DEO GRATIAS

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When we moved from Brooklyn way back in the day, I made friends with a guy named Jerry Murray. Jerry was a good-looking kid who like me was filled with the devil. He did have an up side, and that was he wasn’t an altar boy, and played on the local little league. He also had a very pretty sister or two and to my shocking surprise and dismay, was a New York Giants baseball fan.

We spent many hours together doing things that were normal for a kid of my age, including stealing his mother’s smokes and going into the woods to smoke them.

Mom was an impressionable woman, always looking out for a good influence on her wayward son, anything that would turn his life around for the better, she is still looking I guess.

St. Joseph never looked this bad!

So one day, Jerry comes over to my house and announces that the local Catholic Church, St. Joseph the Worker in East Patchogue was looking for altar boys. Mom’s eyebrows rose to the ceiling but said nothing. The urge to strangle Jerry was coming on and his enthusiasm was running faster than a rabbit’s heart rate. I wanted to slap him into his senses but the cat was let out of the bag.

Mom had a look on her face that made me feel uncomfortable, and I knew that it was making her happy. Making her happy meant only one of two things: 1) she was sending me off somewhere so she would have some peace, or B) she found another way to make me busy.

So they gave me a card one day and said I had to learn what was on it. I nearly fainted, it was all in Latin, or so they told me. My first mass was “in a few weeks, learn it!”

Looking at the red and black bi-fold card, I started the first sentence and nervously put it down. Mom picked up her wooden spoon and somehow the Latin didn’t look all that daunting anymore!

Every free moment of my time was now devoted to either having a cigarette in the woods, teasing my sisters or learning Latin, I had a lot on my plate.

On that faith-filled Sunday morning, the altar was stocked with two old pro altar boys, and two new for the first time, making their debut’s as God’s attempted reclamation of two possible wayward souls, into altar boys. From that Sunday onward, the solemnity of the title; “altar boy” somehow lost it’s luster. The big day came, and it was a 9:00 am Sunday Mass, and I was one of four boys on the altar. I look out into the church and see; Dad, who never went to church, Mom, 4 sisters, accompanied by a host of angels sitting amongst the multitudes, my Grandmother, who was in saintly over-drive, my Uncle Joe, who when they saw him in a church, along with my father, the insurance company immediately raised the rates for the church building, and a couple of aunts and uncles. This was apparently a big deal.

The transformation from who I am to who Mom wanted was in full swing, filled with witnesses and supported by her wooden spoon. Mom was in control. “Deo Gratias, he may be saved yet!” was Mom daily mantra.

One of the prayers was the ‘Confession’ prayer, said in Latin and a somewhat long prayer for someone who wanted no part of any confessions, either public or private. What happens is the altar boys bow down low in a kneeling position and recite it as fast as you can, faster than the guy next to you. Skipping a word or two was legal in the competition and like the spitball, when on the occasion: one would look the other way. After the Mass, my Uncle Joe comes over to me and says: “You looked like chickens eating!” So for the many years I pretended to be a good boy and would recite that prayer on the altar, I would see a bunch of chickens pecking away at the seeded ground, and I would smile!

Well when they finally retired my cassock, and I left the building, the priest waited at the exit as I stepped down on the pavement. Looking upward, his eyes toward heaven, he mumbled: Deo Gratias, make the sign of the cross and waited for the second coming that day!