My paternal grandmother was a mix of two different tribes of Celts. Her father, Mr. Poole was a Welshman or Brythonic Celt, who married a woman from the Emerald Isle, a Gael. They had a daughter, Elsie who was born and raised in Cardiff. I only met her twice. Once she came to Louisiana and we sat up in the kitchen late one night in Baton Rouge, drinking hot cream tea and listening to the crickets. She sounded like Mary Poppins to me and I sounded like Huckleberry Finn to her. She told me that my mother and I were likely fey. [1 Giving an impression of vague unworldliness or mystery. 2 Having supernatural powers of clairvoyance. -lexico.com]
The other occasion I saw her was when my family visited for an hour in California on our way North. She gave me a bag of pennies and called them “coppers.” Her husband was a German speaking man and he just sat in a chair nursing a swollen prostate and said nothing. It was the only time I ever saw him. They had two daughters and a son. The old man’s name was Alfons Heinrich Haus and he was once the yardmaster for the railroad switching yard in Toronto. Later, he was the groundskeeper for a large golf course in the Riverside, California. His people had come to Ariss, Ontario, Canada from Alsace-Lorraine.
My Celtic grandma used to send me books in the mail. All through my childhood, I looked forward to getting the brown cardboard boxes of new reading material. Mostly, she sent Jack London's books. At Christmas she always sent a little box of French cakes called Petites Fours. Over my life, I came to realize that it was the Welsh in me that needed to read and the Irish in me that needed to write. It was said by a Scotsman who shall remain nameless, that although the English gave books and writing to the Irish, it was the Irish who gave literature to the world.
I have always loved shamrocks and clovers. I scan the ground for four leaf clovers when ever I'm standing about. Until I was married to my third wife, I never found one. As a child, I bought several at roadside tourists traps and fair grounds. The ones encased in Lucite and made into key-chains.
When I was a letter-carrier for Canada Post in Vancouver and my second son was old enough to walk with me, I took him to work during the days when his school was closed. The little fellow did the whole route many times and was satisfied with a root beer at days end and I was mighty proud to show him off to all my customers.
At the halfway point of the route stood The Protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church Basilian Fathers (The Basilian Order of Saint Josaphat (O. S. B. M.) It became our lunching place. There was an extensive green sward and a small house adjacent that I believe was also owned by the church. The house was immediately West of the property. Set into a rock wall, was a clear glass tube in the mortar containing a piece of stone from another famous wall somewhere in the Holy Land. My boy and I generally walked onto the green and sat on the grass to take our sandwiches.
Amid the turmoil and persecution of the Catholic Church during the French Revolution and after the Reign of Terror, the Archbishop of Vienne, Charles-François d’Aviau Du Bois-de-Sanzay encouraged Joseph Lapierre to take over the Catholic education of boys in the isolated hill commune of Saint-Symphorien-de-Mahun, Ardèche department. The Congregation of Saint Basil was founded in 1822 in the aftermath of the Revolution.
Basilians founded and still operate St. Thomas High School and the University of St. Thomas in Texas which began in the 1930s. The Basilians began an apostolate serving Spanish-speaking populations in Texas such as Galveston, Houston, Sugar Land, Rosenberg, Wharton, New Gulf, Bay City, Angleton, Freeport and Eagle Lake. Texas served as the platform for Basilian mission work in Mexico and Colombia.
Those missions to Mexico began in 1961 and Colombia in 1987. The Basilian Fathers have served in Mexico City and currently serve in Tehuacán, Puebla, Mexico, Bogotá, Cali and Medellín. The congregation established parishes and schools in Colombia and Mexico and is affiliated with St. Basil’s Medical Centre in Colombia.
The Basilians have novitiate houses in Sugar Land, Texas and Bogotá. They have residences for Basilian seminarians in Houston, Tlalpan and Medellín. Retirement residences for Basilian priests are located in Toronto, Las Cruces, Rochester, New York and Houston.
One of my other postal customers at the time of this story was the Coadjutor Archbishop of Vancouver who was also a member of the Order. In France, Basilians still serve at Collège Privé Sacré-Coeur and in parishes in and around Annonay. In Canada, Basilians serve at St. Michael’s College School, the University of St. Michael’s College, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Assumption College and St. Joseph’s College.
From those august Ardèche beginnings we jump a couple of decades ahead to Sunday, July 14, 2019 via the magic of text and arrive at a sermon given by Father Basil Malowany in Ituna, Saskatchewan in the Eparchy of Saskatoon to a packed house. I have sourced it from the Nepalese Facebook page of the Sacred Heart Ukrainian Catholic Church.
“Much to the enjoyment of the rather full congregation, Father Basil began his homily with a joke.”
“A young priest was asked by a funeral director to hold a graveside service for a homeless man with no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be laid to rest there. As he was not familiar with the backwoods area, the priest became lost; and finally arrived an hour late.”
“He saw the backhoe and the crew, who were already eating lunch, but the hearse was nowhere in sight. He apologized to the workers for his tardiness, and stepped to the side of the open grave, where he saw the vault lid already in place. He assured the workers he would not hold them up for long, but that he still had to do the prayer service at the grave.”
“The workers gathered around, still eating their lunch. As the priest did his prayers and homily, the workers began to say 'Amen,' 'Praise the Lord,' and 'Glory be'! The priest closed the lengthy service with a prayer and walked to his car.”
“As he was opening the door and taking off his vestments, he overheard one of the workers saying to another, "I ain't never seen anything like that before, and I've been putting in septic tanks for over twenty years now.”
At the Basilian Fathers building in Vancouver, there was a goodly thatch of shamrocks carpeting the grounds. The second time my son and I rested our legs among them, the boy found a four-leaf clover. I began to look in earnest and soon I had several. Miguelito found over a half dozen more and by the end of lunch we had a total of fourteen. We pressed them between some junk mail and brought them home to show my wife. She arranged them in a frame and we hung it on the wall. I looked up the odds of finding a four-leafed clover. Approximately one in ten thousand.
Within a week, my wife, a woman never to be outdone, found over a dozen more on her own travels to and from work. My son and I both found more at our Blessed Virgin Mary churchyard site. Things escalated to the point that none of us three could take a simple walk without stubbing our toes on the beautiful rarities. We put them in plastic sleeves, CD cases and glass frames. I still have some of those pressings to this day. After a few months, the phenomenon tapered off and it became harder to find them.
After my son went back to school, the lady who received the church mail told me that the priest would rather I didn't sit on their grass any longer. I told her about the proliferation of four leaf clovers and she said that the priest had also noticed the phenomenon. Curiously, she mentioned to me that the priest would also appreciate it if I refrained from talking to any of his parishioners while I was assigned to my current route. I told her that as a reflex courtesy, I talk to anyone who talks to me first and perhaps the Father could instruct his flock not to speak to me, as a better remedy.
There was a young Dutch couple with a child living in the little house just off the green. They said I could sit on their steps for my lunch and I began to do so. Soon, they moved out, apparently overnight and only days after I began having my lunch there. Several days later, I knew it was truly vacant due to the unclaimed mail on the doorstep.
One Autumn afternoon under a lapis lazuli sky with bronzed leaves swirling round my boots, I strode over to that little house for lunch. I could see that the front door was open and I thought maybe someone was renovating or moving a few items of furniture. When I was a bit closer, I began to hear very disturbing sounds emanating from within. I drew yet closer and paused.
I heard wind reminiscent of the hurricanes I’d experienced in Louisiana, I heard crockery breaking, reminiscent of my pretty second wife, I heard very angry voices woven through in such a hellish way that the effect was more than the sum those three parts I have listed. Concerned that someone might be in danger, I took off my satchels, set them on the landing and stepped into the open doorway a foot or so.
The interior was dark, the curtains closed and I could just discern another staircase that obviously led to a basement. The upstairs had a hopeless sad wet wallpaper feeling that the houses of alcoholics and their innocent cohabitants exude. Nothing stirred in the gloom. Downstairs was where all the action was evidently taking place. The stairwell was dark and the noise was now deafening. I stood and listened. My next thoughts had to do with why I couldn’t physically feel any wind and I suspected that someone was playing a specially mastered tape recording as a weird prank.
In the next pregnant moment, no one burst up the stairs. My reason was unable to find any logic or message in the flow of random words. With no concrete physicality whatsoever to the aural pandemonium around me, my next logical guess was that I might have accidentally stumbled into an exorcism, given the location. Neither theory left me any desire to meet the possible participants or perpetrators. Having already ruled out burglary or a physical assault underway, I deemed it wise to retrace my steps, retrieve my satchels and find a new lunch platform, which I did.
I will now jump through time again to April 27, 2018 and read an excerpt from an article by Sean Fine, a Justice Writer, that was published by The Globe And Mail.
“A jury has awarded $500,000 in punitive damages against a Roman Catholic Religious Order over a Priest’s abuse of a schoolboy, accusing it of betraying the community’s trust by covering up the abuse and moving a serial predator along to new posts.”
“Evidence showed that William Hodgson Marshall, a member of the Basilian Fathers (a Catholic Order of Priests), sexually abused Mr. MacLeod fifty times between 1963 and 1967 while Mr. MacLeod was a student at St. Charles College High School in Sudbury, Ont. where Mr. Marshall was a Priest and gym teacher.”
“Mr. Marshall admitted to the church that he had between fifty-eight and eighty-seven victims over three decades, according to evidence presented during the civil trial. The Order had received several complaints of abuse about him. He was sentenced to two years in jail in 2011 for indecent assault of sixteen children and one woman. He died at age ninety-two in 2014. There have been at least seventeen lawsuits, most of which have been settled out of court.”
“The Basilian Fathers, in a statement, said they respect the judgment and are determined to work toward the eradication of sexual abuse. They also said they had previously expressed their “deep shame” over Mr. Marshall’s actions, and that he was dismissed from the Priesthood and religious life by Pope Benedict XVI in 2013.”
In the closing address to the jury, paraphrased here, it was pointed out that Mr. Marshall was like a leaking barrel of toxic waste and that the Basilian Fathers’ remedy was simply to keep moving that barrel to other communities including Rochester, Toronto, Windsor and Sudbury. I concur.
In another related article from earlier this year:
“Father Jack Hanna CSB, a Basilian Priest who has been freely roaming about Toronto, Ontario Canada for several years, was the subject of credible allegations of sex abuse of a minor. Father Hanna, who taught at St. Thomas High School in Houston, Texas from 1981 until his removal in 2013 for misconduct, was ordained as a Basilian Priest in 1974.”
“Also ordained as a Basilian in 1974 was convicted serial molester Father Leo Campbell CSB. In a 31 January 2019 letter signed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Galveston-Houston, Daniel DiNardo, the faithful were advised of the publication of the names of forty-two Priests credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct with minors since 1950 in the Archdiocese.”
Not long after the Basilian clover anomaly, my wife and I bought a trailer in Lillooet, B. C. An idea came to me one day while I was painting and fixing up the place prior to moving in. I thought that it would be lovely to have a nice carpet of white clover for the yard. It would serve to replenish the nitrogen, keep the grass greener and give the honey bees something to eat. I love walking on it with bare feet and sitting on it. If we ever have any grandchildren, we could look for four-leaf clovers with them, I reckoned.
I went to the Feed and Seed store to buy some. A tall high-school age gal led me back into a shed where metal garbage bins were warehoused. She started lifting lids and hauling out the heavy bags with one arm to read the labels stitched to the bottoms. Some of those bags I had a hard time lifting with two arms. The colleen tossed them around like they were full of dry moss. God bless country girls. I'm glad I married one.
The lass wasn't sure of the commercial name of the type of clover I sought and neither was I. What I desired was Dutch White Clover. We finally settled on several pounds of some variety from an unmarked bag. I wasn't aware that there were so many varieties. I knew there was a red variety, however. I didn't want red. It was too big.
On the wall above the cash register, I spied a little sign that read, “All little girls are born angels. If you break our wings, we can still fly. We just use our broom-sticks.” I concur.
At home, I took the bag of seed and hand scattered the yellowish-brown grains over my entire trailer pad. I couldn't wait to see the emerald carpet appear. That night I dreamed of clover. The following morning my wife and I went for a nice walk along a B. C. Hydro canal. It was early Spring and the plants were all coming up green and getting tall. I happened to ask a native fellow who passed by what was the name of a particularly prolific local plant that had a blossom somewhat similar to a clover. It grew in dry gravel and was past knee-high with purple flowers.
“Dude, that's clover, eh,” he said in a friendly tone.
I thanked him and took a piece to put in my pocket. I told my wife that I was sure he had been mistaken, that it must be alfalfa. I asked a few more people at random that day and they all said it was clover. A seed of doubt sprouted in my imagination. I began to wonder what I had just planted. When I got home, I went to a gas station where they had a book rack and I consulted a book on local flora. There I found an article on the sample in my pocket. I learned that it was indeed alfalfa and was commonly referred to in many parts of the Western North America as clover.
The ladies, when I returned to the feed store, were unable to determine exactly what my seed would look like when it sprouted. We all gathered around a dusty computer and pored over page after page until we were all confused. One lady customer, who seemed to know, assured me that most farmers referred to alfalfa as clover. Slightly worse for the experience, I returned to my trailer. I resented Linnaeus, colloquial speech, genetics, bar-codes, ambiguity, packaging without pictures, my own ignorance and especially my lack of project research.
We returned to the city next day and when I got home, I googled up alfalfa. A most amazing plant. Capable of withstanding fire, drought and probably nuclear attack. Some varieties send tap-roots down as far as fifty feet. It is ancient plant full of nourishment for man and beast. I read articles listing all the genetic mutations that scientist have made to this plant to make it even more formidable. Clover had been tampered with as well and now came in dwarf and giant commercial varieties.
Then I looked at dozens of mug-shots of seeds to compare with what I’d sowed and they all looked alike. I placed several calls to farms that grew alfalfa commercially for ranches. I was told not to worry, I could have the top-soil tilled up and removed. If I did it soon enough. I could move to Brazil. That night, I had nightmares of fast-growing green tendrils entangling the entire trailer park. The Green Man had been awakened and he was in a mischievous mood.
I had to do something. I found the picture frame with the four-leafers my son, wife and I had picked and said a humble prayer. When I came again to the scene of the sowing, I couldn't find a single seed on the ground. No purple flowers. No meter high fibrous spears. Only small round fragrant white blossoms and circlets of tripartite emerald between the long grasses. Maybe it was just the luck of the Irish.
My wife and I planted a large garden after our landlord graciously removed a thick ancient tree stump with a back-hoe. I was digging around one day in the Spring in an area that would have been under that tree’s canopy perhaps seventy years ago. I found in one spade of dirt three items. One was a wee green plastic soldier.
I had played with the same sort as a boy in Texas. You could get a whole bag of them for twenty cents and they came in olive green and tan colours. This one was the mine sweeper guy. The second item was a tiny tan plastic Wonder Woman and she still had a bit of red and blue paint on her shield and head band. The last item was a tiny inexpensive silver electroplated girl’s bracelet that bore the inscription, “Shannon.”
I washed off the figures and propped them for a while in the kitchen window which looked out over where a horse pasture used to be, so I’d been told. I cleaned the bracelet and reburied it. As I paused to have a smoke in the garden, I closed my eyes and for a fleeting second, like a single frame of a movie, I saw the tree, I heard children’s soft voices and a rope-swing moving in the wind.
fin