Hail Mary

December 8th was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and I must prostrate myself before Our Blessed Mother and beg her forgiveness for my blasphemy the other week in asserting that her feast day would be useless to me because it fell on a Saturday. As it happened, I was cruising for a spot on Saturday at around eleven A.M., my brilliant decision to procrastinate having caught up with me on Friday morning and necessitated that I put the car in a lot ($15, river view). “Car Talk” was on the radio as I stole out of the lot, having overstayed my fifteen dollars’ worth. In my eternal optimism, I drove past the Best Possible Parking Block, where, lo and behold, there was a big fat parking spot.

I had all I could do not to compound my sins by turning left on red to get to that spot before anyone else, though there was no competition in sight. I haven’t scored on this block in months. What makes this spot so sweet is not just the hours (street-cleaning is scheduled for Monday and Thursday, 8:30-9, a very civilized time to be up and about), or even the view, or the proximity of the local swimming pool, but the fact that when the broom comes you don’t even have to move, because the block is so well groomed. That cleanliness was an especially refreshing touch on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is not to be confused with the Annunciation or the Virgin Birth or the Assumption, though of course they all follow from this: that Our Lady, in order to be worthy of her role as Mother of God, must herself have been conceived without sin. Pope Pius IX laid this out for us in 1854.

Of course there will always be those who wonder, Why all this fuss about the Immaculate Conception when we could be celebrating Hanukkah? To which I say, Aw, come on. It is one of only two alternate-side-suspended days devoted to Mary, the other being the Assumption, August 15th, which is directly related to the Immaculate Conception in that, if Mary was born without spot of original sin, and the wages of sin is death, then she didn’t have to die. So she was “assumed” into Heaven. Though artists had been painting scenes of the Assumption for centuries, the Church chewed on it for a good long time. Pope Pius XII made it official only in 1950.

I also learned, when I accidentally watched the world news on BBCA on Saturday night, that 2008 will mark the 150th anniversary of Bernadette’s visions of Our Lady of Lourdes, which took place beginning in February 1858. The commemorative 150th anniversary year began, however, last Saturday, to coincide with the Immaculate Conception. And in Rome the Vatican announced that pilgrims to Lourdes during the 150th anniversary year will receive a plenary indulgence—that is, time off in Purgatory (for a limited time only).

Actually I should not make fun of indulgences, because, in a way, that is exactly what I receive from the city when alternate-side parking is suspended: time off in parking purgatory.

I went out for a walk on Sunday, still grateful for the spot granted unto me, and passed a theatrical prop store that had in the window a life-size statue of Mary in her Immaculate Conception outfit (white gown, blue veil, gold sandals with pink rosettes). Next to her was a white wire sculpture of a dog—perhaps a Pyrenean mountain dog—and I am sorry to say it, but the dog looked as if it were sniffing her butt. I intend to go back with my camera.

On Monday morning at eight-thirty, I arrived at my spot with offerings of takeout coffee and the Times. At the head of the line—only six cars fit on this exalted stretch of asphalt—was the red Honda, idling with its windshield wipers on, whose owner seems to have been granted a perpetual indulgence: she is always parked on this block. At 8:40 I watched in my rearview mirror as the broom swept up the avenue, its driver not even pausing to look down the street. He knew it was already immaculate.

Alma Mater

For some reason, I remembered yesterday that it was the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. Surely this should make the alternate-side-parking calendar. It is because I went to an all-girls Catholic high school called Lourdes Academy that I am aware of Our Lady of Lourdes, but the only reason that the date of her feast sticks in my head is that at a reunion marking the hundred-year anniversary of the founding of this school (which closed forever in 1971; my class, the class of 1970, was the last to graduate from an unadulterated Lourdes Academy, which thereafter became Lourdes-St. Stephen’s and ultimately Erieview Catholic, before falling out of history altogether) it was announced that the centerpiece at each table would go to the person whose birthday fell closest to the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, February 11th. I had not actually been sitting at the table I was assigned to (I’m bad at that kind of protocol; I’ll sit where I damn well want to sit, if I feel like sitting at all), but I made haste to get over there and claim the centerpiece that the accident of my birth date so unexpectedly entitled me to. Somebody with a March birthday had grabbed it already.

Some years ago, when I was planning a trip to France with my friend T., I got it into my head that we should go to Lourdes. It was perverse of me: I was in excellent health, and God knows there are other places in France to see. Later it occurred to me that, by bathing in the waters with the faithful who came to Lourdes to be cured of diseases, I might catch something. And when you look closely at the story—a shepherd girl named Bernadette Soubirous had visions of a beautiful lady at a grotto outside Lourdes, beginning on February 11, 1858—it can be deeply disturbing (cf the movie “Song of Bernadette,” with Jennifer Jones).

My impressions of Lourdes were: lots of candles, of all sizes; a grotto of discarded crutches; more nuns and priests and monks and ushers and wheelchairs and stretchers and gurneys than you could shake a cane at; bad food; alarming mannequins of enraptured children in the shop windows; Irish youth groups getting drunk and whooping it up in the street outside our hotel at night. Our hotel was the Hotel St. Paul, which I had chosen because St. Paul was such an indefatigable traveller. It had a curfew.

I bathed in the holy springwater, and it was freezing cold. The nuns, or whoever runs it, are very well organized, and though you have to take off all your clothes to step into the water, there is never a moment when you feel exposed, with all the white towels floating around. “Kiss the lady,” a nun said to me, thrusting a plastic statue of Our Lady at me when I reached the far end of the vat. I obeyed. They held my bra out for me to walk into. And when I was dressed again and back at the hotel I felt fantastic. Who wouldn’t, after a brisk dip in the fresh springwater of the Pyrenees?

I commemorated the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes yesterday by hauling out the towel that I stole from the hotel. I also have some holy water in a small plastic container (not one of those vulgar ones in the shape of Our Lady). And I sang the Alma Mater, as I did that night in Lourdes, inspired by the drunken Irish kids bellowing in the street outside, surprising and horrifying my travelling companion. It goes like this:

Lourdes, we who love you rally round today
With a shout ringing out to the sky!
Lourdes, watch approvingly our work, our play.
What we do is for you, for our high!

Lourdes, we love you, Lourdes.
You’re our wonderful devoted Alma Mater.
Tenderly your mantle floats above us all,
And you love us all,
You’re the mother of our hearts.

Lourdes, we hail you, Lourdes.
May our hearts be true as we go through the days.
Guide us, beside us, in all our chosen ways,
Lourdes, Lourdes, Lourdes!

The closest I came to a miracle at Lourdes was that when I returned to the hotel room, T.—who had resisted studying maps all her life, preferring to get lost and see what happened—was poring over a map of France, a sudden convert to navigation and to picking out her own place of pilgrimage, which, as I remember, involved bouillabaisse.

Later, on the way back to Paris, when we came pretty close to Nevers, where the incorrupt body of Bernadette is on view at the convent where she died, I kept my mouth shut.