Optimistic Daughter Of Charity Served With Verve
Submitted by N.O.V.A. July 2005
Times Picayune	10-25-1998


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When she could still ascend a windmill, the little girl who'd lost her parents would
stop the blades of the machine with the flick of a switch, then climb to the very top,
just before dawn, to help God lift the sun over the low hills of Waco, Texas.

Since her parents died, Pauline Sullivan had been farmed out to her Aunt Lois and her
grandmother Laura, two Servent Baptists. Pauline dwelt happily in this collaborative
world of devout women, but she had a streak of independence that always held her apart.
Perhaps it was a gift from death itself, which had taught her not to cling too tightly
to anything but faith.

Whenever the wind was right, Pauline from her perch on the windmill could hear her
grandmother's summons to breakfast. She was an obedient girl who would grow up to be an
obedient woman, and so she'd scramble right down from her windmill. Unless, of course,
the wind was coming out of the north. Then she could hear nothing but her lone voice
among the stars. Either way -- obeying her grandmother's voice or her own -- she was
content.

"I've traveled a lot by myself, been doing it since I was 5 years old," said Pauline,
now Sister Genevieve Sullivan, 83, a nun of the Order of the Daughters of Charity now
living in the Malta Square retirement community -- formerly Sacred Heart School -- on
Canal Street.

"I've never received an order from a superior that I didn't want to carry out,"
Sullivan said. "When I got the holy habit, I was told, 'You will take your duty or no
duty, according to the wishes of your superior.' I thought then, 'Oh no, I'll always be
able to work. I never dreamt of being old. Now I find that I am here and that I have no
duty. I also find that I'm tired, and ready to rest."

Her windmill-climbing days lost in the past, Sullivan is still up at 4:30 every
morning, standing at the window, watching for the morning star and the first blush of
the eastern sky. She is one of those rare ones who never lost the capacity to choose to
be enthused.

In the six months since her arrival at Malta Square, Sullivan has used the door to her
apartment as a kind of portal to herself, pasting news clippings and handwritten notes
that tell the other residents what Sister Genevieve is enthused about today.

Beginning with home run No. 57, it was the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa derby, even though
Sullivan does not know the rules of baseball. After the regular season ended, there
appeared on her door a newspaper photo of a hog named Porky who escaped from a
temporary St. Tammany Parish animal shelter.

Her door is a real conversation-starter, though she hardly needs one.

"I'm an enthusiastic person, I know it," Sullivan said, standing in the open doorway of
her apartment one recent morning. "My students always said that about me. Yes, this is
I! I'm very interested in my life, and I like it! I think I'm genetic that way."

But how would she know for sure? She possesses only one photo of her father, but she
can't identify him in the picture because he is posed next to his identical twin.
Sullivan hasn't even a single photo of her mother. Of her siblings, her younger brother
drowned, and she has not seen her older brother since they were children. As a girl,
Sullivan took her cues from her grandmother and her aunt.

"We were three of us in the house, three women, all of different generations," Sullivan
said. "All the men had died on us. We went to the Baptist church on Wednesday night,
all day Sunday, and Sunday night. At Bible reading, Gran'maw had her lamp and her
table, Aunt Lois had hers, and I had mine.

"One day I asked my grandmother, I said, 'Gran'maw, what kind of baby was I?'

"Gran'maw thought and said, 'You were a good, happy little baby.'

"Then I said, 'Well, Gran'maw, how old was I when I quit nursing? Did I nurse the
breast or did I drink from bottles?'

"Gran'maw said, 'You were a bottle baby, and you stopped the day you hit your brother
over the head with it."'

Growing up in the Baptist Belt of Texas, Sullivan made a practically unheard-of
conversion to Catholicism while she was in nursing school in Waco.

"My grandmother and my aunt, they didn't care too much for that," Sullivan said. "I
lost a lot of friends over it, but I knew what I wanted."

At 23, with her grandmother and aunt both dead, she found a new community of women in
the Daughters of Charity. The day Sullivan left for St. Louis and the seminary, no one
saw her off at the train station. On her last day in the seminary, there was no one in
her family to attend the ceremony that sent her off into the world as a nun.

It didn't seem to matter. She would walk alone, if she had to. In the seminary, her
superior one day asked her to name her worst fault.

"Independence," Sullivan answered.

"Sister," the superior replied, "I believe your independence has saved you."

As a nurse, Sullivan specialized in cardiovascular nursing, teaching and serving at
hospitals in Texas, Indiana, Missouri and Louisiana, including the leprosarium at
Carville. Needless to say, she has legions of devoted former students and patients.

"At Carville, I learned that if you want to get along with people, they have to know
you love them," Sullivan said. "I remember one little boy named Buddy, brought from
Puerto Rico. He had become blind, because with leprosy the eyes and the ears become
involved quickly.

"I used to sing with Buddy. He was very brilliant. I remember one day, I was standing
around with a doctor and a nurse. They were talking about beautiful girls they had
known. I said, 'Personally, I was never told I was beautiful, except by one person.'

"The doctor was writing his orders. He looked up. He said, 'Who told you that you were
beautiful?'

"I said, 'The person who told me I was beautiful had had both eyes removed. Buddy! And
that was because we sang together.'"

Caption:

"I'm an enthusiastic person, I know it," says Sister Genevieve Sullivan, who gets up
every morning to watch the sun rise.