Pearls at Epiphany

For the past eight years, my mother, daughter and I have celebrated our Christmas together on Epiphany.  We never intended it to become a tradition--but, Addie would often spend from Christmas to New Year with her father when she was little and so it has simply come to be we three. 

At All Saints Church, where I was raised, it was called, "The Feast of Lights".   I always thought of it as the grown-up pageant.   I recall it would begin with a procession of the Three Wise Men and ended with Judas Hanging himself and a whole lot in between , like the Crucifixion; but, not the Resurection.  

We would sing "O come, O come Emanuel"  just like we did all during Advent.  While singing, we'd light these skinny white candles skewered into white card-board discs "for the drips". The lighting would start with one of the men dressed like a disciple  and we'd each solemnly light ours from the person next to us --usually my brother or sister and then we'd pass our light to the person on the other side, while singing ourselves out of  the church--cupping our hands around the little flames to keep them from blowing out.

Then we'd  just stand there under the stars for a while.    It was one of the few times I can remember feeling still as a child--still with the still stars, the  huddled coats of fur and wool and cold breath.

We kids always had our pageant  on Christmas Eve.  The year I was chosen to be  Mary, an angel fainted and because I was Mary, I thought I should be the one to make her all better.  I was sure  she revived because I stroked her forehead the way my mom did when I was sick. I always liked that I was partly named Mary--Mary Kate--for my two grandmothers.  

Mary was a Hamilton with a highlander's soul.  She's responsible for my exotic forays with short bread.  She was long and tapered and elegant and had pure white hair by the time she was 30.  She told me I smelled like a rosebud whenever she dried me off after a bath and her little name for me was "my lamb" sometimes whispered with the tenderness or the pathos of Blake's,  "Little lamb who made thee..?" 

She adored Beethoven--especially-- and told me that if I listened carefully to his Third Symphony, I would hear them playing "Josephine, Josephine, Josephine".  She drank Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey every night until she was in her 70's and smoked Salems until they snuffed her out at 75.

I barely knew Kate Innaugural who was  born to Quakers, America Viola  Robinson and James Buchanan  She was  an opera singer.   Kate and Samuel Sewall Rodman  met and married in Paris during the "war to end all wars". She used to sing with  John Charles Thomas.  He, I'm told,  was famous.   I don't know whether that meant that she was or not.   She was performing with something like the USO and my grandfather was a soldier in the Army Medical Corps.   She died when I was five.  Mom says, she had a heavenly voice and often sang to me. 

I don't remember. 

I remember mom's voice, though

Especially a simple lullaby. with just the words lu-la-lu-al lullaby, sleep baby sleep. lu-la-lu-la-by. It was low, haunting and melancholy and so unlike her, that it was like the cosmos singing through her.

When I was Mary, I kept my eyes down and pretended I was singing that lullaby while cradling my "Tiny Tears" doll, we'd wrapped in swaddling cloths made from old diapers and twined with clothes line.

To be continued...