Grace Notes

Since today is the anniversary of the JFK assassination, I am sharing an excerpt from my essay Mystique, which was published in Ten Spurs, Literary Journal of the Mayborn Conference

Standing in the living room on a bright crisp Saturday in October 1960, my father asks me if I would like to come with him to get neighbors to vote.  Eagerly, I say yes and my mother buttons up my sweater and brushes back my hair.  Dad and I go about Rosedale ringing doorbells.  We climb the brick stoops of the houses around St. Clare’s.  Dad has an impressive list of all the registered voters in the area, or maybe he just has the registered Democrats. The list would be virtually the same for our neighborhood on the outskirts of Queens where nearly everyone is a member of St. Clare’s Roman Catholic Church, and if they aren’t, they belong to Beth Israel on the other side of Sunrise Highway. Oh, there are a few Protestants, someone has to go to St. Peter’s Episcopal near the Long Island Rail Road station.  Maybe they are on the Republican voter list.

So Dad rings the bell and someone answers the door, saying something pleasant to the little kid in corduroys who has come to help.  Dad always has a friendly line while conveying the importance of getting out to vote on Election Day.  Hello, Joe, I’m here with my young friend Juli-kazool to ask you and Evelyn to vote on Tuesday November 8.  As you know we are supporting the Kennedy-Johnson ticket and every vote counts. I turn three the day before John Kennedy is elected President of the United States.  He is one of us; Irish, Catholic and his daughter and I were born the same month of the same year.

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Somebody had to do it.

So we volunteered.  With four Slimming World© comrades I proudly and cheerfully brought up the rear of the 5K “Dorothy’s Dash” for MS on Saturday.  Thank you, thank you.  No need for applause.

I had never been in a 5K.  Long, long time ago, I twice signed up for a twenty mile Walkathon.  The first year it poured so my friend and I found our way to the Statue of Liberty where we met up with a group of kids from the neighborhood and climbed to the top of Lady Liberty.  In soggy shoes and blue jeans heavy with rain, we climbed round and round the steep and narrow stairs just to pass by the windows in her crown and look out, very briefly, at a gray and soggy harbor.  You do that kind of thing when you’re 15.

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