Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
posted by Kitty O'Keefe at 5:15 AM
December 19, 2006
About Me
- Name: Kitty O'Keefe
- Location: United States
A financial professional with 30 years' experience in financial management and education for women.
Previous Posts
- WHY I HATE CHRISTMAS
- Big Slide
- Bigger Slide
- Olive Garden Near Casualty
- Buckley's Busy
- Audacity of Hope
- Bharhach O'Bhamagh
- Debaucheryness
- Truthiness
- Uh, well, um, ahhh, um, I, uh, it's, um...
2 Comments:
Kurt Vonnegut and I went to the same highschool in Indianapolis but sixteen years apart..
Shortridge. Some of his
teachers became mine. We
had at the least two other commonalities. On Friday
afternoons in the late
thirties Kurt and his pals
would find a Catholic church having a fish fry
and with that adolescent
appetite we all remember
but cannot physically imagine now they committed
serial fish sandwich ingestion. The other commonality was St. Agnes.
St. Agnes was the girls'
Catholic high school and
all the protestant boys in
Indianapolis were in league in their defamation
of St. Agnes girls. At
least once a week as we
rode around the north side
in Jack MacCleod's '47
Chevy fastback someone would say, "You know what
the priest makes a St. Agnes girl do when she goes to confession?..." And everybody would groan and beat on him because the joke was, just hearing mention of a silky warm mouth enveloping your 16 year old procreative engine was enough to ruin the evening through making us all dwell innerly on our chronic deprivation
of same.
Kurt Vonnegut dated a
St. Agnes girl and so did
I. Mine was named Sally.
She was tall and dark with long brown hair and dark
eyes that looked like they had just seen a terrible automobile accident way down the street over your
shoulder. She had a cute nose and a sweet full mouth with parted lips. (When I got to know her better, I realized that her lips were parted because she was a chronic mouth breather with a permanent stuffy nose.) You might think this would have been an impediment but it did not prove to be. I couldn't drive yet, so my Dad was kind enough to take me and Sally to and from movie dates at the Uptown or the Vogue in the '52 DeSoto. On the way home, Sally and I discovered the incredibly sweet excitement of adult
sexual kissing..you know,
open lips (remember, her
lips were open already so
she could breathe) just a
bit of nibbling, tongues
touching, then joyously
diving in to leap and play around palates, teeth and braces like two dolphin
lovers in the warm southern seas. Somewhere,
Sally had gotten the idea
that capturing a tongue
and creating a more or less pneumatic suction upon it was what the climax of such kissing was about..maybe a kind of
unknowing innocent forecast of what future
Catholic coitus could be at the gasping moment of inseminate fruition and sure addition to the family of the Church.
Be that as it may, could Kurt Vonnegut have had the same sudden panic that I
did? Sally, breathing hard around it, was slowly drawing my tongue down down down into her body or, rather, trying to and
in so doing was pulling it out by the roots. As fear
rose, I wildly pushed against Sally's chest with my palms. I found there,
no bosums to speak of, but two fiercely erect and startlingly warm nipples.
Sally broke the tongue
sucking seal to my panting relief and pushed me away
somewhat and, loud enough for me to hear her martyred indignation but not loud enough to disturb my driving father who was discretely listening to a Purdue ball game on WIBC, Sally said: "Oh pleeese,
Bill! I don't want to be known as a smoocher!"
It may be testimony to the significance of this comment that it is still
much on my mind 53 years
later. This was my brush
with a possible Catholic
fate. This was my slight
singe at the Auto de Fe of virginal adolescent loin-
fire expressed explicitly above the waist..yea, verily above the neck. Had the fearsome Sister Mary Ignatius, whose rep was flang wide beyond the bastions of St. Agnes,
been there in the DeSoto
backseat with us, I know she would have smiled her thin smile below the rimless spectacles and
said, "Oh Sally I am so
very proud of you! Now,
perhaps a bit less tongue- sucking next time, yes?".
Kurt and I shared one more thing: we both had the
honor to write regularly for the first daily high
school newspaper in America, The Shortridge
Daily Echo. I don't know
about him, but I still have some dusty yellow tearsheets of my dreadful
purile escrievances under the mascot symbol of our
school since the 1920s, Felix the Cat. When we won
a game, Felix was leaping ecstatically happy on the masthead. When we lost, he
pouted and squnched his eyes and held his nose. By
some incredible fate, my
articles only appeared in the Echo on days when Felix was holding his nose.
Much worse than if they had been unrecognizable to me, my idiosyncratically Felix-repelling screeds are instantly familiar and
embarrassing. They are of
one use I have found. I
can read them again.. suppressing the rise of my
gorge..and search for the
slightest sign that some day later I would write something even I might enjoy reading. To my great
delight, as if I were an accused searching for a tiny hopeful glimmer of intelligent sobriety in my drunken public defender, there are tiny hints and forecasts in, say, a simple direct sentence even William Strunk might have spared..an image, a metaphor, an airy allusion left wispy, and unflogged upon the cowed and squeaking reader wriggling to flee. So, wiping our figurative forehead we go into the Court of the future with at least what Marley's shade left to Scrooge: "a chance of hope" for future redemption.
(I just knew if I really
busted my writing hinder, I could get maybe an oblique mention of Christmas in there somehow. And it's just a
half-assed Catholic Christmas mention, too, because, only Jacob Marley was a Catholic. When Scooge finally comes to Jacob's deathbed, he pretends solicitation by asking if his almost-gone partner had had "last rites and all that". But Scrooge left no
doubt in any mind that he
was atheiste-professe, especially when they passed the plate.)
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