Getting in Trouble at Sunday Mass

There was a period of time when I was little that my mother felt the inclination to bring my brother and I to church every Sunday (my father remained at home—he was not religious). I am sure she felt it was her motherly duty to expose us to the religious practices in which we were baptized. And every week we would go to 11:00 mass at Christ the King Church in Yonkers. And every week my mother would park her 1968 Plymouth Valiant in the parking lot of PS 16 across from the church. And every week she would park her car in the same spot in the PS 16 parking lot. And we would cross the street at the edge of the driveway and sit in the same pew, next to all the other people at mass who also performed their same routine, exactly the same way, week after week.

Now I am not implying that having a set routine and sitting in the same seat is wrongful in anyway. Routines give us comfort. We all like to be comfortable. When I was in college and finally free from a Catholic school seating chart and could sit anywhere in the classroom, I chose of my own volition to sit in the same seat in every different classroom I was in. I always sat 2 rows from the door in the third or fourth seat. For me, this served two functions: I had an easy exit and entrance, and the close proximity to the front of the room allowed me to directly engage the professor (I have always been that student) as well as it enabled me to not wear my eyeglasses to see the board.

But back to church. When you are a little kid, just about nothing is as boring to you as going to Sunday mass. Truth be told, it teeters on child abuse to force a child to sit on a hard pew or kneel upright and listen to homilies in silence that you just do not understand. And in 1969, there was no such thing as the “children’s mass”, so everyone, young and old, was forced to sit, pray, and sing together.

Since we, like everyone else, sat in the same self-assigned seats every week, the same old woman sat in front of me. She smelled like mothballs—100% naphthalene---and she wore dead animals as a shawl. Apparently wearing dead animals (stone marten) was a fashion statement with old ladies in those days because she, and lots of the other old ladies in church, wore critters every week. I was fascinated—you could actually see the teeth on their little animal mouths and the nails on their little animal feet. And they linked together head-tail, head-tail from the waist up circling around the neck and shoulders. It was bizarre. And not only did the old woman smell like naphthalene and wear dead animals around her neck and body, she did something that every week, as I sat bored beyond bored, got me into trouble. The old lady that always sat in front of me in the same pew week after week thought she was an opera singer. And when the organ would play the hymn Holy Holy Holy, considerably less than euphonic sounds bellowed from her voicebox. And she was loud—and she was an awful singer.

When you are a little kid, and bored in mass, and the old lady in front of you smells like moths balls, wears dead animals, and then sings as if she was Maria Callas in Carmen, you get the giggles. And not a giggle or two—you get a mad case of the giggles. And giggling in church in 1969 particularly when there was no children’s mass was strictly forbidden. My mother would be mortified at my behavior. She would attempt to immediately put a stop to it. She would throw me a mean motherly look but I was always too far gone. The only way my mother could cure my full on case of the giggles was to grab a tiny little piece of skin on the underside of my upper arm and pinch it until the pain overrode the humor. And let me tell you, the pain from that pinched skin rivaled childbirth. But it was a necessary evil. It was the only way to stop my giggling.

My way of coping with life’s little (or big) tragedies is to find the humor in everything. It’s just the way I am. Maybe it’s psychological avoidance, I don’t know. And I still have trouble sometimes not giving in to the humor during solemn moments. Which is why when my father was dying, and we were so very upset and sad, and we went to the coffin showroom (that is funny in itself) at the funeral parlor, and saw the tacky baby blue Elvis Presley-like coffin with the baby blue jacquard satin lining, all my brother and I could do was giggle.  And even as distraught as my mother was, she giggled too, and saw no need to pinch my arm.