Letters

I have found something to celebrate about the social isolation imposed by the coronavirus: the time to reexamine our favorite memories. Like a trusted cleaning woman who never disturbs hard-to-reach nooks and crannies, knowing she would neither be challenged nor fired, we have also stayed on the surface waves of memory.

I cannot pinpoint the current event that triggered my memories of Trieste. My parents and I moved to Italy. My Detta, who had taken care of me day and night since I was born, was not with us. Detta and I spoke German. At age 8, I had to learn languages. In a “sink-or-swim” strategy, my mother enrolled me in the Notre Dame de Sion, an elegant boarding school on a hill above the harbor of Trieste. At the Notre Dame, the language of instruction was Italian and the social language was French.

Every morning, after washing, dressing and making our beds, our tummies growling empty since the previous evening’s supper, we marched through our private park to our own church. We sang our hymns in Latin loudly to conceal that we had no idea what the words meant.

We listened to our priest’s sermon, in Italian. And, still, we had no idea what he was talking about. He told us not to think bad thoughts endangering our eternal souls. We were sure that, at the right time, our priest would tell us what thoughts were bad and how to keep them from poisoning our minds.

By then, the images of the breakfast awaiting us in the dining hall were mouth-watering: the hot chocolate with a dollop of whipped cream, the oven-warm croissants and brioches with the squares of sweet butter and marmalade with different fruit flavors.

Those images of breakfast became too painful to continue, so we went back to competing for who could count the most flies landing on our homeroom Mother’s veil.

With our souls thus elevated at the end of daily Mass, we marched off in silent pairs to the dining hall.

Suddenly, I remembered what I was doing when I was overcome with childhood memories: Mitch McConnell was on TV, immediately after he had voted against convicting “that earlier guy” for causing an insurrection. Sen. McConnell was enumerating the crimes he now claimed that our 45th president had committed. McConnell insisted that “Trump was practically and morally guilty of all the crimes charged.”

Now, if you can explain to me what McConnell’s speech has to do with flies landing on a nun’s veil, please let me know, won’t you?

Evelyn Konrad

Attorney at law

Southampton