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Record W295198679

Blessed Are the Pure in Heart: A Memoir of Bertha Hansford

2004· article· en· W295198679 on OpenAlexvenueaboutno aff
Alana Montgomerie

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian ethnic studies · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCanadian Identity and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPrayerArtPietyTheologySacrificeAltarSoulIncenseSermonReverencePurgatoryReligious studiesArt historyLiteraturePhilosophy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Grandma Hansford was short, built close to the ground to better withstand the impact of life. There was a stain on Grandma Hansford's soul. The stain was only small, it's true, but because of her goodness, it was all the more apparent. On the bureau in her bedroom was an altar to Christ and to his holy Mother, the Virgin Mary. Prayer cards collected from the churches she visited whenever she traveled, votive candles, rosary beads, and framed photos of the loved ones she'd promised to pray for covered the surface. Here she attended to both morning and evening prayers. These daily prayers fortified the centerpiece of her faith; the weekly mass at St Casimir's Church, the spiritual home of Toronto's Polish Catholics, where reverence and incense filled the air and the stained glass saints watched for any sign of inadequate piety among the parishioners. Grandma Hansford came here to mass and often dropped in to light a candle or say a prayer for the dead. She felt the judgement of the saints, the rebuke of the plaster Christ at all thirteen Stations of the Cross, for he showed that suffering and sacrifice are requisite in those who really do love the Lord. She felt, too, the condemnation of her fellow parishioners, who knew for sure that she didn't really belong there. They suffered her presence, though, out of charity. After all, God was merciful. Even if she was condemned to hell or to purgatory, God would not strike her down here if she dropped in for communion, or to pray, or to offer up her confession to the priest. She was tolerated. She was clearly a sinner in the eyes of the church, for she did not hold to the sacrament of marriage, In fact, she had married twice and went on to live in sin with yet a third man. Grandma Hansford called her first husband the Polak. He was forty when she married him and she was just sixteen+ He was killed, an innocent bystander in a foiled bank robbery, when she was still a girl and the mother of a baby boy. Grandma Hansford stood by the rule that one did not speak ill of the dead, but somehow, when she called Zdancewicz the Old Polak, you knew that it was not a marriage made in heaven. Her second marriage, to a big Lithuanian named Snesky, started well but ended badly. Grandma's mother took over the rearing of the son from the marriage to the Old Polak, and Grandma herself entered into a marriage that produced two more children in three years. Everything went well in Grandma's telling until Snesky got a job as a waiter in a beer parlor. There, tempted by the ubiquitous amber liquid, he descended into alcoholism. She tried to stick by him like a good Catholic wife, but when Snesky pulled out a patch of their little girl's scalp during a drunken rage, Grandma broke her vow to stay with him in sickness and in health. She dressed the children, took their clothes and toys, and moved back to her mother's house. She never so much as spoke to Snesky again, preferring to raise the children on her own, working first as a seamstress and then in a small drycleaning shop on Keele Street. The parishioners at St. Casimir's were not fond of women who didn't keep their marriage vows. They thought a woman who didn't respect her own vows might not respect the vows of other couples. The women at mass looked at her with what might be described as a firm look. They were sure of their place in the community and in the church. If Grandma wanted to be accepted, then her behavior must pass the women's scrutiny. So said their steely gaze, so said their curt nod, so said their thin lipped acknowledgement of her greetings Dobryg Den, Pani. The men did not look at her directly, except when their wives weren't looking. Then they flashed quick smiles, all glowing eyes and teeth. They understood, the smiles said. It was hard to be without a husband, a husband to bring home a paycheque, to discipline the children, to fix things, a husband to warm the bed. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.631
Threshold uncertainty score0.511

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.092
GPT teacher head0.337
Teacher spread0.245 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2004
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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