I woke up this morning dreaming of the “The Bells of St. Mary’s”, a film starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman that I probably first watched as an eighth grade student at St. Gerard de Magella, a Catholic school in Hollis, Queens, a neighborhood in New York City.  It’s been a favorite of mine ever since, though hard to view now; times have changed and the values reflected in that film no longer predominate.  It reflects a sort of idyllic yet plebian epoch where we believed we stood for decency, ignoring the cultural cancers that afflicted us, the genocide of indigenous Americans and racism based on our history of unrepentant abuse of Africans, as well as our penchant for intervening militarily in the affairs of others in order to appropriate their natural resources. 

St. Gerard’s though seemed reflective of a streak of decency, as was Father O’Malley’s and Sister Mary’s St. Mary’s.  My best friend at the time, albeit briefly, was an African American of Jamaican ancestry whose name was Cuthbert Williamson.  Other close friends were Italian and Irish, and I had a serious crush on a girl whose ancestry I never knew, but whose name was Patricia Maher; all of us happily melding, unaware of how much our world would change or just how hypocritical the country we loved was and had always been. 

I think we’ve strayed from the path that might have led from there to the best version of who we should have become.  Instead of curing our societal ills, we glossed over them self-righteously and became a more and more polarized society and a larger and larger danger to ourselves and even more so to the rest of the world.  Indeed, we became that which we claimed so many of the best among us had died to prevent in the second of our wars to purportedly end all wars and today, our government, if not all of our people, avidly supports ethnic cleansing and the mass murder of civilians that most of the world, at least in the global south, considers genocide.  And, of course, our government seeks to embroil us in wars all over the globe in order to attain the worldwide hegemony that we purportedly disdained when I attended St. Gerard. 

Shortly after I graduated from St. Gerard, a sort of poetic prophet playing a harmonica and a guitar, and singing what seemed like the hymns of our generation (albeit sort of off key), arose and stirred us towards a better world, asking “when will we ever learn” and declaring that the “times they were a ‘changing”.  But we haven’t and they didn’t; … not really.  And the innocence of St. Mary’s is gone.

My mood as I awoke this morning was nostalgic and melancholy, as tends to happen as we mature, and I reflected on my personal failures and on my regrets instead of on the successes I’ve attained and the blessings I enjoy; on the many friends and relationships that have vanished and which I did not appreciate as much as they deserved.  Bittersweet memories, reflections and introspections.  But I also focused on the hope Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman generated when I watched their interplay, a sense of hope they still inspire whenever I manage to revisit Father O’Malley and Sister Mary. 

A sense of hope we desperately need today when their like seems all too hard to find.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.