I whispered. “She’s here.”
“Whaaa?” Cindy mumbled, almost asleep already. “Who?”
“It’s Mary, the Blessed Virgin,” I whispered, frantic.
Cindy rolled over and froze. “Holy cow!” she whispered back. We lay there, not knowing what to do. Could not believe our eyes.
But the vision never moved, and that seemed strange. Finally, I slowly, slowly reached up and turned on the lamp. I mean, visions never like the light, right?
Whew!
Cindy’s blue robe was hanging over my white one on the door hook, and the belt area was crumpled in a way it looked like folded hands.
We almost wept with relief. I mean, we had no clue as to how to talk to a saint!
Well, if we didn’t have that early indoctrination into Catholicism like our peers, we were fully indoctrinated now. We were Catholics.
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