My father died when I was 9 and was buried in a Naval cemetery with honors. I remember that date because it was my 9th birthday. My sister Eileen held me.

That was in September of 1941.

Three months later, the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, where my oldest brother Bud was stationed. He was about to come home, but he was “regular Navy” and stayed to fight at sea for four years more.

Just before Christmas, my five other brothers, and six cousins all enlisted and went to sea with the Navy. That Christmas and the next four years I found myself in a world of women: my mother, my three sisters, my two aunts, and 30 or so Catholic nuns.

That spring I sat on the front porch waiting for Vmail to be delivered — to be delivered by a postman with one leg that he showed me and explained that he lost it under a train’s iron wheels. I never forgot that, even as I rode the boxcars that ran on the rails two blocks from our house to downtown at Christmas. True story.

Here, then, is the best part of this column about the women who kept me sane and happy for all those years.

I must not forget the “post women” during the war, who always hugged me.

First there were the nuns. By now you remember all of them. I only remember a few and this is the last time I list them.

Sisters Rosanna, Amilda, Mary Margaret and Boniface, who spent the war years in the big Gothic convent across the quiet street where I was born.

I handed them the clothespins so they could hang their garments. I was probably the only boy at the St. Mary and Joseph school up the street, who knew what the sisters wore under those black garments.

In the fall I helped them rake the leaves around the many saints’ statues that filled the gardens.

I also helped the old sister who was deaf, and who made the communion wafers and told me to say the Hail Mary in signs. That was my life.

Then there was Rosemary De Branco of the sweaters and pearls who taught me how to French kiss and make cookies in her mother’s kitchen.

As the years crawled by, there was Maria Gomez, daughter of a cigar maker, who complimented me on how well I French kissed.

I suddenly recall Maria Theresa, who taught French at Berlitz in Manhattan, taught me how to hold a cigarette like a Frenchman and, when drunk, told me about the Germans who murdered her grandparents at Auschwitz.

Yes, I had a few guy friends, but none like Jeanne Ball, Mary Martin’s understudy in “South Pacific.” We lived together in her apartment across from the Plaza Hotel for a year and danced in the hotel fountain.

I last saw Jeanne in a coffee shop on 48th Street, where she hugged me tightly and whispered in my ear that she had breast cancer.

Then there is the story you have long memorized of the redhead on the escalators at Bloomingdale’s Department Store who came into my life and built a wall around us that erased all the other women in a massive hug of love.

She, who was a dancer in a private nightclub that prohibited her from dating customers, gave me a closet and new pajamas and built a room in her heart where I lived for 65 years.

I know you’ve all memorized her and the others I’ve made famous for the ages. It’s what I do.

I tell you all about these women now because of one that has now entered my life and found a place to grow.

This column is dedicated to my two daughters, Dawn Marie Devine and Jillana Joly Devine-Knickel, and their mother, Katherine Joly Devine, but it is mostly a tribute to the great Kamala Devi Harris, who gave it a try. God bless her and all the Americans who stood with her against the forces of tyranny.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.