Colm O'Regan: Pray to St Anthony for lost treasures — it's worth giving it a go
The Saint Anthony who finds the backs of earrings stuck in your mother’s jumper is Saint Anthony of Padua. Picture: iStock
“No you can’t bring it.”
“Why not?
“Because you don’t need it.”
“But I want to bring it.”
“But you’ll lose it and then you’ll be crying”
Outstanding parenting. Accusing children of future hypothetical crying. But I’m doing this for their own good. I don’t want them to lose it about losing “it”.
“It” could be anything. Whatever toy or other random object a child wants to bring to a place it has no business bringing it. I love children’s attachment to objects. It chimes with my own sense that inanimate things have feelings and will get lonely if left behind.
But this impulse has a dark side. When children bring things to places, they lose them. I try to talk them out of bringing “it” by saying, “Remember the story of Daddy’s pen?”
My father brought me back a present from London in 1987. (He would go on holidays to London to visit his sister. A very 1980s Irish family holiday where one member of the family would represent the rest on holidays.) The present was a pen with a digital clock on it. In the 1980s, rather than advancing technology forward, innovators preferred to just put two existing pieces of technology together like some steampunk experiment. This led to an appearance of a plethora of Digital-Watch-And-Something-Else products: Pens, calculators, rulers, pencil cases, all like the Bulmers slogan: nothing added but time.
For reasons best known to myself, I brought the clock-pen with me while picking spuds. As the reasons were best known to myself I’ll tell you them: When you’re small you want all your things in the same place. All your geegaws and doodahs and whatchamacallits. You like to put them in a pile and count them. I lost many things this way, empty snuffboxes, an old locket, and that day, before I’d picked so much as a bowl of spuds, my brand new pen-watch. Not even St Anthony could save me. Although I gave it a go. I just had to pick the right one.
Christian Hagiography attests to the existence of a number of Saint Anthonys. St Anthony of Antioch lived in the Egyptian desert. Over the course of his life despite being beaten by the devil and tempted with luxuries by the villagers, St Anthony of Antioch sought deeper and deeper austerity. But I’m not praying to a Tory. St Anthony the Great lived in the Libyan Desert and was tempted by the Devil who sent him phantoms of women. We’ve all been there with phantom women. The Saint Anthony who finds the backs of earrings stuck in your mother’s jumper is Saint Anthony of Padua or alternatively Lisbon. (maybe he opened a new office)
He is also the patron saint of elderly people but that may just be because he is always around at their houses looking for their glasses case.
St Anthony is said to have got his powers because he lost a book of psalms and managed to recover them. The Lives of the Saints doesn’t say who HE prayed to. Was it another overworked saint filling in who said “Anthony while, I’m here, do you fancy a job?”?
But you don’t need to know the Lives of the Saints to know that Saint Anthony was less inclined to help when you’ve clearly ignored warnings and been a massive eejit and left a digital watch-pen in an October spud-field.
And this is the news I bring to my children. Sometimes you just don’t know where the Lost Things are and St Anthony can do many things but he’s not a miracle worker.
So they reluctantly put “it” down. (In this case a Stich pencil case.) For now at least, it remains found.
- Check out colmoregan.com for Colm’s comedy gigs around the country.
