Iris Dement
But I can see the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on I gotta kiss you goodbye but I’ll hold to my lover
‘Cause my heart’s ’bout to die
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on my town, on my town
Goodnight, goodnight
A little over a week ago, Father asked for a few minutes to speak during the evening Vigil mass. I was expecting to be told that we would not be having mass at church until the coronavirus crisis was over. The priests and eucharistic ministers had already stopped distributing both species over coronavirus concerns, and I had been unable to receive for over two weeks.
That wasn’t the announcement, however, and it would be several days before masses were discontinued throughout the Archdiocese.
I was expecting an announcement concerning the cancellation of that evening’s dinner to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and St. Joseph’s Day. The plan was to have good food with live music and singing, and a chance to celebrate Italian and Irish heritage. Instead the dinner had been scaled back to distribution of take out containers at the door of the Parish Center. I was disappointed because I had good reason to celebrate: the neurologist said that I could drive again after 6 months of being dependent on my son, my brother, my coworkers, Uber, Amtrak, and BART.
That wasn’t the announcement, either.
Father started to announce that the parish school would be closing…. (I’m not surprised because all schools in Connecticut will be closed by the end of the week)…. permanently after 155 years. Did I hear him correctly? He was talking about the perfect storm that he brought up at mass last fall, a combination of less children, less faith, and less money. The school, my son’s school, my mother’s school, the oldest continuously operating school in the archdiocese is closing its doors in June.
I struggled to process what I had just heard. How could a school that just a few years ago had an enrollment of over 200 students be closing? What had changed?
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If someone asked me why I consider the school closing to be the end of my world as I know it while all the world is struggling with the COVID-19 infection, my explanation would go something like this: Imagine that you are a single working mother raising your child without the benefit of child support, and you recognize that there is something unusual about your child. Although it is an enormous financial sacrifice, you decide to enroll your child in the parish school because it seems to have the structure that he needs. Your son enters kindergarten, and the teacher immediately recognizes that he may have a developmental disorder. He’s evaluated by a child development specialist at a major regional medical center in Connecticut and is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. My son’s small school had one classroom per grade level and no resources for special education teachers. Because catholic schools are private, the school was under no obligation to provide a “free and appropriate public education.”
At this point, most small private schools would have metaphorically packed my son’s bags and seated him on the curb for pick up. Instead, the principal and kindergarten teacher swooped in like angels sent from God. They gave my son structure and goals, and they did everything in their power to help him to be successful academically and socially; these two women and his teachers in the following years continued to give him that support until he graduated. These amazing women – P. Devanney, L. Barbaret, V. Berger, N. Groth, K. Sharpe, D. Hayden, M. Donovan, P. Spaziani, M. Hubert, K. Hicks – helped me to raise this child as if he was their own. He became an altar server in fourth grade and continued to serve through and beyond high school, and the priests served as his mentors and role models. The principal nearly broke down in tears when she called his name at eighth grade graduation. I witnessed God and faith at work in this school and in these women.
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For all but the last two years of my son’s catholic school years, I was still unmarried, and we lived in a house on the south hill in town. We heard the church bells ringing the Angelus every morning, noon, and evening, and we had an unobstructed view of the church from the balcony on the front of the house looking east. I could watch my son walk to school from that balcony, walking down the hill, crossing Main Street with the assistance of the crossing guard, walking down the other side of Main Street, then losing sight of him briefly through the trees until he reached the pizza parlor and started to climb the church hill. Then I knew he was safe.
I often wonder what a “better life” means.
I bought that house when my grandmother was still alive, and the backyard connects with her backyard. Her father and uncle came here alone from Italy to work on the railroad that used to run parallel to my street and in front of the lumber yard below me. After five years, her father had saved enough money to buy a house, and he booked passage for my great-grandmother and grandmother on the passenger ship Giuseppe Verdi. All of my grandmother’s aunts, uncles, and cousins on her mother’s side eventually found their way to the USA and to this neighborhood. They built houses around the neighborhood with foundations made by Italian stonemasons from cut granite. The family names were Serluco, Angino, Schibeci, Indino, DeLutri, Andreano, Bruno, Mancuso, Giannatassio, Indino, Giarnese, Gubetta, and others. Some of them “Americanized” their names: Zecchino became “Zechin”; Travaglini became “Travaglin” pronounced without the -gli. My grandmother Americanized her name to Jennie. Everyone knew everyone and all my aunts were still alive when I was a child. The had well-kept yards and grew Marzano tomatoes and Italian pole beans in their gardens. They sat on their porches while they gossiped in Italian and laughed. We went to parties at the Knights of Columbus and the Garibaldi Club.
My grandmother was one of the smartest women I have ever known. When she arrived in the USA, she was placed in the “opportunity classroom” with all the children and teenagers who couldn’t speak English. She took the “opportunity” to learn to speak English perfectly, fluently, and without an accent. Upon mastering English, she advanced three grade levels in a single year and ultimately surpassed her peers and graduated a year early. She met my grandfather, a jovial Sicilian man, and they married in the 1930’s and inhabited the upstairs apartment in her parents’ house. My grandmother would continue to live in that house, the one with the backyard that connects to mine, until her death.
In 1940 my mother was born, and Grandma quickly realized that she had a smart and precocious daughter on her hands. Grandma sent my mother to the catholic school a year early, as a four-year-old, because she was ready. My mother proved this on the first day of school: Grandma had hired an older girl to walk her home from school, but my mother didn’t want to wait for the older girl, and she marched herself home across town on her 4-year-old legs. After that she walked to and from school alone every day. My mother celebrated her first communion in second grade, while attending the school, and graduated from eight grade in 1953, the youngest student in her class.
In 1955 a flood leveled much of Main Street, but the church and the school were spared. The Governor gave special permission for the schools to not have to complete 180 days that year, just as we are seeing today with the coronavirus outbreak. The south side of Main Street was never rebuilt, and a once thriving small manufacturing town has steadily declined economically for the past 65 years.
There used to be a Grant’s department store below me on Main Street, almost directly in front of my house, but Grant’s moved out of town, then became King’s, then became Ames, before finally closing for good. The spot where Grant’s was located became a short-lived “mini mall”, then a skating rink, and now it’s a storefront church. The A&P grocery store that Grandma and I used to walk to next to where the railroad tracks had been closed long ago, and has since been a video store among other things, and is currently an auto parts store. The First National grocery store moved out of town in the 1970’s, and the building was purchased by the State and used by the Community College. Mencuccini’s grocery store, next to the old Grant’s, became an IGA grocery store before closing its doors a couple of years ago. There used to be a woman’s clothing store, children’s clothing, a bridal shop, a hat store, a shoe store, a dry cleaner, a florist, banks, more bars than what was appropriate for the size of the town, restaurants, mom and pop groceries, an appliance store, furniture stores, gift shops, a daily newspaper, etc. Now we have a pawn shop, a cannabis dispensary, tattoo parlors, boarded-up banks, empty store fronts, and multiple antique stores that are rarely open. The lumber yard directly below and in front of my house has been abandoned now for fifteen to twenty years. There’s an empty factory building across the street from where the railroad tracks were; the old railroad bridge at the end of the street was taken down in the 1970’s. The other old factory to the left on Bridge Street, adjacent to the river, gets purchased by a new developer every few years. All of them have promised to put in an upscale restaurant, mixed office and retail space, and luxury condominiums. I’m not sure what causes them to give up; I know part of it is that the flood did a lot more damage to the structure of the building than is readily apparent. Even Nader broke his promise of converting an old factory to a museum, and took the easier approach of buying a recently closed bank.
It’s not all bad: there’s a thriving health food store that probably got a huge boost to their business when the last grocery store in town closed; there’s an old movie theater that’s been converted to a dinner theater; there’s pizza parlors that have been around since I was a child that will probably still be in business 50 years from now. The Community College is the jewel of the east side of town. More recently one of the old factories in the west end was renovated and has become a beer distillery. It appears to be doing well, and it gives me hope. This is a building that I considered a prime spot for a department store at one time; in fact, starting twenty years ago, I used to write emails to major retailers telling them what a great town this is, how many large properties are available for lease, how there is no significant retail for miles to the west to the New York border and beyond, and nothing for miles to the north into Massachusetts. It would have been a gold mine for a major retailer to open here, and a huge benefit to a town. This is a town where one can’t even buy a pair of underwear without having to get into a car to drive somewhere because public transportation in this region has gone the way of the railroad. Instead the major retailers built new buildings on the edges of T-town. I stopped sending those emails about a decade ago.
Money can’t but faith
The town knocked down the house kitty-corner to me a couple of months ago. The house on the east side of my yard sits empty. The house behind me, next door to my grandmother’s house, is occupied by drug dealers, and 2 or 3 police cars visit this tiny neighborhood on a dead-end street several times each week. The house on the other side of my grandmother’s house burned down 25 years ago and has never been rebuilt; the overgrown trees and hedges obscure the view of cars trying to cross the hill. The house to the west of that house was knocked down by the town last year as well. The short, thigh-high hedge that used to neatly delineate the boundaries of the yard of the house where two of my aunts lived has now been allowed to grow to a height of over 30 feet by the current owners; they seem to be nice people, but apparently they value their privacy a great deal. My house also is one wave in a sea of decay. The tenants who occupied my house during the period of my failed marriage damaged my house beyond description; more exactly, it was their four cats and their urine that destroyed the house to the point of being uninhabitable and unsellable. The house sits empty just like my neighbor’s house.
This past week I’ve spent a lot of time looking at pictures of my grandmother’s hometown, and I’m struck by the irony of so many circumstances. Her hometown was stunningly beautiful with unbelievable views of the mountains. They left Italy in droves for a better life, and she came to settle here, on the steep hill with the parallel streets, much like her hometown in that respect. But the view here is not beautiful, and even when the town was more economically sound, the view would never have matched what she left behind. And now this place that she and her family came to for a better life has become the place to leave for a better life.
I work in New York state now. I used to commute over three and a half hours daily, but ultimately, I had to get an apartment within walking distance to work when I couldn’t drive. It’s a great job, but it’s in a metro area, and the rent is high. I’m still paying a mortgage on an uninhabitable house in Connecticut, so I work a second job in private practice on Saturdays and Sundays to try to make ends meet; I usually get one weekend off per month. My brother is helping me to repair the house, and I’m hoping that it will be inhabitable again soon. I often wonder what a “better life” means.
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What happens when not attending mass becomes the new normal?
I carried home the containers of take out food and maintained my composure long enough to tell my son that the school was closing before I went to my room and cried. There are peaks and valleys in population, and if Father just waits this out for a few years, won’t the school recover? I had seen the last two remaining parochial schools in the neighboring town consolidate after having four independent parish schools at one time. There were so few students that the boys’ basketball team in the T-town school was co-ed. It was just seven years ago that I was sitting in the bleachers watching my son’s basketball games. I pitied that poor school. T-town was much larger than our town, but certainly nothing like that could happen to our school, right?
Sadly, I am wrong. There are two problems in Father’s perfect storm that are difficult but can be resolved. Population is cyclical, and Generation Z children will swell public school enrollment. Lack of finances is challenging, but could be solved if we all dug deeper into our pockets.
Money, however, cannot buy faith.
We celebrated the 100th anniversary of the church building five years ago along with the 150th anniversary of the parish school. At that time, sitting at the celebration dinner, surrounded by faith and love, I never would have dreamed that the school could close; and now the new normal will be having no parish school. The church is now in desperate need of expensive repairs, and I fear for the future of our parish. In the past two years, I’ve seen multiple churches closed and parishes consolidated throughout the Archdiocese. With the church being closed to public masses during the coronavirus crisis, what happens when not attending mass becomes the new normal?
