Category: Stories

I was about as perfect a little Catholic boy as one could find anywhere.  I can say that now, in retrospect, although I had no awareness of this at the time.  I prayed fervently, took Communion on Sundays, and gave my coins to the Missions (in exchange for time off in Purgatory, I must confess).

In fifth grade I learned the Latin Mass by rote and became an altar boy.  Apparently even a star altar boy.  I say so because in that first year in this elite young male crew I was selected to be one of the four boys serving at the Easter Sunday Midnight Mass.  I was the only fifth grader on the altar with the older boys at one of the two most important and heavily attended masses of the year (the other being Christmas Midnight Mass).

I never felt closer to God than when serving on the altar in my altar boy garments: the black, floor-length cassock topped by the white surplice with the billowing sleeves.  They even had a distinctive smell redolent–to me at least–of the Holy.

I imagined becoming a priest, and even a pope.  The Church and its teachings had completely caught my imagination.

So much so that soon I experienced losing my mind.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit: Part I”

He was the scion of one of the wealthiest mercantile families in a small industrial city in the Middle West.  She was the daughter of the descendants of the Irish and German immigrants who had populated the city in the 19th century.  Both received their grammar school educations at St. Benedict Catholic School, 13 years apart.  He went East for his high school education in private schools.  She graduated from the local public high school.

He went on to Yale, where he graduated in 1924 with a degree in engineering and where he was elected to the Torch Society, which honored the 10 outstanding juniors for their achievements.  He was also an exceptional athlete, especially excelling in track and field events, while also playing the offensive end position on two undefeated Yale football teams in 1923 and 1924.  In the latter year he was named to the nation’s All-America football team and voted Yale’s best all-around athlete.

She studied at the local state college for one semester, majoring in English, before dropping out during the Great Depression to work in order to help her large family.  She had wanted to be a writer, and in fact had written a novel during grammar school.

He was handsome and gifted and a sportsman.  She was beautiful and multi-talented and a sportswoman.  He was Anton Hulman, Jr.  She was my mother-to-be, Dorothy Cleary. Continue reading “Affection Harvested in Autumn”

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, sunny and warm, when I reached my faculty office at 7:45 to complete preparations for my first lecture of the new semester.  As always, I was excited for a new year of teaching:  who would my students be, how would they surprise and inform me, how would my teaching evolve as I learned their personalities and levels of engagement.  Having introduced the course and myself to the class at our first meeting a few days earlier, I felt ready for my initial lecture at 9:30 that morning.

It was September 11, 2001, and I was in Boston.  Less than five miles away, planes were leaving Boston Logan International Airport on their routine schedules, many of them heading as usual to New York City.  As they lifted off the runway, these planes would fly low over my son’s new school, where he was in his first week as a high school freshman.

Classical music played on the radio as I focused on reviewing and making small changes to my lecture notes.  I became only vaguely aware at some point that the music had stopped, and that some news–of a crash or an explosion somewhere?–was being reported.  I worked on. Continue reading ““Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom”