Queen of the Bondo

I opened the windows when I got home today. Just for five minutes, but it was enough to hear what was missing.

Last spring the Catholic church in our neighborhood closed. It was one of a dozen or so churches closed by the diocese, a casualty of our continuously declining population. Remember, a church is more than just a building, they told the parishioners. But a church is a building, and empty buildings change neighborhoods.

I’m not Catholic, but I miss the church’s presence something fierce. I miss the chiming of the bells at noon and six, something that gave structure to my day while I was out of work. I miss a sense of activity on Sunday mornings. And of late I miss the three-storey statue of St. Rose of Lima that once adorned the front of the building:  three Saturdays ago I was walking to the train station on my way to work and there was a crane sitting in front of the church. That night, she was gone. Where she goes nobody knows. Like the old woman who gives shelter to the Partisan, she died without a whisper.

Though it’s been bought by a charter school — which is good — the church now looks like it’s been in a bar fight, like someone knocked out its front teeth.

So at six o’clock tonight when I opened the windows, though I heard the far-off freeway traffic, the train, the sounds of someone’s car stereo, there was also the in-rush of loss, the absence of church bells, fifty years’ worth of constancy and comfort to people I never knew.