For me, fear and desperate planning
filled the first three months of Grade 5. I had to somehow avoid Mr. Jackson’s
groping hand when he drove me and his sons and daughter and my little brother
to and from school. Grade 6, however, went well. No trauma that I can remember
except for Dad’s drinking and the loud arguments between him and Mom. I kept
hiding the hammer, axe, and knives for fear that during one of those drunken
arguments he’d try to kill her again.
In
fact, I remember the fall months of 1947 with enjoyment for it was then that I
first studied ancient history. One November day, while reading about the
Grecian city-state of Thebes, I had a déjà vu moment and roamed the streets
leading up to its ancient citadel. The present merged with the past and I
became Theban. That experience led me to visit Greece in 1993 and work on a
Bronze-Age-Greece novel.
Remains of Cadmea, the
central fortress of ancient Thebes.
The
other vivid memory I have of Grade 6 concerns heaven. Over and over in religion
class Sister Mary McCauley talked about the afterlife.
Dante and Beatrice gaze at
the highest heavens.
“What will we do in
heaven,” I asked one day.
“Why,
Dolores, you’ll praise God for all His glory and beauty and goodness. You’ll
sing, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and Earth are filled with
your glory!”
“That’s
it?”
“Yes.
Isn’t it glorious?”
Clearly,
she thought so.
I
didn’t.
The
truth was that hell, despite its flames, sounded much more interesting. No
mealy-mouthed humans there.
Medieval illustration of
Hell
in the Hortus deliciarum
manuscript
of Herrad of Landsberg—about
1180.
So
I thought. And thought. And thought some more about how to make heaven
appealing. After alighting from the school bus one afternoon, I ran up the
rutted driveway, into the unpainted house, and called out, “Mom!”
“I’m
here. In the kitchen.”
Dumping
my books on the divan, I hurried to the kitchen where Mom stood at the range,
stirring a steaming pot of macaroni.
“Mom!”
I shouted. “You know how heaven being boring bothers me?”
“Yes.”
“God
seems so conceited. All He wants is to be praised all the time. And it just
goes on and on and on with no ending. It scares me. Everything ends. What’s the
end of heaven?”
“It’s
the end of life I know about, Dolores. We die and we’re with God.”
“But
just saying, ‘Holy, Holy,’ all the time gets monotonous. I’d like talking with
people.” I paused and then confided that God simply wasn’t enough for all
eternity.
“He’s
pretty wonderful,” she said.
“Well,
if dead people have been telling Him that since the Neanderthals”—we’d started
our study of ancient history with them that year—“then He must be sort of tired
of it all by now. Wouldn’t you think so?”
“Possibly.”
“So
here’s my idea! When I get to heaven I’m going to ask God—as a favor—if He’d
show me a movie of every person who’s ever lived—even those babies in Limbo.
Going all the way back to the Neanderthals.”
“Sounds
interesting.”
“Yes," I agreed enthusiastically. "And that’s not all. I’ll ask to see not only the people but also what they
thought and what they said and what they dreamed about! And I’ll see and hear
their conversations when they were alive. I’ll watch their whole lives! The
life of every person!”
As
Mom drained the macaroni, she summed it up. “So you’re going to see a long
movie?”
“The
longest ever, Mom. It’ll go on and on because people keep dying and I’d keep
seeing movies of their lives. Maybe God will even give me popcorn! Buttered!”
I
went to bed content that night. An eternity of stories . . . and buttered popcorn.
All
photographs are from Wikipedia.
