Recollection of Prayer

   In 1948, the rosary crusader Fr. Peyton, came to the Canadian prairies and my parents were among the twelve thousand people gathered to hear his message. They had been married in the Depression and then living through the Second World War they were eager to found their family on solid ground. They adopted the practice of saying the rosary together with their children.
   A dozen years later this practice of the evening rosary was to impress itself on my small person. That summer, my aunt and family had traveled from Edmonton to visit her older sister, my mother. There in the living room of our little house with the summer sun fading from the mountains, we all knelt before the crucifix on the northern wall. The prayers began as usual but soon I was rudely drawn out of my reverie by my Aunt turning towards me and saying that it was my turn to lead a Hail Mary.
I was alarmed and tried to hide behind my mother. Slowly I became aware of a dozen or so pairs of eyes watching me which to my five year old self was a vast multitude of people looking in my direction. I froze in terror as I only knew the first two words having never bothered to learn the rest. It was a gentle rhythmic sound that I had registered, not words.
   Thus began the painful process of being fed a few words at a time, to be repeated out loud until with great relief, my part was over and it was the "crowd's" turn to answer. My release from public scrutiny left me on alert in case such attention was shown me again. Alas, my invisible world of daydreaming had suffered a severe shock. I had just survived my first public performance.
   I still had my private evening routine to perform under the watchful eye of my mother as I knelt beside my bed, before the hand-tinted painting of the child Jesus with a little bird sitting on his hand, to make contact with my guardian angel whose protection I was taught to request.
   I can recall three events of physical danger that needed such angelic help on the small farm we lived on.
   The first is remembered more by hearsay, I have only a vague memory of the portable cement mixer passing over my head and down upon the ground, leaving me safely behind in the box on the back of the tractor from whence it had tumbled, heading up too steep a hill.
  I do remember being on top of the hay wagon that overturned and left me buried under the hay. Not for  long as my father was quick to reach me. Just long enough to feel the panic of suffocation.
   The third event was quietly dramatic. I had been watching my brothers doing something with the barn door that ran on metal rollers to open and close. For some reason it came off its mooring and fell straight in my direction. I turned and ran as fast as my little legs would take me and the metal rollers scraped my back as they fell, missing my head by a whisper. Crying loudly and unaware of my close call, I ran into the house to have my wounds tended to, my life being preserved by a matter of inches.
   Most of all I recall in that little house, how many times with every childhood illness, my mother rocked me in the blue rocking chair, how one day my little soul was caught up into the arms of the Virgin Mary, who filled me with the greatest tenderness I had ever known.
   These recollections live in the timeless world of memory, hand in hand with those loved ones who no longer walk this earth but keep me company on my journey of prayer.