THE SAINT ANTHONY PRAYER CARD
“She said Anthony was on the case...”
I moved to New York City in 1995 and rented a room the size of a closet in a six-floor walk-up. I’d saved up enough money to cover rent for two months, but I needed to find a job. On Tuesdays I’d wait at the Astor Place newsstand, where the first printed issues of the Village Voice would be dropped. I’d grab a copy, flip to the classifieds, and start circling.
At that point I’d held many jobs: dishwasher, babysitter, waitress, cashier, bookseller, janitor, receptionist, title examiner, and the Salem, MA equivalent of working at McDonald’s—haunted house ghoul. My family valued hard labor. My grandmother was born in Ireland in 1909 and was sent to the United States at age sixteen to work as a maid. She spent years cleaning rooms in hotels and rich people’s homes, and later trained to be a nurse and a gardener. Besides her work ethic, the things she held onto from the old country most fiercely were her brogue, her sense of humor, and her dedication to the Catholic church.
When she learned that I was unemployed, my grandmother mailed me a prayer card of Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. (In grammar school, if the nuns misplaced their keys, they’d lead our class in a chant: Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony please look around, something is lost and must be found.) Often depicted holding a lily and hugging a baby Jesus, Saint Anthony is also known for saving people from accidents. Years later, when I visited his shrine in Padua, it was piled with crutches and photos of smashed cars. If you have a near-death experience and survive, you’re supposed to make a pilgrimage to his tomb.
My grandmother was on a first-name basis with the saints. She said Anthony was on the case and that he’d find me a job. In 1995 important communication (like offers of employment) still came in the form of calls, so I taped the prayer card above the phone that I shared with my roommates, an old rotary with a spiral cord and a receiver the size of a billy-club. 1995 was also the year that my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. The last time I’d seen her before moving to New York, her skin was waxy and jaundiced, her eyes the color of dandelions in milk.
The prayer card worked. The job arrived. But there were other things I wanted. So I kept Saint Anthony taped to the wall, hoping that he’d continue to direct good news my way. There he remained, until I left that job and found another job and then another job and then my grandmother died. I took the express train from New York but arrived too late to say goodbye. The last time I saw her alive, she had told me that I lived too far away.
I took the prayer card down and hung it in a new apartment, over a different phone. I asked for more things to be found. When I got rid of my landline, I attached Anthony to the router on my desk (the new device for important communication), hoping there was still some magic left, a bit of my grandmother’s goodwill. He remains there today, next to a line of blinking blue lights. Leaning into Jesus and asking for miracles.
