It's Hard To Be Holy

An Overture

There was almost nothing, as the Author quickly discovered, of her subject's memory left in St. Gregory's Parish. He'd been right. Whatever joys or horrors that had befallen the community had been neatly and thoroughly and purposefully forgotten. 

'Civilized' was the word he had used. 

There was no one left to confirm or deny the stories he'd told. There was no one left who remembered names like O'Toole and Ohannes; no recollection of the courtyards of Curly's claimed as kingdoms by the marauding gangs of children. The tragedies of Wino Willy, Derek O'Grady, Mickey and Jimmy Donovan, and a hundred more like them were now lost to time. So too were the legends. The Donahues and Zielinskis, Freddy McKinny and his céilí band...the Tiny Teamsters. The Veiled Lady could now rest in peace. No current inhabitant that the Author stopped in the street could muster any grand description of their residency. It was all just simple shrugs and generalizations. 

'Oh, sure. It's a nice place to live,' said one.

'It's pleasant,' said another.

'It's...fine,' said the longest tenured resident the Author could find. She was in her late 30s and had lived in the parish for close to seven years. 'Yeah,' the woman concluded, sounding almost wistful. 'Yeah...it's a fine place to live.'

Fine.

Pleasant.

Nice.

When he'd spoken of the parish, he'd done so in gloriously spiteful terms. Vibrantly dramatic tales followed by violently unambiguous assessments. The St. Gregory's of his stories had lived and breathed. A fantasy land almost, but one now dulled by the actuality of the place. Seeing it in the flesh disappointed the Author. There were no dramatics here. No pride. No horror. Just simple and effective descriptors.

Nice.

Pleasant.

Fine.

Everyone seemed detached.

And yet...as she wandered the cleaned and refurbished streets of the neighborhood, much smaller than even she'd realized it would be, the Author couldn't shake off a rather distinct, unsettled feeling. She couldn't quite put a name to it either, only knowing the more she wandered, the more her stomach tightened.

'Catacombs' was a word that came to mind, but she quickly shook it off.

'Mollified' then followed, and that was a closer.

And without warning, she found herself standing on Glendale Road. Not the Glendale of pitched battles and potholes and death, but a pretty street with bike lanes, shared by colorful rows of flowers and all-too-fit joggers.

The Author sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. It was another hot day. A very hot day. Not a good day to wander. Why had she come here? What good in the end did it do her, except to make sense of all that she had heard? But there was no sense here, nothing that made it stand out, nothing that separated it from a hundred other gentrified neighborhoods in a hundred other cities across the country.

Guilt nipped at the periphery of her mind, and the Author found herself rubbing out the cigarette after only a puff. She felt embarrassed to be smoking there. The place was so clean and neat that she couldn't bare to think that she was somehow soiling it. So clean and neat and nice and pleasant and fine--

And then the word came to her. It came so suddenly that the Author sat up straight and gasped as if stung by a great shock.

'Silent' was the word.

St. Gregory's Parish was silent.