Letter from Mariakhel

I’m glad I held on to that shoebox.

A few weeks, I treated myself to new pair of shoes and, as is my custom, I held onto the box they came in, even though I didn’t have any immediate use for it.

I’ve been trying to cut down on the clutter in my apartment, but it just seems wrong to get rid of such a sturdy container.

And whenever I do toss out an empty box, I suddenly need one. It never fails.

Last week I was working in my computer room and I just fed up with all the debris.

I have piles of stuff that I’ve been threatening to sort out for years and while I couldn’t take care of the whole mess in one day, I decided to clean up one small spot near me. Whatever I wanted to keep would go into the shoebox.

I sat down on the floor and got to work.

I found a single chess piece, a pair of 3-D glasses I bought when I saw the movie Up back in 2009 (Yes, I cried), a St. Anthony medal I am now wearing, and a cover from Parade Magazine dated June 7, 1998 with a photo of George Clooney and the quote, “The Only Failure is Not to Try.”

But then I hit gold in the form of a single typewritten sheet of paper. It had been sent from Mariakhel, West Pakistan on February 10, 1956, one year before I was born.

It was addressed to my grandmother, aunts, and parents. I realized it must have been written by Mother Gertrude, one of my father’s grammar school teachers whom the family had stayed in touch with years after he had graduated.

I have the dimmest memory of meeting Mother Gertrude when I was a child. She wore a white habit, unlike the black habits that the nuns wore at my school, and she seemed like a nice lady.

'Reach down from Heaven and take hold of my hand...'

I recall asking her about some family event that had happened many years earlier.

“That was before your time,” she said, smiling. “You were still in God’s pocket.”

Mother Gertrude had done missionary work for the church and her letter describes condition in this town.

“Our convent is a red-brick, one-story building of five rooms, besides a lavatory,” she writes. “The kitchen is being built a few feet away from the refectory.”

The priests, she says, “receive special training from the start, and are truly fitted to our type of life.”

“The priests have certainly accomplished much during their first seven years or so here,” Mother Gertrude writes, “and now they are hoping that besides running a dispensary and teaching in the school, we will be able to teach sewing and many other useful things, as well as train the mothers to take care of their children.”

Mother Gertrude refers to Bishop Hettinga in her letter and I found references to him online, including a photo of the bishop laying a church foundation stone in 1957.

I tried to imagine my grandmother and the rest of the family receiving that letter at the apartment house on Upper Broadway.

This was back when Dwight Eisenhower was president, the year that the minimum wage would be raised to $1 an hour.

And the letter was written on the very same day officials at the University of Alabama suspended African-American student, Autherine Lucy, claiming they could no longer provide for her safety after a mob of more than a thousand men pelted the car in which the Dean of Women drove her between classes.

Unfortunately, the letter ends in mid-sentence and I don’t know where the other pages are. I’m still amazed that this one sheet of paper survived all these years.

I don’t know much more about Mother Gertrude, but I believe she did return to Pakistan at some point even though she was getting on in years.

I’ve got the stuff from that pile in the shoebox, so it’s taking up less space.

But I’m going to find a special place for Mother Gertrude’s letter, so I’ll always have this gift from a time when I was still in God’s pocket.