PART ONE...LIFE AMONG THE CATHOLICS

INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI. AD DEUM QUI LAETIFICAT JUVENTUTEM MEAM... 

I had a love-hate relationship with the nuns. You can supply your own joke about that. They were in kind of a mind control cult. Their job was to pull us into the same organization. I still love each and every one of them despite the hours I spent in tedium and fear.  They raised us.  We feared them but they had their tender moments too.  Once, Sister JM sang to a blushing little boy: "Can she bake a cherry pie Billy boy, Billy boy, can she bake a cherry pie charming Billy?"  For a few seconds I was somebody special.  My first crush.  Wouldn't you know I'd pick a nun!  Well at least you know she'd let me down easy.

No paper was written upon until you put the initials JMJ at the top.  It was a dedication—Jesus, Mary and Joseph—it meant you were working in honor of this holy trio.  Despite such lofty intentions, I was not a good student.  A child like me would today be the poster child for Attention Deficit Disorder.  In the 1950's I was a lazy kid who needed to be harassed and cajoled to stay on task.  Even at that it was easy to get over on my benefactors.  Sometimes.  There were so many distractions.  When I was younger it was a window, a tree—anything.  I daydreamed constantly.  I'd try to listen but soon I'd be noticing that if you looked at these desks right it would seem we were aligned in a formation to run a football play.  "Oh God, I think she just called on me to read and I'm not even sure what page we're on."  Later the distraction would be girls and those daydreams were, uh...er...more vivid.

The Church taught us to despise divorce and avoid those who had encountered such a fall from grace. My favorite aunt was divorced and I was torn between avoiding her and being with her. We called visitors "company" in those days. In my naiveté I had misunderstood the command about not "keeping company" with a divorced person. Tough situation for a 7 year old.

First Communion was the initiation into the Catholic Church.  Second grade—7 years old.  You had to come up with some sins to relate during your First Confession.  The hard part was fasting before the big event from the previous bedtime until after your communion service.  The cool part was amassing something around $4 in gifts from relatives.  Catholic belief insisted the little white wafer was actually the real body of Christ.  They later taught us the miracle was called Transubstantiation.

We wore these tiny cloth artifacts called scapulars around our necks.  If you died while wearing one you got the express lane to Heaven.  We fired off staccato like prayers and kept track of them with a set of beads called a Rosary.  You could gain certain heavenly advantages by doing this everyday for a month.  Every so often you went to Confession.  You knelt in a little closet and confessed your sins to the priest who sat behind a screen to insure privacy.  "Bless me father for I have sinned, my last confession was  blank blank ago.  These are my sins..."  He, of course, knew who you were and you just hoped he wouldn't listen to your list and interrupt you by screaming for all to hear: "YOU DID WHAT?  MY GOD YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!"  Just kidding.  They'd heard every boring list a million times.  They probably would have liked to hear from a flaming transvestite or two just to break up the monotony.  When I was very young I made up sins just to have something to confess.  Confession ended with the priest assigning a few prayers as penance and you were free to go sin some more—or did he say "Go and sin NO more?"

What little we heard about sex was something about a mystery reserved for married people. Good boys kept their minds off the subject. Apparently good girls weren't subject to such dangerous ideas. The priests said to keep our minds off these evil thoughts with a hobby. The problem for most of us was this train of thought was our hobby.  Playboy magazine was the holy grail and he who had one had a following.  We found our first ones while working in the big truck trailer during the annual paper drive.  Manna from heaven to starving travelers—we smuggled them out under our shirts—reminiscent of the saints we were taught about who smuggled scriptures behind the Iron Curtain.   If the sexual abuse of children by priests was going on in our area it would not have been talked about and victims would have kept quiet out of fear of being persecuted.  Likewise, gay meant happy but God help you if someone claimed you were a "Queer".  Gay people use the word lightly today but it had sinister and sometimes violent implications then.  So much for tolerance.

A priest blessed our throats on the Feast of St. Blaise. I was ten and had a serious sore throat. It wasn't cured but then I reasoned I wasn't the best of believers.  We were not allowed to even attend a wedding in a Protestant church.  Religious books were allowable only if they contained the "Nihil obstat" and "Imprimatur" to prove they had been approved by the censors.  Billy Graham was not to be watched on TV but Bishop Sheen was.  Casper The Friendly Ghost and Superman were frowned upon because of the theological implications of ghosts and people with almost supernatural power.  Finally one day a bishop came and we were confirmed with a slap and the admonition to "go in peace." We were full fledged Catholics.

My old school sketch

Funny, how you cannot remember the date of a defining moment in your life.  I was very young when I was introduced to the term eternity.  I was troubled.  I couldn't conceive of a world without end—and I could not fathom a world with an end either.  What was a little kid doing agonizing over such concepts?  Sunday nights, especially, became times of agony and uncertainty—and thought.   The halcyon days were numbered.  The unquestioned moral certainty given by God had a weakness in its foundation.  The simplicity of life was now tinged with a scariness I'd never known before.  Doubt and uncertainty arrived like the smell of burning leaves on a crisp October Saturday.  These were heady times.

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE NORTH WIND I love winter.  I always have.  Though currently a refugee of sorts in the Deep South, I long for the feel of icy air in my nostrils.  I want to be chilled by snow blowing in my face.  I want to ball my fingers up into a fist in fur lined gloves.  I can remember entering my father's bedroom on a winter morning.  He was a Wisconsin boy and once my mother would get up, he'd open the windows and it would be so cold you could see the condensation of your breath.  Of course, only the hallway had any kind of furnace so all of the rooms were a mite cold.  The photo was taken just a few years ago.  As kids we lived on Miami Ave and it was a winter wonderland as a kid.  I always read adventure books about the North Woods.  Minnesota, The Dakotas, Wisconsin and of course, Canada and Alaska—these places were the promised land.  I always had secret plans to run away to the North.

PART TWO...A BUS CAME BY AND I GOT ON

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." 

In school I soon fancied myself an athlete.  I was a star in my own mind.  No one else apparently shared my insight at evaluating talent.  I loved sports and spent hours and hours practicing on the playgrounds.  It was a great way to fill in the wide gaps in an adolescent's self esteem.  So were girls.  Girls were always the prize we longed for.  I dated a few girls and even engaged in what  kids called "going steady" back then.  I was almost faithful.  Sometimes.  I owe the girls I knew a heartfelt loving thanks.  They were part of the joy, and the uncertainty, of my youth.  Someone recently wrote in a song: "Any girl could have known me better."  I agree.

I worked summers in a few jobs.  I was a gardener on a wealthy estate in a nearby village.  They treated me like a special person—provided that person was a leper.  I worked hard—they had so much—I had so little and yet they sometimes tried to cheat me. "Oh, I'm sorry, you worked 25 hours this week—I'll make it up next week."   Weekends I was a caddy.  Now there is a dignified job.  Rule one.  Find out what brand and number ball (example: Titleist 1,  Top Flite 3 etc.) your clients are using.  The first chance you get reach in the bag and put a couple of these in your pocket.  Duffer will soon eventually sail one into the woods and this will certainly shorten the time it will take to "find" his lost ball.  I still remember caddying for Mr. X.  I doubt if he ever broke 120.  He was making his way up the ninth fairway and was already lying 8  or 9.  He looked like a hockey player ragging the puck up the ice—not unlike his putting technique.  He was still about a hundred yards away and he asked me which club I thought he should use.  Disgusted, I sarcastically said: "For you, a three wood."  X hit his only solid shot of the match and drove his ball well over the green, off the roof and into a crowd enjoying an outdoor lunch.  "Darn wind," I lamented.  I also worked for the state as an insect trapper.  I would put out traps for things like Japanese Beetles and then mark a map showing insect activity to direct spraying operations. 

The Sketch "Our Old House"  is of the house where I grew up.  It was a frame structure of about 750 Square feet (Today, my two car garage is almost 700 sq. ft.).  We had an oil furnace under a grid in the hallway.  When it was working you fired it up by pumping in fuel and dropping a piece of burning paper for ignition.  The grid was hot to step on barefooted.  There was no ductwork—heat radiated up and drifted through the house.  One summer we got a window air conditioner for what we called "the front room."  It sounded like a B-52 taking off but it was cooler than a fan.  There was a damp, low ceilinged basement.  An alley reached the back of the property.  Neighbors sometimes asked to use our telephone.  On the bright side, no one I knew had a key for their house or the need for one and neighbors did "rat you out" if they saw you misbehaving.  We swam in the nearby creek and played sport after sport in the narrow backyards and alleyways.  School was walking distance away.

I left for college armed with Roman Catholic teachings and a midwestern indoctrination in conservative politics.  Neither lasted very long.  There was a war on and my conservative background could not survive in the face of discovering the lies, hatreds and greed that had fueled the war.  This came on the heels of a political assassination that has never been explained and a viscious reaction to pleas for the most basic of civil rights.  The explanation for that was  far too clear.  Looking back I could see even the trusted ones of my past had taught me wrong.   Hate is never pretty—or comforting.  We heard "Nigger" this and "Nigger" that—there's a world in a word.  That revelation was like an earthquake.  We grew up in a culture where newspaper ads for jobs and dwellings carried the less inflammatory admonitions: "Colored" and "White."  Many of our mentors were rooting for the anti communist rebels in Hungary while later pulling for the viscious police dogs on both ends of the leash in the racist South.   To get along you had to go along.  It was as cowardly then as it is now.  It's said to be an even playing field these days.  That apparently means the prejudice has gone underground and the epithets have been replaced by code words.

College was good and bad.  There was tedium to be sure.  There was an urgency to life and it was difficult to see why we should labor in required courses having little relation to the world crisis we saw everywhere.  My majors were History and Political Science.  I would sometimes "cut" classes to attend Philosophy and Literature classes outside my major but taught by friendly professors.  If one of our classes meant something to us we generally received a good grade with work that seemed effortless.  It didn't feel like work when you were craving learning.  Some of us did not care for the paternalism of the educational establishment and its propensity to support societal norms without question.  Remember—this was the 60's and the Free Speech Movement led by Mario Savio was in full swing—but being opposed tooth and nail by reactionary elements.  Some students were generally apathetic but a small minority objected to being required to fight and pay for wars and activities we viewed as highly immoral.  We were awakened to the plight of people in our own country and around the world.  Most colleges and political leaders would have preferred we kept asleep or immersed ourselves in panty raids and fraternity fun.
 
I complained in print about college rules and leadership.  A lot of controversy "hit the fan" when I had a lengthy anti war article published in a local intellectual journal.  Some professors were highly supportive and appreciative.  A few were not, one going so far as to interrupt his class to criticize me.  One  Philosophy professor went out of his way to approach me in front of my family before graduation to say what a fine person I was and how much he appreciated my efforts on campus.  My parents didn't  understand what that meant to me or how much an honor I'd just received.  The two most respected professors on campus (one in the History Dep't., one in the Philosophy Dep't.)  wrote strong letters (Their words) of recommendation for me to graduate school.  Not everyone took the high road.  A friend who was a military veteran gave me a warning that a veterans get together had discussed my need for assassination.  True story.  I had some other feedback but it was all verbal and/or anonymous.   I was also selected to be a panel member for the annual campus wide Foreign Relations Day Debate.  It was a big deal.  The topic was South Africa and I was not a fan of Apartheid.

The Draft was always hanging over our heads.  I once considered the military (Marines, I was a signature away from the Platoon Leaders Class program).  I gave up all interest in the military after I learned the truth about the Vietnam War and other events in American history.  I would not go and I opposed anyone else going.  I did more than that when the occasion arose.  I had a draft deferment as a student and later as a teacher.  That was turned into a 1-A classification which later became meaningless because of a favorable draft lottery number.

My worst times in college were the semesters I ran out of money.  I lived for weeks on loaves of white bread.  Unfortunately that coincided with the time I had to pick up a credit in some sort of physical education.  The only class available at the right time was one called Conditioning.  It was taught by a football coach who simply put us through the most vigorous exercise imaginable.  I remember falling from dizziness while running the field house steps.  The best college time was the day I met the woman who would become my wife while we both crossed a street in the rain.  I've liked rain ever since.

ALL SCRIPTURE IS OF GOD...