Adventures of a Middle-Class Catholic Bag-Lady
THE HUMOR OF SIMPLICITY
So, what’s a middle-class Catholic bag-lady? A woman who by background and profession belongs to the middle class, but by virtue of trying to follow gospel and papal dictums about a simple and austere way of life, manages to give the appearance of a real bag-lady, with humorous results.
Before going any further, I want to make absolutely sure the reader knows that this article’s title is not meant to be in the least offensive to real bag-ladies, for whom I feel great empathy, especially since they provide me an image of my future in case my “shadow-self” someday overtakes my present efforts at maintaining the merest modicum of respectability necessary for my job as a seminary professor and for speaking engagements.
An example will explain what I mean about being taken for a bag-lady. Recently I drove my son from our lower-middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles to take his college boards at a high school in Watts — a neighborhood now being rehabilitated, but famous for past riots and gang warfare.
Anticipating a wait of some four hours, I brought along a bag of knitting, and dressed casually in my Saturday best: scuffed boots, twisty leotard, long skirt, 10-year-old sweater, long scraggly hair, and of course no makeup, since even the $1 that could be spent on a cheap lipstick could better be given to the poor. You get the picture.
You May Also Enjoy
My name was placed on a hit list; I was accused of being a communist. At the same time we were leafleted by guerrillas, who were attacking our stand on nonviolence.
When the worker is engaged in work that is to him intrinsically meaningless, then he is deprived of work in the deeper sense, even when he makes a living wage.
Girls in the ghetto are hungry for love, and desperately afraid of not going along with the social, cultural, and sexual pressures of the street.