It has taken me years to unravel why The Way of Saint James was SO important to me and it wasn't until i truly set my intention to do it that the choices in both my spiritual and my physical preparation began providing those answers. It took on a rather mystical quality all it's own. In fact I often said " I am no longer driving this bus " I said it so much I swear I could see the bus. Turns out it was a school bus.
Friday November 22, 1963 at 12:30 pm i was where i always was on Friday afternoons, school.
Saint Richards School Omaha Nebraska. I probably don't need to spell it out for most of you reading this : That date changed the way many of us looked at our world and for those of us too young to intellectually grasp all the ramifications of President Kennedy's assassination it was the images and the feelings around that day that remain. Until that day our occasional school drills of *"Stop, Duck and Cover" were the only indicator that there existed even a flicker of Danger somewhere. Besides with all those drills, we were surely prepared, weren't we?
To truly understand , you have to have some memory of it, as it happened, My memories of that day are still pretty clear along with how I felt about it.
Before that particular hour of that particular day , it was just Friday, a day of the week that like most school age children i looked forward to and for me it was not just because cartoons & favorite serial shows followed on Saturdays mornings. Fridays in my class at Saint Richards meant " Reading Day" and whatever "Catholic Reader" we were on that week would be read aloud not just by each of us but by our teacher, our nun. i always looked forward to. I loved it . I'm not sure if that day we were in a Faith and Freedom Reader or the ever popular Cathedral Reader, what i do remember is that we were finishing the story from the previous week of two best friends separated by the settlement of St Augustine Florida by the Spanish. the ending of that story had the cry of one friend to the other of something like , "Remember St James! and Spain" . My having just left Arizona to " re-settle " in Omaha, i had a year and a half earlier learned for the first time, what it felt like to be separated from a best friend, when Lala left our small town to accompany her parents and "resettle" in the foreign land otherwise known as Tucson . Aside from the fact that neither Lala or I ever exclaimed some loud and dramatic farewell. ( " Remember Chatty Cathy! and Ft Huachuca" doesn't provide nearly the same impact) I related. My teacher ( sister) had a great flare for *imagery ,a great story teller. She would always include bits of historical and liturgical details about the importance of each of those bits to each story. In this case St James importance to Spain and about what a Pilgrimage was and ..Oh wait , did she just mention France? as a pilgrims route ? Did she just talk about Joan of Arc ? And Orleans !! Hey I was born there!" .. I met my friend there". That sister called me " The girl with 100 questions" i always wanted more information, especially if something sparked my interest. As that awful news came in the door that our president had been shot , i didn't want anymore information. I ,along with all my classmates,spent the rest of the time till dismissal on our knees by our desks , staring up at the portrait of our President that always hung above the blackboard. Even our otherwise unflappable , sometimes stern nuns suddenly seemed tender and vulnerable.
While trying to navigate the sad & confusing weeks that followed I continued to play out that story in my imagination, along with various other stories i liked , along with my Barbie and what ever else i could use to distract myself from the awful grainy black & white images the TV produced over and over again. Disrupting our Saturday morning routine, but more important upsetting our parents and seemingly every adult we depended on and looked to to feel safe and secure. Not to mention the nuns. I remember seeing several of the sisters trying to hide what were clearly tears as they organized our exit from school that day. The world didnt look quite the same. It is nearly impossible for anyone who wasn't there or was too young to remember ,including trying to explain to the children in today's world ( of instant and sensationalized media output everywhere ) the impact that horrible event had on everyone in 1963.
That was pretty much the last happy time on "Reader Friday" at that school before we moved again ,which was shortly after that and before the school year had even ended. Later in my new School in South Carolina and in all our subsequent moves and new schools after that I apparently developed a pension for "Daydreaming" every teacher that followed said i had a particular talent for it. Its right there on every report card ,in black & white. I know now it was my own way of saying "Please do not interrupt my regularly scheduled & otherwise happy childhood with any more scary or unhappy events." I also think I was beginning to be very aware that all the moving with new places and new schools , nearly every year , were going to be quite enough for me.
Even with all that I was relating too in that book before the "bad news" came & all the various elements that spoke to me and helped to project me right into that story , I may never have remembered , had it not been for the bigger, sadder events that surrounded that day. Who knows, but all of those feelings are part if it now. They never faded. And St James and his story in Spain? They would call to me again and again over the years and often in the most unexpected ways. I was already on that bus.
On My Way to Santiago de Compostela
49 years 8 months and about Twenty Days before I begin to walk
The Camino also known as The Way of Saint James
* Stop, Duck & Cover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_and_cover
* As everything in life has a potential for a shadow side , my nun's talent for imagery & storytelling was no different. This same nun painted such a clear description of " The Fiery Waters of Hell" for me that those images kept me (and in so doing ,my parents) awake for weeks. Though i remember that i liked her she was over all what we might refer to now as " tightly wound" i only found out years later that it was after she recieved the news that President Kennedy had been shot that she came back into the room and finished our story before delivering the news to us. She seemed softer to me more accessible and took great pains to try ,as best she could , to explain the events with much thought and care especially given the age of her young charges. I remember that very clearly because I remember being scared and confused. Up until then it would have been harder to imagine her dispensing all of those comforting hugs so freely. I remember that feeling of being comforted completely enveloped by her habit as her arms surrounded me. She showed great patience ,and concern for each of us as we left that day. I never attended a Catholic or a Parochial school again. I missed the nuns. My nun . I missed the stature of Mary in front of that school that greeted me each day as I arrived. In times of great uncertainty & unhappiness I suppose I've been searching for them ever since.
