Attempted Kidnapping (Part 2)

“That they were almost kidnapped by werewolves?” asked my smart alec Uncle Richie giggling in the background. I stuck my tongue at him. My mom ignored him.

“She called the police and is sending them over here when they are done talking to Anne Marie.”

“Oh my God!” My Nan gasped as she pulled me close.

I looked up at my mom and cried, “I told you! You never believe me!” My mom sighed.

Two cops showed up not too long after. One was tall, skinny, and kind of cute for being older. The other was a little chunky and looked like he had one donut too many. I had really made up some doozies to spice up our conversation by the time they arrived so when the nice police officer handed me a lollipop and sat with me on the plastic covered couch and asked me to tell him what happened, I was ready for him.

“Weelll…,” I drawled out my words after popping my sucker out of my mouth, “it happened like this. Me and Anne Marie stopped at the playground like we always do. Anne Marie is my cousin. Actually, I think we stopped at my great-grandmom and grandpop’s first. She always gives us pizelles. You ever have them? They are sooo yummy and…”

The officer taking notes jabbed his partner with his small white pad, which prompted the one sitting next to me to ask, "Tell me what happened when you left the playground.”

“Oh, well, Anne Marie wanted to leave because she said the spaceship made her sick because it spun so fast when it took off...”

“Spaceship?” the pudgy cop laughed. I scowled at him and said with another big slurp of my lollipop,

“Didn’t your momma tell you it’s really impolite to innerrupt?”

The cop beside me cleared his voice and smiled at his friend. “What’s your name anyway?”

The cop, who wasn’t finding this so funny just glared at me so the nice cop beside me said, “I’m Officer Paul and that’s Officer Jack.”

“Well you really need to teach Officer Jack some manners,” I huffed.

Officer Paul winked at me, “I’ll try. Can you please tell us more about the spaceship? Is that a ride at the playground?”

Richie, who was eavesdropping again, popped out from the family room and said, “She’s talking about the merry-go-round.” I acted like I didn’t hear him. He might be 16, but he acted like he was 10!

“Anyway,” I continued, “she really is a sissy about spinny stuff. She needs to toughen up, if you know what I mean.”

The good cop grinned, “I think I do.”

“We had just come out of Universe Playtown when these two aliens from Nowhere Land, on the other side of Jupiter, pulled up in their broken down spaceship…”

Richie burst out laughing, “I thought they were werewolves.”

(to be continued)

Attempted Kidnapping (Part 1)

One day while walking home from school with Anne Marie, we had an unusual and frightening encounter. We took our regular route home, making a pit stop at my great-grandparents’ house for snacks, and then hung out at the playground that sat conveniently half way between school and home.

After we finished swinging, sliding, and releasing the general stuffiness that accompanies a day trapped in a classroom listening to people talk at you, we picked up our school bags and walked towards the exit. No sooner had we reached the street did a banged up gray car pull up in front of us. Two young men with long dark hair and even darker eyes sat inside of it. The passenger rolled down his window while Anne Marie and I stood cautiously but curiously watching. He held up a little brown puppy for us to see and was asking us if we wanted to pet it.

I could feel and hear my radar (a sound much like an inner alarm) start bleeping in my head. I stood frozen in place, but, when Anne Marie began to walk towards the car, I sprang into action. I leaped from my spot, grabbed her hand, and drug her in the opposite direction the car was facing. As we raced off, I chided to her about the class we just had on talking to strangers in between screams for help.

We ran to the closest house banging on its door frantically, but no one answered. Looking over my shoulder, I realized the car had sped off. We quickly walked the other half block to Anne Marie’s, and then I cut through some back yards and front yards to my house.

Bursting through the front door, dropping my bag on the floor, I breathlessly blurted out, “Me and Anne Marie were almost kidnapped!” to which my mom promptly rolled her eyes. Now, understand, I was the “queen of tall tales” as my Nan would so fondly tell me. I had told whoppers about pretty much everything and, of course, there were true things that no adult could ever bring himself or herself to believe. It was all classified as my “vivid imagination," whether it was or not.

“No, really it’s true this time,” I shouted.

“What’s true?” my Nan asked from the staircase.

“Me and Anne Marie were almost kidnapped by these two werewolves driving in a silver bullet. They were about to eat a puppy, and they wanted us…” The phone interrupted me.

Okay so I exaggerated. Fiction was always much more interesting than the truth. You had to juice it up a bit, and I was good at it. What was the big deal anyway? Adults did it all the time. They made up pretty lies of how much they loved you and then would hurt and betray you in the worst ways possible. Believe me, I knew. I had learned a lot in my 7 years on this earth.

My mom hung up the phone and, speaking more to my grandmother then me, she said, “That was Anne. It seems Anne Marie came home saying the same thing.”

(to be continued)

Cousins First, Then Friends 2

“Why aren’t there any women priests in our church?”

Without even looking up from her cup of wafers, she answered, “I don’t think there are any women priests in any church.” She was one year older than me, but I don’t think you would guess it if you didn’t already know it.

“Well, why not?” I questioned.

“I dunno. I don’t think the church likes women too much.” I rolled with laughter.

“Yeah, right. You don’t see the men walking around in those crazy get-ups! They make the women look like a bunch of penguins.” We both giggled then. Once we calmed down again, the conversation turned serious.

“I’m gonna be like Mother Theresa when I grow up,” I said to not really anyone in particular.

“I’m gonna be a model” replied Anne Marie.

After she thought for a few minutes, she said, “Why you wanna go and be that? I think you have to be real old. Mother Theresa has a lot of wrinkles.”

“I don’t know. It just seems like something I want to do.” I shrugged. Anne Marie shrugged, too.

“Okay, well, maybe I’ll give you some money to feed all those kids then. I’m gonna have lots of money! But don’t expect me to go out there with you because I can’t be all dirty and be a model.”

I cackled, “Who says you have to get dirty?”

“Don’t you see them pictures of those people. They are dirty!”

“They ain’t dirty. That’s their color!” I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, I don’t mind getting dirty.”

“I know you don’t, but I’ll have a reptation to uphold.”

It was my turn to be the priest, and I dunked the wafer into our grape juice. “Mother Theresa is a nun, Tammy. You gonna be a nun?”

"I dunno. I don’t like the ones at our school too much. They are pretty scary. Mother Theresa seems okay, though. I wonder if you can be a reglar person and still be a missionary?” My mind wandered off as I placed the wafer onto Anne Marie’s tongue.

Cousins First, Then Friends

Many times I would find myself over at Anne Marie’s house to play. She was my cousin. She was okay, even if she did like to play with dolls.

The first time I met her was when her mom brought her to my house. They thought we would get along nicely since we were so close in age. It might’ve been okay if she hadn’t brought those darn dolls with her. How sappy!

As soon as she walked through the door with her brown curls and those ugly dolls hanging from her hands, I knew I was in trouble. Yuck! I ran upstairs to hide, but my mom found me. “Tammy Marie, Annie has brought her daughter to play with you.”

“Aw, Mom, she’s gonna wanna play babies. I don’t like that sissy stuff.” I grumbled from underneath my bed, giving away my position.

My mom yanked me out by my leg with me protesting the entire time. “She can play with Bobby. He doesn’t know any difference anyhow. Moooom….”

Despite our rough start, we did grow on each other. She hardly ever made me play dolls cause she knew I hated it. Anne Marie had a chalkboard and school desks in her grandparents’ basement so a lot of times we would pretend to be at school. Only our school was cool. Not like the real thing. We would let our students, which were a mixture of stuffed bears and dolls, ask questions. A lot of times we would have really good answers for them, too.

If we weren’t playing school, we were pretending to be at church and took turns being the priest and doling out the wafers. Her grandpop would get bags of them from the church for us. Those things weren’t as tasty as potato chips, but we sure could put them down.

“Hey, Anne Marie.”

“What?”

(to be continued)

The Sacrament of Eucharist

Rows and rows of boys in neatly pressed suits and girls in pristine white veils and dresses made of laces and satins were almost spoiled by the dark, ominous skies. Various colored umbrellas hung precariously over the heads of the young children being quickly ushered from the convent to the church. It was the day of my First Holy Communion, and the clouds had burst open with a fierce downpour. The rain pounded the pavement around us, splashing dirt onto our shiny white shoes. It looked as dreary as I felt.

Making your First Holy Communion is a big deal in Catholicism. For the first time in a child’s life, you are old enough to enter into another aspect of your religion. It was a very special time we were told. We would be allowed to receive the body of Christ in the form of a wafer, which begged the questions, at least from me, “How did they get Jesus’ body into that little wafer? And why would you want to eat it?” Many more of these crossed my mind, some expressed and some not.

Then, of course, was the counterpart of the wafers, the wine (I thought you had to be an adult to drink?). But this wasn’t any ordinary wine, it was supposed to be the blood of Christ. Gross! This seemed pretty creepy to me. I guess, it was just me, though, because everyone else seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, especially the priests.

Part of me felt very proud to participate in this special occasion, parading across the schoolyard for all of our families to see, but another part of me could not escape all the questions it brought forth. It made me uncomfortable. As we entered our local church, we were escorted into the pews and warned again to be quiet. I sighed and nervously peeked back to catch a glimpse of my Nan and the rest of my family. I couldn’t see them so I turned back around and put my attention on the altar.

It was adorned and surrounded by beautiful white and blue flowers leftover from the May Procession, which was in honor of Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus. I had asked Nan what did it mean to be a “virgin," but she waved me off with a brief but abrupt answer that never made any sense to me.

When I asked my teacher that same question, “What was a virgin?” she turned several shades of red, stuttered awhile, and then asked why I wanted to know. Slightly relieved when I told her I wanted to know why Mary was called a virgin, she told me that God put Jesus in Mary’s belly. I thought about this and then said, “My neighbor was talking to my Nan and told her that Pauline would be a virgin for the rest of her life. Is God going to put a baby in her belly, too?”

My teacher’s mouth hung open and her face lit up like the red bulbs on our tree at Christmas time. “No, Tammy,” she managed to squeak out, “Mary was very special. This won’t happen again.” I chewed on that thought for a few moments and then spit out,

“Did God marry Mary afterwards? Did Mary divorce God and marry Joseph? Aren’t we all children of God? If we are then are our mommies virgins too…” The words flew out of my mouth like bullets but were halted in mid-air by the look on my teacher’s face. She reached up and rubbed her temples.

As she turned back to the class, she said, “We’ll talk about this more another day," which translates into “when hell freezes over.” I giggled at the memory of it and was snapped back into the present by Sister Mary tapping on my shoulder. She leaned close to my ear and whispered, “I have my eye on you, young lady.”

“Great!” I thought. “Why does she always have to sit right near me.”

Father Comes to Class

Two days later, Father Callahan took over our Religion class. I was glad to see he kept his promises. He was a younger priest and much nicer to look at then Sister Anne. Father sent Sister to the back of the room. I giggled into my hand as she tried to squeeze into an empty desk. It kind of looked like a penguin when they waddle their back end into something, and it struck me funny. When I turned around in my seat, Father wagged his finger at me.

“Okay, children, today we are going to talk about sins.” He made columns on the chalkboard for the venial sins and another one for the mortal sins. He asked us for examples of these. I sat and listened because everyone was yelling at once. Father had to tell everyone, “One at a time. We’ll start here and go all the way back.” Great! I was the very last one. They would take all my answers!

We had to name a sin and then say if it was big or small. Lying, disobeying parents, stealing, cheating, fighting, and not going to Mass on Sunday or Holy Days were some of the standard answers. Some of us were more original. Susie said her brother knotted her cat’s tail to a rope and then tied it to their fence and then made a loud noise causing the cat to try and run. That’s just mean!

Jeffrey said that his dad liked to look up their neighbor’s short skirts when her husband wasn’t looking. He said his mom caught his dad once, and she didn’t talk to him for a week! That reminded me of something and I piped up, “That’s okay. My dad came home drunk one night and brought his girlfriend with him! My mom cursed a lot, and there was lots of sinning going on that night. My dad wasn’t even allowed in the house for like an entire month! How many ‘Our Father’s’ would you have given for that, Father?”

I think that was the shortest religion class I ever had! And I never did get an answer to my question. How do you like that?

Confession 4 (final)

“But, Father, I still have more.”

“I think that can wait until next time.”

“Next time? But what if I get run over by a car? I won’t be cleansed of all my sins and I might….” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “Go to h-e- double l.” Father clutched his Bible.

I noticed his knuckles seemed very white, “You are not going to die between now and next week, Tammy.”

“Oh, yeah?” I exclaimed, “That’s a relief!”

I got two “Our Father’s” and three “Hail Mary’s." I wonder how he figures that out. As I knelt down in the pew and bent down my head to make it look like I was praying, I thought this over. Does he just pick a number out of his head? Or did God tell him that's what I had to do in order to be free of sin? Because saying a few prayers hardly seemed like a lot. A person could do a lot of sinning and come in and get them all forgiven. What's the point?

Feeling a presence beside me, I peeked out through my fingers. Great! Sister was kneeling beside me. You would think there were plenty of other kids to harass than only me. I sighed in resignation.