Pass the Peace

“Shake a leg!” my father is saying, but, I know now, he was praying. How else did his tribe of seven, ever arrive anywhere?  We are always late. To schools, operas, planes. And tonight is a holy night, Midnight Mass 1972 at the hospital where Dad is chief of staff. The 11pm liturgy will be chased by 12 am gastronomy: short-bread and tall gingermen, stiff squares of green and white jello and almond cookies heartbroken by the red thumbs of their devout bakers. Dusted with sacred crumbs, I will sleep by the car ride home, and need to be peeled out of my punch-stained and shoeless tights. But now we wait. Passing the time, keeping the peace.

I skip around the pool bobbing like a geisha, my thighs bound together by my torturous white, Danskins. They are never pulled high enough at first, the crotch always hanging a little too low, and, in Hawaii, an entirely excessive, sticky, clingy layer. An early trial on the path of feminine vanity, which my four big sisters have trod ahead of me. 

“Five lovely flowah, but no fwuit” a cheeky Chinaman once advised him. With five daughters you can forgive my Dad for smoking as he prays. He takes a long pull on his Kent. Standing beside him, I answer with a pull on my special Christmas drug:  sugary coffee with loads of cream, steaming in my cherry-cheeked Santa mug. It primes me for the next hour and for 40 more years of wide awake addiction.

Thanks be to God! Dad tips the cigarette half-spent in ash, as progeny descend at last. Asian angels on platform shoes, queen mother at the rear, pinning her chignon. We seven pile into the blue, Eldorado, a smooth-riding, 8-track playing, velvet-lined cruiser-turned-clown-car, as lo, we emerge, one after the next, painted and primped, onto the cool black asphalt of the chapel lot.

It’s 10:55 – his fervent prayer has prevailed, and unveils, the open church door, spilling out the ancient faith light. Blessed water makes holy our foreheads and finery. So too, the clamor of carols, and well-intentioned if not in-tuned voices, splash over our entry, sanctify our sideways steps over the more punctual and already seated. It’s 1972, and my sisters’ vanilla shawls loop over their kaftan dresses. Mom sways elegant in her polyester gown, neck V’d and snug-sleeved, expertly sewn Vogue pattern 4537. Many hot afternoons I’d hid down the cool folds of that psychedelic silk, hung like a waterfall in her closet, and twiddled my fingers between magenta and black, losing track of my 5 years. Keeping time. Passing peace. “And also with you”, we shake the holiday hands of nurses, and priests and people my parents know.

Called to read, Dad crosses the wide nave, shiny black leather slaps down smooth stone, moving toward the text of Joseph, dreaming of angels, scheming the night road to Egypt.  So we stop twitching in our bench, stop folding our programs into boxes and boats, to lean into the neverending story, balladeered tonight in the voice we know. Dad speaks good English though he went to Central Intermediate and was raised behind a butcher’s blood-streaked block. Chicken bones was his first schooling, our Popo had said, then people bones and medicine. But sin, who can doctor? Who heal the fractured faith? Nearly he donned the cassock and the collar, ringing the dark 5 am bells at Dayton College, nearly consecrated to soul and not scalpel, nearly saved from praying for girl flowers to hurry up for mass.

So as he reads, we can imagine him a holier man, a shepherd to the faithful few, and we, then-never-born, watching from our heavenly pew. Hovering over the goosenecked, lectern mic, his deep, deliberate speech circles outward, buzzes the candle-shadowed stucco, like the undying Word singing through the star draped universe. Verse to verse. Rumbling, rousing creation for the miracle of faith in an ungrateful earth... where the Lamb of God is on the lamb in Egypt, where your coins are marked with Caesar, where your loins are bound in Danskin tights every Christmas Eve.

But my father became a surgeon and not a priest, hearing confession before the curtain of anesthesia and injecting counsel with each steroid shot. So, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Mass is ended, let us go to the refreshment table. And eat. And make our labor joyful and our families prayerful by workaday faith and not religion.

Now that I have crossed these 40 Christ-masses, these pieces of “we” pass again, like the napkin-wrapped cookies pressed into our pockets by insistent nuns at the door. Feeding my flock. Marking my times. “Peace be with you”, they whisper, “you are right on time.”

It is 2012. On the way home tonight, my daughter’s shoes will come off in the Honda, my son will whimper, “I’m not tired” as I pull off his punch-stained shorts. My husband will lift them up the forgetful stairs. And in the morning, without any sudden moves -- so nothing is frightened away -- I’ll offer my hands to the reborn day and drink my dark Christmas brew.