Blessed Trinity Roman Catholic Church

It was one of those crystalline winter nights. The sky, pitch black, illuminated with its glittering stars a blanket of crusted snow. I turned up the collar of my overcoat against the bite in the air. My young wife, Lyn, and I (we are the same age but as I recall her she seemed so young, so vulnerable that night.), had driven the dark streets of our East Side neighborhood. Green and red lights of Christmas trees peeked over porches through windows at us. Wreaths of evergreen decorated doorways. Fillmore Avenue merchants had done themselves proud and Santas greeted us from every lamppost.

We parked Dad's car off Leroy Avenue behind the convent and grammar school at Blessed Trinity Church. The Sisters of Saint Joseph had taught me there and ten years before had passed me along. In six months I'd finally have my M.D. and maybe I could start supporting us instead of living off my folks and, until she became ill, Lyn.

Lyn was on Christmas leave from Lockport's Niagara San, more formally the Niagara County Tuberculosis Sanitarium. In a way we were lucky since medicine had just discovered that Streptomycin and Isoniazid were effective against TB.

She was thin from her struggle with that disease and she was heavy with our first child. She had been selling coats at Hengerer's to feed us and pay for our waterfront-project apartment. Suddenly she was fainting and vomiting and then locked away six months in that sanitarium. Yet we were thankful there was such a place to take care of her.

Christmas came and Lyn was improved enough to visit home. We were full of laughter and joy and we were going to have a baby. Al-le-luia! Well, almost Alleluia.

This Christmas Eve she was bundled in a blue woolen coat left over from her school days and across her mouth she had wrapped a scarf. I held her hand to help her hop awkwardly through the crusty untracked snow in a short cut to the church. She tripped. I caught her.

"Oopsey" she exclaimed as she caught her breath and her balance.

"OK?" I asked.

"Yes. I'm OK"

I worried about the baby in her prominent belly and due in just two weeks. We both worried about her illness and all that medicine and what it might have done to our baby. We did not speak of it.

Blessed Trinity is a particularly beautiful church and, as I recall from that starry Christmas night with Lyn home and getting better, seemed magical. Its style is Byzantine, built of hand-made red bricks that drooped as if they were still soft. Every nook was filled with statues and ceramic designs. On top, the mighty dome, its red oriental tiles dusted with snow, bulged pregnantly toward a twinkling sky.

Inside, the church was crowded with neighbors dressed against the cold. We were a few minutes late for Midnight Mass. The altar was ablaze with candles standing in golden candlesticks and flooded with white flowers. In the manger to its left huddled Virgin Mary, Little Lord Jesus, Saint Joseph and the barnyard animals. Incense was in the air and the choir rang out from above with "Adeste fidelis, laete triumphantes."

We stood in the back for a moment until an usher in a brown business suit with his sparse greased-down hair combed straight back noticed Lyn's condition. He cleared his throat and motioned us to follow to a pew on the side aisle. An older couple smiled and crowded over to make room for her.

I stood alongside and thought about those last six months. "Silent night, holy night" the choir sang. It was a holy night, I thought, as I recalled nights alone without Lyn. I had persuaded the school to let me go and stay at Niagara San for my two weeks of required tuberculosis study, while she was there. It was a world-renowned center for the treatment of that disease. The doctors were excellent, Dr. Jack Lipson in particular. They were on the cutting edge with new drugs and all the best kinds of rehabilitation, good food and country air. I recall their wonderful apple pie. Lyn, though she loves apple pie now, never enjoyed theirs.

"Kyrie eleison" chanted Monsignor Rung from the altar in his golden vestments.

"Christ eleison" choraled back the choir in flickering light.

Yes mercy, Lord have mercy on us. I learned a great deal about tuberculosis at the San, not just the good. Lyn made friends with a young woman who insisted on going home. That friend came back and died. I attended her autopsy and all I can remember were the pus-filled cavities she had for lungs.

I had had too much experience with the disease even before that. My Aunt Eleanor died of TB at the Meyer Memorial Hospital in Buffalo when I was nine. Lyn's scarf kept across her mouth even in church reminded me of the gauze masks my aunt used to wear. When I was six, my mother spent a month in Perrysburg San and came home against advice. A medical school classmate of mine dropped out of school that year with it. I tested positive for TB but never had the disease, not even a cough

History of Cristmas Seals

History of the double barred cross

History of Tuberculosis

American Lung Association

In his homily, Monsignor Rung called our attention to the humble animals in the manger. I thought of the stuffed toy animals Lyn made for an occupational therapy project. I remembered cute monkeys with button eyes made out of long, cotton stockings. The Occupational Therapist said, "We will lamp them in the sunshine to kill any possible germs." Lyn sent them out to several of her friends who had little children. Then she was suddenly taken with the fear that all the little stuffed animals she had labored over so painfully would be thrown away for fear of infection.

We slipped out of Mass early. Mom had Christmas cookies and milk on the table for us. Bing Crosby was crooning "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas from the radio. Mom had been hanging her mother's old glass ornaments on the tree. Dad didn't usually like to bother with a tree but Mom talked him into putting this one up for Lyn. Dad came in from an extra shift handling the mail rush at the New York Central Terminal in time to finish up the tree and have a slice of fruitcake. We all wished each other "Merry Christmas" and went off to our beds.

Upstairs in that old house, Lyn and I snuggled down in the three-quarter bed that had been mine alone. It was crowded. About 5:00 AM I woke for the fourth time.

    "Larry I'm all wet," I heard Lyn say.
    "What?" I responded.
    I'm wet."

"Do you need to go to the bathroom?"
"I was dreaming I was in a lake. I was..."

Then my medical training dawned on me. I had already delivered five babies. I sat straight up.

    "Your water's broken."
    "What?"
    "Your water broke. The baby's coming."

   We woke the house, started calling the hospital and the doctor, but it wasn't until about 12:15 am on December 26, 1954 that our first son, Tecumseh, was born.

Lyn said. "Let's call him Larry, after you. We can nickname him Tecumseh."

I did not take much convincing.

Now every Christmas Lyn says, "Being in the San wasn't so bad. I was productive. I made Tecumseh."

Tecumseh, or Teck as we call him, was the best Christmas present and most welcome Christmas visitor we have ever had.

"When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the morning light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food, and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies with yourself."
- Tecumseh Shawnee Chief 1768-1813

History of Tecumseh

Larry Behan is a regular contributor to the North Side Writers Group, a group of local Buffalo writers who meet every other week for support, critique and good fellowship.

Tecumseh Came to our House for Christmas

by Larry Beahan _{© 1998}

Tecumseh Came to our House for Christmas

by Larry Beahan © 1998

by Larry Beahan _{© 1998}