A friend of a friend of our is a saint

Literally.

Last night a woman we have gotten to know at church came over for dinner. Lots of surprises:

• She's from Philadelphia,
• As a girl, she lived 3 blocks from the corner I used to stand on to catch a bus to St. Joe's,
• She went to school in Bensalem, where Mary Ellen's sister lives,
• Much later she lived in Alexandria, just 2 blocks from where we lived on Gordon St., and

[drumroll, please]

• She knew a saint. St. Catherine Drexel, to be specific.

In fact she went to a school Mother Catherine Drexel (which is how I've always heard her referred to) founded for black and Indian children. This school, just outside Philadelphia, must have been for blacks. I never saw no Indians there.

Dottie, the woman from church, told a funny story of how new teachers, nervous young girls barely older than some of the kids in the school, would come over from Ireland and process into the chapel, many of them getting their first look at some black kids -- the black kids they had signed up to spend the rest of their lives serving. And the kids would make weird faces and do their best to look like they came from another planet to scare the young postulants.