Yes, I did bring A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to New York City

On graciousness during Lent

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Mar 28, 2026

I’m pleased to tag #OpenBook Linkup on CatholicMom.com. Thanks to Carolyn Astfalk for hosting this opportunity!

Every year, the Women of St. Jude host an Ash Wednesday morning of reflection that glows with a particular hallmark of hospitality. We lay out a simple but lovely repast of home-baked breads, bundt cakes, fruit, yogurt parfaits, and goat cheese. We use real goblets for juice and plastic cups for coffee and tea. One particularly gifted member crafts such lovely table decorations that we all joke about hiring her to cater other events.

More importantly, we slow down for this first day of Lent and take in the graciousness of our God. This year’s speaker, a Jesuit priest, took his time drinking coffee with us before giving a wonderful talk (with an intermission!) on the Lenten homilies of Cardinal Newman. Afterward, he was in no hurry to return to his many duties but continued to chat. This was why he had come.

My husband and I traveled later that day to New York to visit our son for his birthday. We arrived at La Guardia in the rain and were picked up by a sixtyish man named Zorhan with long gray hair and a heavy Queens accent who enthralled us with his conversation. He’d been caught in a blizzard in Buffalo once with his dad after they’d worked some electrical job; driving blind in the snow, they exited the highway, ran out of gas, and were in danger of freezing to death. Taking a shovel they kept in the trunk, they abandoned the car and started to walk. When they heard what sounded like a plow coming, they hurled the shovel in its general direction of the sound, hoping to get the driver’s attention before he could hit them. The driver opened the cab and let them in, saving their lives. Zorhan warned us to watch out for DoorDash delivery scooters speeding the wrong way in New York City’s bike lanes—I never did see one of those, though I made sure to look—but the blizzard story he told us proved prophetic, because a huge snowstorm kept us in New York for an extra two days. And I know I’m just a humble Midwesterner beguiled by a talkative cabbie, but here in this “dinosaur moment”—three people taking delight in spontaneous conversation as though our cell phones didn’t exist—we found graciousness, too. It probably wasn’t until we got out that Zorhan noticed the ashes on our foreheads. We said goodbye warmly before he drove off.

Our son works long hours at a demanding job, so my husband and I tend to stick to routine when we visit: we walk or run in the park, read our books, and write for a while before we strike out at noon for a mass. On that first rainy Friday of Lent, we walked to a church on East 55th Street that purportedly offered stations of the cross afterward. But when we finally found the place, we saw that the service had been relocated to Holy Family, a sister parish several blocks away on East 47th. We finally arrived soaking wet at the start of the liturgy of the Eucharist; but then we made the most beautiful stations according to a new translation of St. Alphonsus Liguori and were granted a plenary indulgence to boot. From there, we walked to Chartwell Booksellers, a Churchill-themed bookstore in the Park Avenue Plaza on East 52nd. There, my husband struck up a long conversation with the owner, who told us several stories, including one about Churchill being struck by a car in the snow.

I say this by way of a long introduction to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, a gritty but gracious, compelling yet leisurely book that accompanied me on this journey. A friend from our Well-Read Mom group had recommended it as her favorite after we’d finished reading The Chosen by Chaim Potok, which is also set in Brooklyn—although Smith’s book takes place much earlier, beginning in 1912 and flashing back to the turn of the twentieth century. I was enthralled from the earliest pages, in which a young girl named Francie Nolan recalls collecting aluminum foil with her brother to give to the junk man on Saturday, who will exchange it for pennies they can spend in the candy store once they’ve set aside half for the tin can bank nailed to the floor in their closet at home—although Francie is allowed to keep the extra penny she gets from the junk man for enduring a pinch on the cheek.

Francie’s mother Katie, who cleans apartment buildings, puts aside her mop and pail when the children come home and sends them out to buy bread and beef tongue for their sandwiches. Poor as they are, Francie is always allowed to pour out her share of the coffee that’s offered with every meal, a prerogative she will later cherish in memory. Francie narrates that whole leisurely Saturday, including visits from family members, pick-up baseball games, library books on the fire escape, and weekly confession with one of her friends—a confession she does not agonize over but simply makes part of her day. And when Francie’s beloved father Johnny, a singing waiter with a drinking problem, brings home leftover lobster at 2:00 a.m., the whole family gets up and eats. But then Francie remembers that she’s broken her fast for communion in the morning and will have a real sin to confess the following week.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn may be a classic coming-of-age story and a window on immigrant life; but it is also a love letter to family, broken and hardscrabble though it might be. When Francie is struggling in school, Johnny willingly fakes an address in another neighborhood so she can attend the more attractive school of her choice. There, she is caught telling an outlandish story, and we see the first glimmers of her writer’s vocation:

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. ‘You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get messed up.”

It was the best advice Francie ever got.

Francie learns about cruelty and depravity long before she is really old enough to understand. In a surprisingly funny passage, Francie’s mother rescues her from a sexual predator who is known to murder his victims. Francie recognizes the man in the hall of her building and is so petrified that she cannot run or even let go of the banister. When the police finally come and inquire about Francie’s swollen wrist, they learn that her mother had to hit her with the butt of a gun to make her let go; when they inquire about her bruised knees, they learn that her mother had to drag her down the hallway to safety. And in the coup de grace, Francie’s father uses carbolic acid to wash away the stain of the man’s touch on the back of her leg. (Before Johnny proffers this remedy, Francie is screaming that she wants her leg cut off.) After this terrible trauma, a doctor gives Francie a sedative and advises her mother to tell the girl it was all a dream when she wakes up. In neighborhood lore, Katie Nolan’s heroic rescue transmutes into a cautionary tale about a fierce woman brandishing a borrowed gun.

The Nolan family may be poor, and Francie’s father may be a drunk. But when he comes home every night, he sings on the stairs so they will know it’s him. Meanwhile, Katie, who has so little time for leisure, ensures that the children read passages from the Bible and Shakespeare every night. Most importantly, Francie receives the gift of faith:

Francie believed with all her heart that the altar was Calvary and that again Jesus was offered up as a sacrifice. As she listened to the consecrations, one for His Body and one for His Blood, she believed that the words of the priest were a sword which mystically separated the Blood from the Body. And she knew, without knowing how to explain why, that Jesus was entirely present, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the wine in the golden chalice and the bread on the golden plate.

I almost never have a theme for Lent, but this year, a particular verse from the gospel of Mark kept drifting into my mind: He said to them, come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest for a while. This passage appears shortly after Jesus has sent the twelve on mission and right before the feeding of the five thousand. It seems to me now that beginning on Ash Wednesday, I was invited to rest: in the gracious hospitality of the St. Jude ladies; in the generous conversation of the Uber driver; in the storytelling of the bookstore owner after a walk in the rain, and in the quiet daily masses we attended in the midst of our cycle of reading—even in the snowstorm that kept us confined to our son’s apartment. Just as the snow began, I spilled an entire cup of tea on my son’s work laptop. He didn’t freak out, and my husband heroically saved the computer from water damage—which would have been an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. But while I apologized over and over, my son sat on the sofa, his lips moving in prayer.

I’m sure every mother out there can imagine how happy that made me. What a way to usher in a season of Lent in which our gracious God calls us to repentance, preparing us for the moment when we will commemorate the most gracious act ever performed on anyone’s behalf. A blessed Holy Week to all.

Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Mt 11:28-30