My Gandmother Was Vulgar

When my grandmother was in her dotage, blind and lost in reverie, she sat placidly on the living room couch. She had a vast store of poetry and ditties memorized is the schooling of her youth (1870-90) wherein rote memorization received heavy emphasis. I listened to her often enough that I memorized some of these recitations she dredged up from decades past. Here is one.

There was a young lady from Bride
From eating green apples she died.
Soon in the lamented the apples fermented,
making cider inside her insides.

Now this bit of doggerel always made her smile a bit and in my childhood it thoroughly amused me.

One day Sister St. Whatabitch, our 6th grade teacher, asked if we knew any poetry. Well because it rhymed I thought my grandma’s ditty qualified. So I shot up my hand (with the same forethought I bring to everything I do, even to my 8th decade). Sister St. Whatabitch called upon me and I marched up to the front of the room. When I finished reciting I expected much enthusiastic laughter and giggling. But there was none. I was puzzled and noticed lots of eyes darting from me to Whatabitch’s location. With growing dismay, my face turning scarlet, I turned to be impaled by the gaze emanating from her stony face.

“That was just vulgar,” she hissed. “Sit DOWN!”

I retreated cowering to slump in my desk equally embarrassed, confused, indignant and angry. An arbiter of decorum and morality had pronounced my grandma’s ditty as “vulgar.” and by extension unwittingly rebuked my grandmother herself. She could not have shocked me more if she had implied that my grandmother was a street whore.

My grandmother vulgar? My grandmother who represented transcendent decency, goodness and virtue? How could that possibly be? Her remark thus set up a polarity in my psyche with Whatabitch and all she represented at one pole and my sainted grandmother and all she represented in my personal hagiography at the other. Such a dichotomy was intolerable in the world of absolutes that imprisoned my young Roman Catholic mind. One or the other was right and the other was wrong.

Blood, as the bromide goes, is thicker than water. So it is no surprise to know that my devotion to my grandmother superseded my deference to the magisterium of the Church personified by Whatabitch. I rejected what she said as apostasy in my own spiritual edifice. Thus ironically did the calling into question the decency of my devotedly Catholic grandmother, initiate an erosion that grew to eventually lead to a complete collapse of my association with Roman Catholicism.