Journal of a Naked Poet - II

My first historical memory is the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I was two and a half years old, and did not know what death was. I've written about it in several poems. My father was away, fighting in the "Pacific theater," as the military euphemistically called it. I asked my mother where Daddy was, and she told me he was fighting "the Japs." I asked her what a "Jap" was, and she showed me a monstrous figure that she had drawn with colored chalks on a small chalkboard. The casualties of war are not only the bodies of young men and women; they include the minds, the attitudes, the hearts of civilians.

I remember the rainy night in a Navy housing project in Chula Vista, California, when my father came home from the war. I have written about it in a poem or two. My parents had to shyly get reacquainted with each other. I guess they did, because after Patricia and myself, six more children were born.

There was a terrible housing shortage in 1946, and for a while my parents and my sister and I lived in a one-room converted garage. I think it was there that I experienced what I now interpret as a reincarnational flash, involving an old man in a skullcap, working with plant essences. It was the first of many, and I've written about that, too.

One day, while we were living in that garage, my mother sat cross-legged on the foot of my little bed, and started telling me about God. Of course, since she was an Irish Catholic, it was her version. At first I was excited, as she started out with "Long ago, so long ago that you can't imagine it . . . ," but when she got to the Christ part, I clearly remember thinking, "Oh no, not that old story again," and was quite disappointed. When my father came home from work and asked her what she was doing, she was singing Tantum Ergo to me (a thirteenth-century Benediction hymn by Thomas Aquinas, written in complex and erudite Latin that is difficult even for me, now). I'm sure my mother had no idea what it meant, but the melody, when combined with incense and a golden monstrance, is quite compelling. My father, who had not yet converted to Catholicism, was, I'm sure, baffled by the whole thing.

Religion, or rather spirituality, took on increasing importance in my life.  In 1953, when Stalin died, the nuns in my Catholic school told us to pray for him, because "he was a very bad man, and was surely going to hell." I dutifully did so. By the seventh or eighth grade I had developed an infatuation with the simple life of poverty of Saint Francis of Assisi. Poverty was something that I could understand: we had plenty of it.

In high school, when I became literate in Spanish, I became enamored of the mystical writings of Teresa of Ávila. I read the Imitation of Christ in Latin (my copy had belonged to San Diego's Bishop Buddy, and I still, miraculously, have it). Then, straight out of high school, I entered a Jesuit novitiate. I lasted two and a half months.

(to be continued)

Text and image © 2020 by Donald Jacobson Traxler.