Manayunk Story

This is St. Lucy.

Yes, those are her eyeballs on that plate.

It's part of her legend: Rather than forsake her virginity (which she'd pledged to God) and marry some rich Roman, she endured torture -- the gouging of the eyeballs and what have you -- and was ultimately martyred with a sword to the throat after refusing to denounce the faith.

In addition to being patron saint of the blind and the go-to gal on things related to the eyes and sight, St. Lucy is the namesake of our Manayunk parish. When I was kid, the statue pictured above stood at the end of the long central hallway inside the elementary school, and when you came out of the classroom at a certain time of the day, the sunlight streamed in behind her in exactly the way that would seriously freak out an 8-year-old.

I mention the eyes because this weekend we had the celebration of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, and one of my Italian cousins was in from Florida. At the party, she ran into one of the Hermitage Street neighbors, a 91-year-old woman (also Italian), who still lives in the house with some of her children and grandchildren.

My cousin was excited to run into this woman because she wanted to hit the old lady up for a lesson on how to remove the malocchio -- apparently nobody where they live in Florida knows how to get rid of the evil eye, so my cousin wants to be the fixer of the maloiks. Sadly, she left disappointed because, as the old lady told her, you can only pass along that information on Christmas Eve. Stunod!