A Letter Filled with Concern

Last week I shared with you the gift of a cache of letters and documents—eight in all—that I recently discovered in my safety deposit box. Among the documents was the “Permission for Exclaustration,” which you read last week.

Several of you who left comments noted how formal it sounded and that’s true. It was in a sense a legal document that permitted me to leave the convent for a year. I’d professed a vowed commitment to that convent on January 1963 and so this document was a formal recognition of that and a permission to leave the Mount for a year and live beyond the convent itself.

 The vow I’d taken—along with poverty, chastity, obedience, and conversion of morals—was one of “stability.” That is, I would be a part of that Community of Benedictines for the rest of my life. I was walking away for a year and so I needed permission to depart the convent and leave the Community.

This week, I’m sharing with you the following letter that Mother Mary Austin wrote to me on December 23, 1966, the day I signed the above document. That was the day before I left the convent.

Late as it is, I cannot resist writing a brief note to you. In my own name and that of the Community, I wish to express my appreciation for the contribution you have made to our apostolic work.

Even though you are leaving us, please be assured that the Mount Benedictines are not breaking their bond with you. You will be included daily in our remembrance of the “absent brethren.”

Know too, Sister, that I have faith in you as a person. I believe that you are trying sincerely to bear witness to Christ in the way that seems best for you. Know also, Sister, that if after you have tried to live outside the convent and find that you would like to return, we will gladly welcome you back. In the interim we will always have a prayerful and loving remembrance of you.

I hope you will find the peace and happiness that you are seeking. God bless you through the coming year. Please remember me and the Community in your prayers.

With love in the Holy Child,

Mother Mary Austin OSB

I don’t remember Mother Mary Austin giving me this letter. My memory of her attitude has always been that she was deeply annoyed with me. And she was annoyed on the evening of December 5 when I’d sought her out and said I needed to leave. But it’s clear from this letter that her annoyance was only momentary and perhaps she felt it only because she was powerless to give me peace from my torments. It was only in myself that I could find the happiness I sought.

I had become, in today’s parlance, somewhat of a zombie. I taught my high school religion and English lit classes enthusiastically. I participated devoutly in the monastic prayer of Benedictines. I listened intently to the students asking for advice.

I did all that was asked of me and yet I felt nothing. I was simply acting the role. It was a performance. I had lost between ten and fifteen pounds; I had no appetite; and I wasn’t sleeping. Truly I walked as the living dead from Thanksgiving on.

So I suspect now that I gave only a cursory glance at the document I signed on December 23 and at this letter from Mother Mary Austin. I’m not sure why I kept them or the other six documents I’ll share with you. I was acting on “autopilot” for many months after leaving and somehow these letters and documents must have held meaning for me even though I never again read them.

Note that at the end of her letter, Mother Mary Austin—of the Order of Saint Benedict (OSB)—asked me to remember her and the Community in my prayers. The truth is that rather quickly I ceased attending Sunday Mass and seldom prayed. I felt I was drowning in despair. I suppose my only prayer was “Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord. Lord hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” (Psalm 130)

I did sorely miss the many friends I’d made in the convent—women who laughed a lot and showed compassion toward all and cared with deep concern about our world. Many of them are dead now, but I’m still in touch with several nuns who became dear to me during those convent years.

I think the truth may be that I was in such anguish for many months after leaving that I drew in on myself—except for when I had to put on a performance of normality at work and with the new friends I’d made at the Loretta Guild for Working Women.

I tell you now that I figuratively died during that time. I existed merely as a puppet, although I don’t know whose hand animated me. Many years passed before—like Pinocchio the marionette—the current of life pulsed within me.

I always think of that when I read newspaper stories about the Magicicada cicadas of eastern North America. They spend most of their life underground. Then after thirteen or seventeen years the mature cicadas emerge and live for several weeks, singing their unique song.

I, too, finally emerged from the dark loam of uncertainty. I left the convent in 1966 between my 30^th and 31^st year. But I think I did not truly live as a whole person until 1976 when I met Doctor Nimlos, who literally saved my life.

For everything there is a season. Peace.

PS: These past two weeks have not been—for me—the season for blogging. I’ve had two bouts of pink eye, a cold, and a sinus infection. I’m hoping that by next Monday I’ll be back to my routines. Peace.

Photographs from Wikipedia.

A Move Accompanied by Music

In late May 1967, the four friends whom I’d met at the Loretto Guild suggested that we find a house to rent. One of them worked at the University of Dayton and knew that during the summer months the University rented the houses in which students had lived during the school months. At the end of May we moved into the house pictured in last Thursday’s posting. We stayed there for three months. During that time I dated a little. By the end of the summer that had ended.

         In August one friend began to study the classified ads in the Dayton Daily News. She found a three-bedroom apartment at a “swingin’ singles” complex that boasted a swimming pool with a concrete surround furnished with deck chairs, tables with umbrellas, and hootenanny music.

         For that swingin’ singles’ pool I bought a two-piece swimsuit. It consisted of a top that was like the modern-day sports bras and a pair of shorts that came four or five inches down my thighs. The suit was modest, its pattern a smattering of tiny pink, blue, and yellow flowers with green leaves on a white background. It suited someone like myself who was still uncomfortable with having much flesh on display. The memory of seven yards of black serge lingered and my body missed the anonymity of the habit it had worn.

         Many days in September and October, after taking the electric trolley bus home from work, I’d don that swimming suit. Opening the door to the pool area, which a tall wooden fence enclosed on three sides, I’d first dip my toes to test the water's coldness then sit on the edge of the pool, making circles in the sun drenched water. Next, I’d enter the shallow end and sit in the water. But I didn’t know how to swim, so after a few minutes, I’d emerge from the pool and settle into a lounge chair, positioned in the shadows beneath the overhanging railed balconies of the second floor.

         There I’d read while humming the songs the local DJs were playing on the radios. When not engrossed in a novel, I’d raise my head and watch the bronzed men and nubile young women flirting with one another in the pool and dancing on the concrete area surrounding it.

         The local radio stations played records by many folk artists, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Glenn Yarborough, and Simon and Garfunkel among them. It was a time rich in music.

         One of those songs—written by Seeger in the 1950s and sung by Joan Baez in the mid-'60s—helped get me involved in the Vietnam War protest.

         Another, sung by Glenn Yarborough, appealed to the men around the pool but spoke to me also. I embraced the independence advocated in the song—the searching for what’s next in life. It became sort of an anthem of freedom for me.

        

         A third song, written and sung by Simon and Garfunkel, forced me to truly look at the world in which I lived. It helped me recognize the alienation around me and the desperate need to find meaning. It helped me understand that I wasn’t the only person lost and confused.         

         The music of 1967 and the following ten years or so is embedded in my psyche. Those songs of protest, young love, human need—of taking to the road and being open to change—helped form the woman I was to become. Just as the goodness of my mother and the prayer and dedication of the convent nuns had formed me.

         Slowly I was finding a life, but I needed help because mostly my mind was muddled. I still disliked myself intensely. So next week I hope to share with you what the second Dayton psychiatrist said to me. It was peace I was seeking and with him I found mostly questions to ask myself for a lifetime.

Photographs of the Dawning of Self

Last evening I riffled through a box of old photographs that date back to the early twentieth century. There were great-grandparents, Grandma Ready and O’Mara, Mom and Dad, my brother and his family, friends, as well as myself. Among those photographs I found some from early 1967 that show me during the first few months after I left the convent as well as one from the month before I left and a couple from a year later. Today, I’d like to share these with you.

         Here’s Sister Innocence in November 1966—a month and a half before I left the convent. I was teaching high school students in the Mount Academy and this is one of the Asian students. I had weighed 118 pounds from the time I was in grade school. But during those final months of 1966, I lost about 15 pounds and was the thinnest I’d been since fifth grade.

         Wearing the clothes of my pregnant sister-in-law, I left the convent on Christmas Eve, 1966. The following two photographs show me two days later at a party she and my brother gave for the family. In the one below I’m standing next to my cousin-in-law. I’m not sure what article of clothing I’m holding.

         In this second photograph I think I’m examining a half-slip my brother and his wife gave me as a Christmas gift. As I’ve said in earlier postings about this time, I did a lot of acting for a few weeks. Acting surprised. Acting happy. Acting interested. Longing always to be home with my mom and dad in their house where I didn’t need to act.

         In Dayton, where I got my first post-convent joy, I first lived at the Loretto Guild where I met four women who befriended me. In the early spring of 1967, the five of us moved to a house near Dayton University. My sister-in-law was due any day and so would soon be needing her spring and summer wardrobe.

         With the encouragement of my new friends, I bought myself dresses and shoes to wear to work. They were excited for me and wanted to take photographs showing “Sister Innocence” in her new finery. Below are pictures of me in one dress after another. These were taken outside the two-story home we’d rented. It was on a residential street where many students lived.

         On my face you see smiles that are real. I was no longer acting. I’d settled into life beyond the convent. Friends enriched my life. I enjoyed my work as an editor at Pflaum Publishing. I was going to movies, concerts, plays, dances. I had a library card. I traveled successfully on the city buses. I knew where to shop. I was being invited to the homes of co-workers to meet their families, play with their children, and enjoy tasty home-cooked meals. 

         I was taking a class on the novels of Charles Dickens and George Eliot at the University and writing papers that were garnering good grades. This was proof, I thought, that my mind was working well and that I hadn’t lost my ability to craft sentences. In a word, I was happy.

         That summer I traveled home to visit my family. This is a photo of me at Lake Jacoma in Blue Springs, Missouri. My family and I did some fishing there and then sat on the grass to enjoy a picnic with some of Mom’s famous potato salad. I note in looking at all these photographs that none of them show me in shorts. It took many years before I bared my legs by wearing pants that came above my knees.

         Finally, here is a winter 1967 photograph of me at my brother’s home in Independence. My hair is different; my smile is different; my whole demeanor has changed. This is what time and good friends and loving family can do for someone who has been deep into the abyss of depression and has—by some great grace—decided to live.

         Last night, while viewing these photographs that show in their own way a resurrection, I thought of Robin Williams. My heart aches for his pain and for the forlorn darkness of mind and heart and spirit in which he must have been living. May he now know the truth of himself and know, too, the meaning and worth of his life and the joy he brought to so many of us. May he know that he was and is a gift from and to the Universe. Peace.

Why Dating Didn't Work

Last week I wrote a story that illustrated I wasn’t a total wimp when younger. I could—when push came to shove—speak up for myself. As the psychiatrist in St. Paul said many years later, “Dee, you have the deepest sense of survival of anyone I’ve ever worked with.” I think I felt my survival being threatened by that first Dayton psychiatrist. He set up roadblocks to my surviving in a new environment.

         As I indicated at the end of that posting, I soon found a second psychiatrist. I want to tell you about that experience, but before doing so, I need to share with you my life outside work those first months after I left the convent.

The Loretto Guild

         This past April I described the Loretto Guild where I lived for the first few months of 1967. While there, I met four young women who became friends. Like me, they worked in downtown Dayton. Unlike me they hadn’t been in the convent, so they were younger than I—all in their early twenties. But in the ways of the world they were so much more sophisticated and knowledgeable.         

         These four women—all different just as the women in the convent had been—helped me settle into the life of a single young woman in a bustling city. I have such good memories of our laughter each night when we went out to local restaurants for supper or settled in the lounge of the Loretto to watch television and gab.

“Dance at Bougival” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

         With them I went to the local dances sponsored by the Catholic Church in a Dayton auditorium. It was there I met two men in their thirties who asked me out on dates. Hesitant, shy, awkward—I was all of these and more. Inarticulate often, I was inept at carrying on a conversation with a man. I still carried with me the fear of the neighbor who’d molested me for three months in fifth grade. (Click here and here if you’d like to read that story.)

         Since I was ten, that fear had pervaded my entire response to men. It—and the acne I’d had in my teens and twenties—had been the reason I’d done so little dating in high school and college. Now I had to move beyond that fear and accept dates with these men and . . . let them kiss me goodnight after a movie or supper. Yet I so feared that one of them would clutch my breast or move his hand up my thigh.

         Here I was, thirty-one years old, no longer ten. I’d studied psychology in college. I’d been in the convent where, especially in Omaha, I’d learned to be resolute when faced with difficult situations.

A 1966 Volkswagen Beetle.

         But in the darkness of a car on a residential street at eleven at night, I lost my certainty that I could say no if one of these men tried to go beyond where I felt comfortable. And so, when one of them would pull up at the curb before the residence where I was living, I’d clutch my purse and say, “Thank you,” while hurriedly opening the car door. I’d almost run up the sidewalk to the residence door, behind which safety beckoned.

         As you must already suspect, the men gave up on me. My conversation was forced. My response to sexual overtures was awkward. My confidence in myself was nil. I must have been—I’m quite sure of this—a dismal date!

         So I stopped going to the dances. I stopped dating. And instead I went to night school to learn more about literature. I could hide in a book.

All photographs from Wikipedia except for the Loretto Guild, which is from the Dayton Library Postcard Collection.            

Pflaum Co-Workers and Office Space

In my last three postings, I shared with you how I got a post-convent job in Dayton, Ohio. Today, I want to introduce you to my three co-workers, who helped me find my bearings in this new world.

         As I explained last week, I met Bob, my future boss, on Sunday, January 25, 1967, when he and his three young children picked me up at the Dayton Airport and drove me to my new “digs” at the Loretto Guild. Bob was the managing editor of Our Little Messenger.

         Most first and second graders in Catholic schools throughout the United States read this weekly publication each Friday. It was a four-page, 8 ½ x 11-inch, full-color weekly that always contained stories and features about animals, inventions, Catholic feast days, fun activities, and other things that might enthrall young children.

         Many children in the public grade schools got The Weekly Reader, which those of you who grew up in the United States may remember. The Catholic schools got the “messengers.” The Pflaum Publishing staff produced three of these a week: Grades 1-2, Our Little Messenger; Grades 3 through 5, Young Catholic Messenger; Grade 6 through 8, Junior Catholic Messenger. Each messenger had its own staff. The staff of Our Little Messenger consisted of Bob, Brian, Alice, and me. Each of us was responsible for one messenger page each week.

         These three co-workers taught me how to write captivating children’s stories that contained an element of surprise. They also taught me how to edit and introduced me to a book I’d never before encountered—The Chicago Manual of Style—which I learned was the “bible” of the publishing industry.

         As a senior editor, Alice had been in publishing the longest of my co-workers. She was my first real teacher in the art of line and copyediting. Alice spoke with surety about how young children learned and deeply appreciated their sense of wonder. A gifted writer, she completed her work within hours and then set to researching topics for future use in the messenger.

         Brian, a black-haired Irishman who spoke with a lilt, liked to tell stories. Thus, he kept me from thinking about my own inner anxieties. Getting to the core of a page topic took Brian at least two days each week because he saw so many details and possibilities. His slow pace helped me become patient with my own learning during those first weeks in the job. The truth is that Brian helped me relax.

         Bob was new to publishing and came to it as a writer who’d already had a well-received book published for young people aged 10 to 14. He had an abiding interest in all aspects of nature, and at our weekly meetings to discuss the next issue, he’d come up with intriguing topics—the song of whales, the antennae of insects, the butterfly’s return to San Juan Capistrano, the wing feathers of raptors.

         The four of us worked in a long rectangle of a room. On one long side were windows, one per office. The other long side was an empty wall, which stood as the right-hand side of the aisle that passed each of our left-hand offices.  Jutting out from the window wall were three partitions that divided the space into our four offices, each of which contained a desk, chair and file cabinet. At each of the short ends of the rectangle were doors.

         Alice occupied the first office; I, the second; Brian the third; and Bob the fourth. His was the largest space as he needed a table on which we could lay out the weekly stories and illustrations and assess each issue before its printing. During these sessions, he taught me about layout and design.

         These three co-workers set me on a career path as an editor and curriculum developer. They truly changed my life.

Note: One of the summer messengers is now for sale on e-Bay. As of Thursday, May 1, you can see it by clicking here.

Photographs from Wikipedia.

         

Rediscovering the Art of Discourse

Thirty days after I left the convent, I began to work at Pflaum Publishing. The day before, I’d flown from Kansas City to Dayton. Looking back I realize that the normal reaction to the possibility of a new job might be both anxiety and eagerness. But all I can remember is feeling passive and emotionless. I remember also that my parents had mixed feelings about my taking the job. On one hand, I’d have work and could then support myself and evolve a life. On the other, I was emotionally stunted.

         Both Dad and Mom worried about my well-being. After all, I would be living nearly six hundred miles away where they couldn’t watch over me. Yet they’d always wanted their children to be independent. As I was growing up, they both often said to me, “Dolores, you can do anything you set your mind to.” They always believed in me.

         But they’d never seen me in the state I was in when I left the convent. During the following thirty days, I had, however, improved somewhat, and as I started to climb out of a deep abyss of unease, I was able to relate again. The “acting normal” became almost second nature and by mid-January, I could engage in conversation with my relatives and talk with salesclerks when Mom and I went to a store together. But always it was an effort to do so and I relapsed into silence when I was with only my Mom or Dad.

         Growing up, I’d found that talking with others was both interesting and enlightening. Yet, not only was I mute when I left the convent, I also lacked any spark of interest in others. I was encased in ice. 

          Fortunately, during those thirty days between leaving and starting my first post-convent job, I decided, subconsciously I suspect, to reenter the human race. I relearned the ebb and flow of conversation. The give and take of it.

         I mention this because on Sunday, January 25, 1967, my future boss—Bob—and his three children, who ranged in age from four to eight, met me at the Dayton Airport. It surprises me still that those children, in their fifties now and living in Spain, Texas, and Kansas, still remember picking me up and what we talked about on the drive from the airport to the Loretto Guild where I was to live for the next five months.

         And what did we talk about?

         Baseball.

         I inherited my love of baseball from Dad. Every summer evening while I was growing up, he, my brother, and I would sit on the front stoop and listen to the radio broadcast of the Kansas City Blues, which was a Triple A minor-league Yankee farm team. I’d followed baseball until I was twenty-two and entered the convent. I’d known all the names, positions and teams of the American League, and the changing stats for the Blues and the Yankees. I was a true fan.

Joe Kuhel was the Blues' manager in the early fifties.

         Of course, in the convent we didn’t listen to the radio or read the newspaper, so I was nine years out of date, but Bob’s adult children have told me more than once how fascinated they were that a “nun” knew so much about how to play the game and about the players from the forties and fifties.

         And that, truly, is the first conversation I had after leaving the convent in which I was, for a space of time, myself at my best. Not acting or playing a role, but simply enjoying the exchange of facts and childhood dreams and ideas with other human beings.

         Children have always had the gift of calling forth from me the essence of who I am.

Photographs from Wikipedia. 

The Loretto Guild and Dad's Advice

Back in May 2011 when I began this on-line memoir, I posted willy-nilly whatever came to mind when I sat down at the computer. However, you, the readers, seem to like the varied series I did later. And the truth is that I enjoy writing an interlocking series.

         So last Thursday I began a new one: my entrance into the world beyond the convent and my beginning, unwittingly, an editing career. This week I’m refashioning a June 7, 2011, posting I did about where I lived and my dad’s advice for working in the big city of Dayton, Ohio.

         The office of Pflaum Publishers there occupied a brick building in a rundown section of town—lots of bars; vacate buildings; men down on their luck. Several blocks away, at 217 North Ludlow Street, stood the Loretto Guild, a residence run by the Dominican Sisters for single workingwomen. The building occupied an entire block in downtown Dayton. 

         Each tenant at the Guild rented a narrow room with a twin bed, a dresser with three drawers, a straight-backed chair, a nightstand with a lamp, a sink, and a closet. We used communal toilet and shower stalls and had both cafeteria and curfew. For about five months, I found myself right at home there—the convent with amenities.

           During my two interview days in Dayton in late December 1966, the managing editor had taken me on a tour of the city. He’d pointed out the Loretto and its nearness to the publishing company. If hired, I’d exit the brick building, turn left, walk to the corner, turn right, cross the street, walk down five blocks, wait for the light, cross the street, turn left, pass a café, and open the door to the publishing house. An easy daily route.

            Before I departed for Ohio to start my new job, Dad gave me some considered advice. “Dolores,” he said, “tell me approximately where the place you live will be in relation to where you’ll work.” My dad respected blueprints and maps, so I drew him one with both the living quarters and the workplace clearly labeled.

            “How are you getting to work?” Dad asked.          

            “I’ll walk.”

            “Tell me your route.”

            I walked it off on the map.

            “No. That’s not good. I want you to go a different way each day.”

            “What do you mean, Dad?”

             “One day, turn right instead of left. It’ll be longer but safer,” Dad said, using his index finger to show me the proposed route on the map. “The next day, turn right but walk beyond the corner, up a block or two. Then turn right and walk to the office. You'll be coming from a different direction.” His finger follows that route. “Some days I want you to walk down six or seven blocks and then come back up to the office. Change your route each day.”

            “Why would I do that?”

            “Honey, all sorts of men are lurking out there. They’ll know your route if you take the same one each day."

            “Yes . . .?”

            “They prey on women,” he said.

            “Dad, who’d want to prey on me?”

            “Believe me, Dolores, they’ll prey on anyone.”

            Despite my listlessness and lack of humor at the time, I almost said, "Thanks, Dad, for that vote of confidence!"                                  And also, despite his concern and care for me, I didn’t take his advice. No circuitous routes. Dad was right though. I did meet men. But no one “hit on” me. That’s the phrase I learned from a women I worked with: men “hit on” her.

            The truth is I’m not sure I’d recognize a “hit” if it happened. Some things just don’t occur to me. It’s often only later—hours, days, weeks, years—that the match sparks and I say, “Oh, that’s what that was all about.”  So if someone “hit” on me those long ago years, it went way over my head. 

All photographs from Wikipedia except for the Loretto Guild, which is from the Dayton Library Postcard Collection.