We've established I had no religious up bringing. We had one old and moldy Bible in the hall bookcase, which was sparse of books to begin with and was used primarily to press flowers. After my dad died, I brought it home and found a flower! Well, it was actually a lot of decomposed buds, but a flower!
As a child, there wasn't anyway I could comprehend this tome written in the Old English, besides, Dad kept Playboys around and we tended to find them more interesting. We also had a book called Egermeir's Bible Stories. I couldn't understand the them, though loved the pictures. With no understanding of Christianity, picking up Bibles and Bible story books, meant nothing to me, and my parents just weren't going to teach me. Not that they weren't good parents, they were, but they were disconnected from God, on any level, that I could tell.
My Dad had some grudge against God, and whenever I asked him to take me to church, he'd turn purple. He died this past September and I still don't know what his issue was with God, but he seemed to have made "some" peace, and according to his nurse, accepted the Lord at the end. My brother's theory was Dad would say
anything to impress the attractive woman, since she held his hands to pray. But as kids, the name "GOD" wasn't allowed to be spoken in our house, but we could say cuss words. I pushed this whole God theory envelope during my Born Again days in High School and got slapped for the effort. But I'm getting ahead of the story.
Georgette Travers Circa 1932
My mother wasn't a source for God, either, nor did it help that she wasn't one to talk much about her own life. When she died I reflected on how much I didn't know about her. She wore a cross, more often than not, and had a few Rosaries (including the glow in the dark one pictured on previous post), and made a point to visit all the grave sites of all our relatives once a year, a kind of pilgrimage. She also bought my first Bible (when I was 17) though I asked for it on my birthday. All I knew was she'd grown up Catholic, was abandoned by her mother, and there was "an issue" about her marrying a Methodist (her story). She held fast to being kicked out of the church for marrying my dad. But she also told me when she was a kid, her father was deported to Portugal for horse thieving. This was a complete lie. I discovered during genealogy that he'd gone home after his French-Canadian wife (granny) left him for a sailor. Mom had been living with his family in New Bedford, and when granny's cavorting was discovered, they shipped mom back to her mother, in California. They never contacted my mother again, and she lost her roots.
As was custom in those days, they didn't "talk" about their past, leaving me to piece things together. Though my mother never stepped foot into a church unless someone was getting married or being buried, she nonetheless sent away for her Certificate of Baptism in 1988, verifying she was Baptized into the Catholic Church on January 30, 1927, at St. Anne Church, New Bedford, MA. She never told me she sent for this, and I found it after her death. It makes me feel sad.
New Bedford MA Catholic Document
Her affinity for Catholics went as far as her fondness of her cousin, a priest from Boston who would come to visit us in the summers. I was fond of him, too, and tried to draw him into God talk, but he wasn't interested in talking about God, and at the time I thought that strange since he was a man of faith. But, he said while on vacation he'd much rather have a whiskey and cigar and leave his collar off. I used to write to him, until we lost track of him by 1993; mom said it was because he was in seclusion, that he'd decided to become a monk. That story didn't resonate with me because he wasn't very religious in my mind, and then there was the cigars and drinking thing... and, of course, he liked to pose me in bikini pictures. At the time, I felt "weird about it," but nothing more. We just didn't KNOW about BAD things then.
While doing some genealogy I discovered he was subject to two molestation lawsuits, both of them brought by women. He was accused of molesting them when he served as assistant pastor of St. Joan of Arc Church in Cumberland in the 1970's. He was placed on leave of absence in 1993. Frightening. He died Feb 15, 2001.
Alfred R. Desrosiers "Sonny." Here he is in his usual garb when he was visiting. And a picture he took of me in 1969 at Huntington Beach, CA.
I do remember him being a tad too touchy-feely, and also a good body-surfer.
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