This all started twenty years ago when I found out it was not St. Michael the Archangel who visited  me in the woods and did that thing to me in 1953, that it was actually Father Thomas Barry Horne, pastor at the nearby Catholic Church in Bartlett, outside Chicago.  I confirmed it was Father Horne when I had a phone conversation with my sister in 1994 that changed the rest of my life. 

That secret visit from an archangel was, I think, what kept me from being an atheist.  It also caused me to be sexually aroused from age five on, and as a result I had a pretty strange life. 

People used to joke about Catholic school girls being oversexed once they got out into the world.  I wonder how many of us are wild because we were aroused as a child by a priest, then forced to keep it secret. 

My secret

A sequence of events that took place in 1994 changed my life, and took me in a direction I've continued to go now for twenty years, even though I wish it all never happened.  I've described it in many places here at City of Angels Blog. I had a baby at age 40 and was inordinately protective of her, then got into AA and got sober and clean, not even smoking weed, stayed that way for two years, then Lizzie turned five.  My home group was having a priest come up from L.A. for a speaker meeting and I pained up.  Could not move off my couch that night to go hear the priest speak as the pain crippled me, same pain by the way that I'm plagued with today.  And then that week, or over that next couple weeks, it just happened, I started remembering everything.  And the memory was so shocking I had a physical reaction, at one point even flying across the room and banging up against a wall, just because the shock itself created a momentum, a physical momentum.  And I cried, and I had this awful total body pain, and

Gosh,

My five year old daughter Lizzie was right there at home with me the whole time. . .

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I picked up the phone and called my sister Patricia, even though last time I’d seen her, she'd come up to Arcata to visit and meet her newborn niece and she got drunk and hostile and yelled at me nonstop for several hours until I finally made her leave. Now it was five years later, now Lizzie and I were in a different apartment in Eureka, now I needed to call my sister and since it was not the first time we’d been estranged, I ended up calling her as if nothing had happened back in Arcata when she’d frothed at the mouth at me.  I called Patricia, at the 415 phone number she’d had since they gave out area codes and said to her, 

“Do you know anything about Father Horne when I was about five years old?”

I described a bit of what I was remembering, being a little girl in Father Horne’s living area, next to his bed, getting closer and closer to his bed.

And before I said another word, Trish said to me, “He got to you too.”  Then added, “That's why I've been so hostile to you our whole lives.  You took away my first lover.” 

Read Chapter One here and Chapter Two is coming soon

In the 1960s:
We were dancing at a restaurant on a country road in France, and I was the one who got the whole crowd singing along with "Yellow Submarine."  Still, afterwards, while I stood to the side, they all surrounded Trish to find out more about the new English music.