February 19: Old Straw Basket, Two Nuns, Blessed Sebastian of Aparicio

After I had my breakfast, it was only around noon, and I wasn't meeting old Sally till two o'clock, so I started taking this long walk.  I couldn't stop thinking about those two nuns.  I kept thinking about that beat-up old straw basket they went around collecting money with when they weren't teaching school.  I kept trying to picture my mother or somebody, or my aunt, or Sally Hayes's crazy mother, standing outside some department store and collecting dough for poor people in a beat-up old straw basket.  It was hard to picture...

Holden can be a pretty keen observer of people.  He recognizes genuine people and, as he fondly refers to them, phony bastards.  Most of the characters in The Catcher in the Rye don't measure up to Holden's high standards.  Holden doesn't even measure up.  However, the two nuns he meets at a diner score pretty high on his goodness meter.  They teach school (one of them is an English teacher), and they collect alms for the poor.  They're the kind of individuals that make me feel guilty about just being myself.


I have a pretty good life.  I've got a job (three or four, actually), a house, a full refrigerator, two healthy kids, and a supportive wife.  Granted, right now, money is pretty tight for us.  Actually, money has a grip on my throat that's turning my lips blue.  But it's all relative.  Compared to the two nuns that Holden meets, I live a very comfortable life.

And compared to the life of Blessed Sebastian of Aparicio, I live like the pope.  Sebastian was born in 1502 in Spain and emigrated to Mexico in 1531, where he worked hard and became a very wealthy man.  Eventually, when he was entering his seventh decade of life, he gave up all of his money and joined the Franciscans.  For the next 25 years, he was a "begging brother," using a wagon drawn by oxen to gather food for the religious of his community.  He died in 1600 when he was 98, after having spent nearly a third of his life in poverty, living on charity.

If Holden's two nuns make me feel guilty, Sebastian makes me feel like Veruca Salt.  I don't think of myself as a spoiled or greedy person.  I try to be grateful for everything I have and to keep my complaining to a minimum.  I'm not always successful.  This week, especially, I've been what my coworkers would call, um, really whiny, if not downright bitchy.

Saint Marty has to keep in mind that he's not begging on the street with a beat-up old straw basket or wandering the countryside with a team of oxen looking for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner.  Blessings really do abound.

I don't think I'm this bad