Ugly Duckling Story

My father thinks he oughta kill me for having a little pride.

The dirt poor working class.

I got a line on that a long time ago in a magazine called The Other Side, primarily Black American, which mysteriously shut down after I sent a subscription to my father that showed a Black crucifixion scene on the front cover. I thought of that being delivered with his mail and figured his reaction,

At the same time I had sent to him another subscription to a small radical Christian publication to and that, also, suddenly went out of circulation. just afterward.

As for poverty, my father thought he escaped it through the British scholarship system of the post-war era in England.

By marrying my beautiful mother and moving to America in the “Brain Drain.”

But he did not. He put it on his children and he just does not understand the cost of this not just to him but to so many others.

The article in “The Other Side” that I read, I don’t know how to say it but it’s something about pennies. Stained dark copper pennies. The feeling that I got from it. I remember trying to find 10 consecutive pennies datewise (in other words, the year) and I couldn’t do it, but I wanted to give them to my little boyfriend’s mother and I thought about how delighted she would be. I collected changed from all over the house and kept it. Recently I was called a pig. It was the little girl I was and I don’t mind it a bit because I finally grew out of it and I LOVE that little girl that I was that no one else could.

Because she also stood near the top of the staircase feeling dizzy from hunger and sugar sweets holding the pencil she was looking for and fell all the way down to the bottom and there wasn’t even anyone there to know it. I don’t remember what happened afterward. I may have fallen unconscious.

But here I am today, 50 or more years later, to hold her wherever she still lives in me and all those nasty snots who hurt me can go take their marbles and play somewhere else.

Because those who have the Lord lack nothing.

The Lord alone is sufficient. (St. Therese of Avila)

And now she does have the Lord through me today.

And so does the little girl in me who turned around to look back at the boy behind her as she was getting her bike and fell down on it and got the wind knocked out of her. It didn’t hurt but it was embarrassing. I was a Clutz. I didn’t move easily.

I guess I was some sort of Ugly Duckling story. “The W-M story” (wart-mole).

Somewhere in that is the heavy presence of exactly 40 years suffering and my theory that my mother was descended from Jewish grandparents who on her mother’s side who “passed” as Anglican. She called herself a heathen, and her mother also. Neither were baptized, she said. Her father was Anglican as far as I know. My father was half Irish Catholic and half Anglican, roughly speaking. I picked up on the exactly 40 years and wondered whether Jews lived that out somehow in their faith? I dont know, it puzzles me. I have too much that I need and want to know. I don’t have time for it all.

The point is, the insane suffering seems to be relenting and the Lord is calling me home. That is one of the things that I am wondering. Whether he is calling me home as in, to death? Because so many things are coming together. Or is He calling me to a new beginning?

Only time will tell.