St. Augustine Catholic Church, 11 April 2011

I remember when I attended St, Augustine Catholic Church, it was for my grandmother's funeral. I can remember the approximate date, it was 26 April 1965, the day before my fifteenth birthday. But I don't remember going to the cemetery for the burial, one forgets so many things and wonders "where was I?" "what was I doing?" “ why didn't I go?" "who was I with?" There must have been other funerals that day, my grandmother's casket was one of several and I remember the priest who officiated. This was the church of my Auntie Mabel; she died in 1960. My grandmother was Protestant and never went to church, she could marry my Catholic grandfather on the condition that she raise the children as Catholics, but on Sunday mornings she said her boys needed their sleep and most of her children were nominal Catholics and married Protestants. 

It was an Irish Catholic church.

 

"The Skater" by Charles G. D. Roberts

 

N.D.G. Winter Carnaval, February 19, 1955; photo taken at 
NDG Park (Girouard Park); St. Augustine Roman
Catholic Church in the background.

My glad feet shod with the glittering steel
I was the god of the wingèd heel.

The hills in the far white sky were lost;
The world lay still in the wide white frost;

And the woods hung hushed in their long white dream
By the ghostly, glimmering, ice-blue stream.

Here was a pathway, smooth like glass,
Where I and the wandering wind might pass

To the far-off palaces, drifted deep,
Where Winter's retinue rests in sleep.

I followed the lure, I fled like a bird,
Till the startled hollows awoke and heard

A spinning whisper, a sibilant twang,
As the stroke of the steel on the tense ice rang;

And the wandering wind was left behind
As faster, faster I followed my mind;

Till the blood sang high in my eager brain,
And the joy of my flight was almost pain.

The I stayed the rush of my eager speed
And silently went as a drifting seed, —

Slowly, furtively, till my eyes
Grew big with the awe of a dim surmise,

And the hair of my neck began to creep
At hearing the wilderness talk in sleep.

Shapes in the fir-gloom drifted near.
In the deep of my heart I heard my fear.

And I turned and fled, like a soul pursued,
From the white, inviolate solitude.

-o-

Note: As of 8 a.m. today, 22 January 2025, it is -16C with a windchill of -23C. Milder by Sunday...