I Love These Photos of My Father as a Little Boy
My father with some nuns when he was about a year-and-a-half old:
This poem was written for my father when he was 1 week old:
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This stuff means a lot to me because I feel like it reconnects me - a fairly recent convert to Catholicism - to my Catholic patrimony.
Although I only entered the Church just over 3 years ago, my father had been a cradle Catholic, baptized into the Church as an infant. However, after both of his parents passed away when he was very young (his mother when he was 5 and his father when he was 9), he and his 3 younger siblings were adopted and raised by a Southern Baptist aunt who brought them up in her faith tradition.
Labels: Faith and Family, Poetry
posted by Pro Ecclesia 12:01 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Wow, Jay. That poem is absolutely beautiful. Very very touching. What a treasure!
Priceless. You're right to treasure these and preserve them for your children.
BTW, did you pay attention to the date? The day after Pearl Harbor. It's really cool to think about what must have been going on in people's minds at a time like that, and yet to consider how life and love go on and people remain people and can still focus on the important details of living and loving. God bless Sister Margaret Mary and your dad.
Yes, I did notice the date.
My mother and father were born 1 week apart. He on the Feast of St. Andrew, November 30, 1941. She on the day that will live in infamy, December 7, 1941.
Looks like a couple of nuns were vying to have their pictures taken with your dad -- and not without good reason! An adorable contest.
Jay, that poem brought tears to my eyes--and the pictures, too. Really beautiful and, as Paul notes, priceless!
Your situation reminds me a little of my own. My dad was raised as the first ever non-Catholic in his paternal line after his Catholic father abandoned the family. I've been trying to make the Catholic Patrimony Connection, too. It's alot of fun.
Jay,
Where were those pictures taken? And are both Sisters identified? Because the older nun in the photos looks strikingly like St Katharine Drexel, whom, of course, you are very familiar with from your time in Columbia, VA at St Joseph's. Mother Drexel died in 1956.
fr Brian, OP
The nuns and the location are not identified. There is a stamp on the back of the photos from May 1943, which is the date I presume they were developed.
In May of 1943 my father lived with his parents in Los Angeles.
There is certainly a resemblance with Mother Katharine Drexel, but I doubt this is her. She would have been 85 years old and in very poor health at this point. After her heart attack in 1935, she lived in retirement in Pennsylvania, I believe.
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