This blog has been rolling on for about fourteen years! When it first got started a series of “alter egos” appeared as “guest bloggers”. They all came out of my imagination and were fun to write and fun to read. For some reason in the transition to the new format they all seemed to disappear back into the imaginative fog from whence they came. One of the favorites was a nine year old Catholic girl named Caitlin O’Rourke. She wrote as she spoke. From the archives, here is Caitlin for your enjoyment. Where did she come from? This one was inspired simply by the photograph.

Jimmy Pochowski makes me so mad and he still calls me Fatty Catty even though Aunt Margaret says I’m stretching out a little and then he didn’t believe me when I said that Caitlin was the Irish form of Catherine and so today was my name day then he told me something really gross about Saint Catherine of Siena which I don’t think is true because it is so gross he said that Saint Catherine of Siena used to suck up pus from the sick people who she used to work with because she never ate anything else but the Eucharistic and he said she must have been some kind of crazy nut and I said no she was not she was a saint who changed the world just like Sister told us in school today and she wrote letters to the Pope and told him to stop being lazy and Sister said you can still see her head in a box with a light under it in a church in Italy and she showed us a picture but it was yucky because it was hundreds of years old like a mummy and another thing I told him was that even if it was true that Saint Catherine used to drink pus I didn’t care and he said she did lots of other things like beat herself with chains and not eat anything for a long time and I was talking about it with Flora at lunch and Flora said she thought maybe Saint Catherine was crazy and I didn’t know what to say and started to cry a little bit then stopped because I thought Saint Catherine wouldn’t cry at such a little problem then at recess when I was walking around the playground by myself and thinking which is something I do pretty much every day I thought that Aunt Jules who is a lawyer in California who divorced her husband for the money does lots of things that seem crazy to me like she runs everywhere all the time and never eats anything but a lettuce leaf once a day and Aunt Margaret said she had an operation to have pretend boobies put in and she had an operation to make her face look younger and other stuff too and Aunt Margaret says she now looks like a clown which is right because she always was a fool anyway so if Aunt Jules does all that so she can look like a Barbie doll why is it crazy for Saint Catherine to do stuff that people think is crazy to be more like Jesus and when I saw Jimmy coming in from recess I was going to tell him but changed my mind because Aunt Margaret says I shouldn’t cast my pearls before swine.