Consequences

Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family, you knew certain things to be true. # 1 You would be going to Mass on Sunday. This was not up for debate, or a vote or subject to your current position on the Catholic church. You were going. # 2 If you were a female, you would enter the church with your head covered. You would also wear a dress, or a skirt, because even in the seventies, women wore dresses and hats or mantillas. There might have  more progressive churches in town, but St. John the Apostle was not one  of those churches.

Once, while I was at work, the subject of being raised catholic came up, and a woman about my age joined in the conversation. “Oh yes !” she chimed in, “I remember that if you didn’t have your hat, your mother would have to pin a handkerchief to your head or she would pull out one of those little plastic pouches that had a mantilla in it & pin that on your head.”  I was incredulous.  A handkerchief ? PIN it to your head ? What the ….?   If we arrived on the steps of the church with no hat, the best we could expect was a wadded up Kleenex that my mother dug out of the corner of her purse. There were no pins, and you were not allowed to hold it to your head with your hand, you had to walk very slowly and hope it would not fly off as you made your way to the pew. The Kleenex most likely was dotted with wine, red lipstick,  and  the juice of a rare steak consumed the night before, when my parents had date night. Sunday, Bloody Sunday.

I was about eight years old when I decided I could fix this problem. My parents were out on Saturday night, the youngest of us at home, under the care of our oldest brother, who made us fried egg sandwiches for dinner and later would make us popcorn. We could watch whatever we wanted on TV, for as long as we wanted. It was fabulous.  I decided to go door to door to my sister’s rooms and collect their hats for the next days Mass. I then put them all in the back of the station wagon. The next day as we pulled into the parking lot, I passed out all the hats, and we were good to go. 

My mother, crossing the parking lot and already digging around in her purse, looked up in surprise at all of our covered heads.  I knew at that moment that I had the power to control the consequences.