#5, Part C, Beginning of formal memoir Ray
Assignment 5 part C, beginning of formal memoir. Ray
There was a middle-aged lady (some would unkindly have described her as a dowager) who went to our church (Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception) in the 1960s in Tyler, whom you couldn't help but notice because of her slightly outlandish, vaguely Victorian-era hats. I saw her most often at the sparsely attended masses, the 7 a.m. or the even more tortuous 6 a.m., to which our father (and, if she wasn't "ill" that day, our mother) would drag our somnolent, unwilling bodies. We invariably sat in the left-sided group of pews, while this lady, whose name I couldn't tell you now to save what's left of my soul, sat on the right, always by herself. She gave off that air of strained nobility that comes from grimly determining to serve out one's lonely, miserable sentence on this Earth without uttering a word of complaint. She had never been married, which, in the early-to -mid 1960s, automatically conferred a pathetic Old Maid status upon her. She also was an heiress and had lots of money. And she wore burgundy a lot. Had I not been so close to comatose due to the ridiculously early hour (on a precious Sunday) and the torpor induced by the Catholic mass, I might have wondered what the rest of her story was.
I found out some of it a couple of years later from my mother and the only newspaper in town, which carried of picture of our noble loner holding the pair of handcuffs in which she had been shackled the previous evening. Her house had been burglarized while she was there, and she had been handcuffed and tied up by the burglars. "She's rich, but she's never been married," said my mother with a mixture of pity and, oddly, satisfaction.
Looking at that grainy gray photo of this forlorn, alone, and (it was impossible not to conclude) utterly sad lady, I had a sort of premonition about my later life: I would eventually become this pathetic, sad recluse, except male, without the wealth and hopefully without the bad fashion sense.
Most of these creepy feelings I got (I must have been about 12 at the time of this one) did not typically present themselves in words, but as black nonverbal dreads arising from deep in my guts and working their way up to my confused, scattered brain. But this particular dread was accompanied by a stark phrase: That's going to be me-not necessarily the burglary, but the stranded-castaway aloneness. I couldn't have explained to anyone else, or even to myself, why this seemed so, but it carried the force of absolute, rock-solid, undeniable truth. Immediately I tried to dismiss this "premonition" as being pure gypsy fortune teller-type bullplop, minus the crystal ball. But I also knew, in the innermost pit of by being (where the most dangerous types of "knowledge" reside), that it would become horribly close to true, and that this ominous mental spasm was something I would never be able to forget.
There was a middle-aged lady (some would unkindly have described her as a dowager) who went to our church (Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception) in the 1960s in Tyler, whom you couldn't help but notice because of her slightly outlandish, vaguely Victorian-era hats. I saw her most often at the sparsely attended masses, the 7 a.m. or the even more tortuous 6 a.m., to which our father (and, if she wasn't "ill" that day, our mother) would drag our somnolent, unwilling bodies. We invariably sat in the left-sided group of pews, while this lady, whose name I couldn't tell you now to save what's left of my soul, sat on the right, always by herself. She gave off that air of strained nobility that comes from grimly determining to serve out one's lonely, miserable sentence on this Earth without uttering a word of complaint. She had never been married, which, in the early-to -mid 1960s, automatically conferred a pathetic Old Maid status upon her. She also was an heiress and had lots of money. And she wore burgundy a lot. Had I not been so close to comatose due to the ridiculously early hour (on a precious Sunday) and the torpor induced by the Catholic mass, I might have wondered what the rest of her story was.
I found out some of it a couple of years later from my mother and the only newspaper in town, which carried of picture of our noble loner holding the pair of handcuffs in which she had been shackled the previous evening. Her house had been burglarized while she was there, and she had been handcuffed and tied up by the burglars. "She's rich, but she's never been married," said my mother with a mixture of pity and, oddly, satisfaction.
Looking at that grainy gray photo of this forlorn, alone, and (it was impossible not to conclude) utterly sad lady, I had a sort of premonition about my later life: I would eventually become this pathetic, sad recluse, except male, without the wealth and hopefully without the bad fashion sense.
Most of these creepy feelings I got (I must have been about 12 at the time of this one) did not typically present themselves in words, but as black nonverbal dreads arising from deep in my guts and working their way up to my confused, scattered brain. But this particular dread was accompanied by a stark phrase: That's going to be me-not necessarily the burglary, but the stranded-castaway aloneness. I couldn't have explained to anyone else, or even to myself, why this seemed so, but it carried the force of absolute, rock-solid, undeniable truth. Immediately I tried to dismiss this "premonition" as being pure gypsy fortune teller-type bullplop, minus the crystal ball. But I also knew, in the innermost pit of by being (where the most dangerous types of "knowledge" reside), that it would become horribly close to true, and that this ominous mental spasm was something I would never be able to forget.
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