In the Catholic Church, each month of the year is dedicated to a particular devotion: January to The Holy Name of Jesus, February to The Holy Family, March to Saint Joseph, and so on, but the one I remember most clearly is October, which is dedicated to The Holy Rosary. As a child that month was, for me, a time of pain, fun, and fear.
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Pain was always the first to appear, settling in for a month-long spell on the first of the month. On that night, after the early-evening chores—picking up a lard-pail’s worth of hickory nuts in the woods; helping Daddy with the milking of his cows; and feeding the lucky layer-hens that had survived the end-of-summer slaughter when a hundred of their brethren had gone from the coop to the cauldron and into the cooler—and following the washing of dishes and cleaning-up from what was often a one-dish meal (a kettle of chili con carne, a pot of chicken noodle soup, a baking dish of scalloped potatoes with ham, or, on Fridays, a casserole of macaroni and tuna) Mother would announce, “Time for Rosary,” to which Daddy would refrain, “Knees on the floor,” a joint command that prompted their seven school-age children to take their rosaries from the crucifix where they hung and to kneel beside the chairs that circled the dining table.
Like the Muslim tasbeh, a rosary is tool for meditation. A rosary consists of a crucifix from which hangs a “pendant” with five beads that ends with a medallion to which is attached a “loop” that is strung with five “decades” of small beads, between each of which is a larger bead. The beads of a rosary might be shiny and colorful—so pretty that my sisters would wear them as necklaces—but mine was made of boring-black wooden beads that symbolized discomfort for me.
The floors in our home were made of oak slats and with no cushion between my knobby knees and the hardwood floor, as the family together first recited the Apostle’s Creed, then the Our Father, followed by three Hail Mary’s, a Glory Be and another Our Father, my knees would begin to ache. A half hour or more later, by the time we’d finished the entire “loop” with its fifty Holy Marys, four Our Fathers, four Glory Bes, a Fatima Prayer after every Glory Be, and ended the prayer with a Hail Holy Queen, the synovial fluid in the membrane behind my patellae would have ceased to lubricate the joints of my femurs and tibiae, thereby locking them at a 45 degree angle and causing me to wince and yelp as I struggled to an upright position. Every night of the month, this cruelty was the same. While I had been taught that the lengthy recitation of The Holy Rosary was intended as a time to reflect on the glorious, joyful, and sorrowful mysteries in the life of Jesus, my mind was only on the sorrowful.
With my birthday coming in mid-October and the angel food cake and gifts that accompanied it, the month did also offer a measure of fun but with darkness descending ever earlier in the day and the naked trees transforming themselves in moonlight to wraiths with skeletal limbs and fingers, it was a time of fear as well.
As a knobby-kneed boy on my birthday in October 1960—prior to praying The Holy Rosary!
Ravenous ghouls were outside and in abundance, just waiting for you to drop your guard, and if you didn’t dip your fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross before going to bed, they were likely to slip inside the house and whisk you away while you’re sleeping to their haunted world. You never knew where they might be hiding: maybe in the barren trees, maybe in the dry grass beside the road.
Oddly enough, Halloween night on October 31, precisely the time when malevolent spirits are purported to prowl, was never a scary night for me. For some reason, I just knew the night was only for fun and that there was no need to worry about ghosts or witches. Perhaps because gaggles of screaming children disgusted them, they kept to their lairs and after we, the McGlynn kids, had “disguised” ourselves with brown-paper bags over our heads and Daddy had driven us to town, we were free to roam the few short streets of Cazenovia without fear of abduction. And anyway, even if there were stray ghosts about, you could bribe them with your sack of candy.
No, Halloween was fun—but it was all the other nights that were scary. When waking in the night with an urgent need to relieve myself, I would have to jump from the bed to the rug and then from my rug through the doorway in order to reach the bathroom beyond. This action had to be done in two steps only; not a single toe could touch the bedroom floor because that would rouse the ogre who rested beneath my bed. Being the littlest goat with no older brother to ward off the ogre, I would be unable to escape the ogre’s claws and certain death.
Given all the fears I had as a child, I consider myself lucky to have reached adulthood. If it wasn’t a monster that was going to eat me while I slept, it was my own sisters who were going to lock me in the clothes drier and spin me around till I shrank so small that I fell through the tumbler’s holes never to be seen again.
I believe that we are all much more superstitious than we’d care to admit but that as we grow we use our experience and education to disguise our fears. Similarly, our childhood demons move from lairs to live in sanctuaries, dress themselves in human apparel, and appear regularly on national radio and television.
With October’s end comes November, a month of devotion for the Souls of the Dead. November 1 is All Saints’ Day, celebrated in honor of all the known and unknown saints in heaven. November 2 is All Souls’ Day, a day to remember the souls of all the “faithful” who have passed. Though I do not count myself as especially faithful in the Catholic sense of the term, I do cherish the tradition of honoring the dead and this year, when more than 1.4 million lives have been shortened by an illness whose spread might have been stopped or at least hampered by benevolent spirits, it was a coven of demons that came to rule.
In memory of Terry Shadick
John McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org