The Smith Kids, a Gang of Their Own

We had a family of Catholics down near Tennyson Road.  I can't remember all their names, or how many kids they had, but there were a lot. Old Man Smith was a bricklayer, tuck-pointing industrial chimneys.  He hurt his back in a fall from a scaffold, but by then the three oldest boys were home from the war, so the family was okay.

Our sandlot baseball diamond was across the street from their house.  It was at the edge of The Flats, which flooded every spring because the bedrock, only inches down, was too frozen to allow runoff from the snow-melt.  Mr. Smith liked to watch our games from an easy chair on the front porch, an elevated position because years before, they had had to raise the house on cinder blocks to escape the spring waters.  At any rate, he had a good seat.

After the games, we all went over to the porch for ice cream.  In a day when our family of six would split a brick of neopolitan, the older, working Smith boys would bring home sacks of the stuff.  Every kid got a half-brick, ruining supper appetites all over the neighborhood.

If I happened to be hanging out with Bernie, my age, at suppertime, Mr. Smith would tell the youngest, little Eugene, to "run up to Bobby's house and ask his mom if he can stay for supper." 

A generous family.  Our culture at home wasn't Catholic-friendly.  My England-born grandmother, living with us, always had an unkind word for the pope, Pius-the-something.  Not so many generations removed from King Henry and his troubles with Rome, I suspect. 

It wasn't until my dad was on his death-bed, in '92, that I learned that he'd been raised Catholic.  That may have been why his mother's name had been crossed out in the back pages of the family Bible, in Oxfordshire, for marrying a Catholic.  Heck, I told Dad, why didn't you tell me?  I'd have been Catholic.  It would have been a lot more satisfying than my having had to go to Sunday schools run by Mennonites or Pentacostles..

Last week I watched a Monty Python movie in which they lampoon the Catholic Church's birth-control stance.  A house is crammed with a least a score of small children as they sing the opening song, "Every Sperm Is Sacred."  A bit much, even for me.