Evening Prayers and the Picture at the Top of the Stairs

In our home - as in many other homes in rural Canada in the 1940's - saying our prayers was an essential part of getting ready for bed.  Like most children I rushed through our prayer without any thought to what it said or meant.  In my head the first line was " nowilayme (all one meaningless word),  I pray the lord my soul to keep ... and so on. The prayer ended with a "God bless" where we listed a series of names beginning with grandparents and relatives - God bless Grandma, God bless Aunt Allie - and ending with God bless Mommy and Daddy and the rest of our immediate family including Skippy the dog.  If someone in the community was ill  my mother would encourage us to add a line that go something like: "Please make Wayne better."  And then we would hop into bed. If the weather was cold the persons mentioned in the "God Bless" line got shorter.  However, if you wanted to irritate your sister who was waiting her turn to say her prayers you could always string out the "God Bless" line to include everyone you could think of.  Typically the prayers were said while kneeling beside the bed but in the midst of January in a cottage where there was no direct heat in any of the bedrooms we were allowed to say the prayers from under the covers.

I now realize that there were several versions of the prayer we were taught.  Other versions were more gentle and did not talk of dying children or souls heading to heaven.  The version we recited came from an 18th century American book called the New-England Primer.  The first stanza went like this:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray to Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take

  On reflection I am glad that I never made any attempt to comprehend what I was saying.  It certainly had the potential to cause nightmares in a young child who awakened in the middle of a dark night.

Now for a word about the picture that accompanies this blog.  When we were children my father's elderly aunt and uncle lived in a large brick house on Elizabeth Street in Stratford. Because my Grandmother lived with them our family were frequent visitors in their home.  Unlike us, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Allie had indoor plumbing.  The toilet was located on the second floor in a room separate from the bathroom.  To get to the toilet you needed to climb the heavy oak staircase to the first landing, turn right and begin the climb to the second floor where at the top of the stairs hung the picture (shown above) of the angels floating over the little girl.  I never understood what those angels were doing but I figured that it must have something to do with death.  I also knew that even if I kept my head down and tried to look the other way I would "see" the picture as I passed under it.   And for an eight year old the choice was very clear: scurry past the picture or face even worst humiliations!