Thomas Lynch's formative moments
I was raised by Irish Catholics. Even as I write that it sounds a
little like "wolves" or some especially feral class of creature. I don't
mean this in the nativist sense of brutish hordes, but in the sense of
sure faith and fierce family loyalties, the pack dynamics of their
clannishness, their vigilance and pride. My parents were grandchildren
of immigrants who had all married within their tribe.
The only
moderating influence to this bloodline and gene pool was provided by my
paternal grandmother, a woman of Dutch extraction, who came from a long
line of Daughters of the American Revolution. She was a temperate
Methodist, an Eisenhower Republican, a wonderful cook and seamstress
and gardener who never gossiped or gave any scandal to her family until
early in the so-called roaring twenties, when she was smitten by and
betrothed to marry an Irish Catholic. This was not good news to her
parents and their circle.
As was the custom of her generation, to
appease her fiancé's priest she "converted" to what she would ever after
refer to as "the one true faith?"--the lilt appended to the end of the
declarative shoving a foot of doubt in the door, as if the apostle with a
finger in the wounds of the risen Christ had queried, "My Lord, My
God?" She took a kind of dark glee in explaining the conversion
experience to her grandchildren, to wit: "Ah, the priest splashed a
little water on me and said, 'Geraldine, you were born a Methodist,
raised a Methodist. Thanks be to God, now you're Catholic.'"
