CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A Catholic Point of View

....so I went among the black robes, and my life was changed forever.

Being one of those who eventually took Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University to heart, I was soon into my education and the University all the way with all my heart. In it for the knowledge and not for the dollar, I took to my education like a dog to a bone. I savored knowledge like an exquisite apple.

Knowledge is power, I believed, so I wanted to figure everything out. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to have an answer for everything. Quickly, like a poison, knowledge began to roil and torment my days and nights, and I became a deadly serious student. I became an unmitigated bore. I was one of those who was always asking why, asking why about the most unanswerable questions. Why do we hurt one another? Why can’t we all love one another? Why does God permit evil? Why must we have war? Where’s hell, really? Why can’t mankind live in peace? In short, I got the most and the best out of my education that my mind was capable of, and, so, my education changed me. I let it alter me forever and completely, for good and for ill. But the more you know, the less you know, if you know what I mean.

Sometimes, when I was in real pain with the quandaries and ambiguities I discovered with my education, I was one of the those who dreamed that when I died, I’d know everything. All my questions would be answered in the afterlife, I hoped. So, maybe, a little, I hoped to die.

My first memory of a college class, without consulting my transcripts, is of being in a Survey of English Literature course, in a dilapidated, long, thin room of the oldest building on campus, and I’m sitting to the back of the room, to the professor’s left. Many years later, I’ll be a janitor in this very same building. The chairs with their small desk arms are dilapidated and these chair arms are full of deeply grooved graffiti. We’re studying the cavalier poets who were influenced by John Donne, the first poet to impress me as I commenced my education, and I’m digging them; they not only write poetry, they’re sword fighters. I was a Romantic and would remain a Romantic for much of my life.

However, my memory is playing tricks on me again. When I get out my transcripts, I see the English Lit. survey course doesn’t come until the first semester of my sophomore year. Instead, my first semester in college includes Russian, general physics, debate, history of civilization, logic and English composition. Memory triggered by transcripts, I now recall the standard oversize history textbook with pictures of the chariots of the Scythians, the Medes and the Persians and the Ziggurat temples of Hammurapi. This is my first encounter with these exotic names and peoples.

I remember a comparative essay for comp class which contrasts the timorous driving of the woman driver with the aggressive driving of the male, a descriptive essay in which I compare the aftermath of a Thanksgiving turkey dinner to a battlefield, the breached walls of the mashed potato fortress and the shell casings of green beans lying about, the red cranberries like bloody cannonballs.

Aha! Here comes the syllogism in logic class! Ah, yes—the fallacy of the “undistributed middle”. I’m in a huge lecture hall, now, and watching a ball roll down an incline and I don’t quite understand the magic by which a ball rolling down an incline gets turned by the prof. into mathematical formulas about gravity and mph and Newtonian ideas about things at rest and in motion. The speech teacher is one of those people born with a huge birthmark on her face, even larger and more pronounced than Gorbachev’s forehead birthmark. I get an “A” for speaking in public.

I joke to my friends that I’m taking Russian so I can be the first to collaborate when the Russians take over America. Brother Edwards (?) who teaches the class is only a few pages ahead of us. He’s been thrown into the breach. He’s learning Russian just ahead of the class. It’s the early days after Sputnik, and America needs Russian speaking people to man fortress America’s foreign language shortfalls. Russian becomes a course in vocabulary. For two years our tests are mostly vocabulary tests. I tease stepbrother Dale that the Russian word for brother is brat, with a long “a”.

Brother Edwards gets an early morning, commercial TV show to teach Russian. He invites his students onto the show to discuss things Russian. I go on and receive my first, fleeting 15 minutes of local fame. That particular show is about Russian culture, and we play music as part of that.

“There’s something about Russian culture and pop music that reminds me of America in the Twenties and Thirties,” I wisely inform the audience, proud of my telling observation of backward Russian culture, yet, later, as my sophistication in literature and culture increases, I tell people that I think Russian writers are America’s soul mates. I read Tolstoy, Gorky and Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Pasternak, and I hear in them American or at least European voices.

The second semester is pretty much like the first, only now I take Intro. to Psych., and I discover that I’m thoroughly ridden with mental illness (who doesn’t), but I also discover Freud and later read his stylish essays. He wrote beautifully and convincingly. It’s the first time I truly understand that the human animal has an unconscious which is responsible for a lot of behavior he doesn’t control or understand. I understand and accept the concept immediately. Big doors swing open in my understanding which have never shut again, triggered by my first encounter with the ideas of psychology. Soon I discover Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders which goes right along with what I’m learning from Freud and psychology. Of course I learn about the ever popular “Oedipal complex” which I see I have in spades. I read Freud’s small book, The Ego and the Id, and, years later, remember that he was talking in one place, in that book, about the body’s wanting to die at the molecular level and to cease the exhausting struggle of holding the self in existence. Is that really in his book? I don’t know, but, later, I use the idea to explain to myself my own suicidal feelings.

I was reading Freud’s small book at about the same time I came across the idea of sleep therapy and I wished I could just collapse and go into a mental hospital and sleep for three solid days and nights. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I understood psychology with a lot more ease than many of my other early courses. In the psych text, I found a way to translate my military intake tests into my IQ, which I didn’t know. It told me my IQ was around 127. No genius, damn it, but passable. Yet, I longed to be a genius so I could more easily understand the damn courses I was taking. I wanted to know everything, EVERYTHING! For years, I used my above average IQ as yet one more way to belittle myself and doubt my abilities.

My first year ended in a dead heat with a middle-B average. I was taking 6 courses each semester. Later, I learned to ease back on the number of courses I took. Working and going to school was hard to do, but I held my own, though I wasn’t spectacular. Later (now) I felt cheated by the fact I couldn’t afford to just to go to school and even more that the school hadn’t been Harvard. I don’t think I wanted to go to Harvard for the prestige in its name, but I did want to attend Harvard because of the brilliance I would be allowed to bask in and learn from. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to know many bright people, and I’ve always enjoyed their company.

In that first year at UD, I met Joe and David, my good college friends. They also were getting a late start in college. I think, like me, Joe came out of the military. Joe teaches at Drake University now, in Des Moines, Iowa, (unless he’s retired), and David is an executive with one of the three major weekly news magazines. We three were older than our fellow students and married too: David to Monica and Joe to Nancy. Joe, Nancy, Bev and I got divorced, but David and Monica are still together.

We three met in history courses. History was Joe’s major and David’s and my minor. We became great good buddies. We played golf together, the only time I played golf on a regular basis, but our chief game was Risk. That’s right, Risk! We three got together, spouses in tow, many friday nights and drank wine (got soused really) and played that game with all the seriousness of real generals while our wives sat around and talked about the children. Sometimes all of us, wives too, played Charades. Charades was the rage in those days.

David and Monica were born and bred in Ohio, in the Xenia area, and they were childhood sweethearts, even as far back as grade school. In high school, David played basketball and Monica was a cheerleader. Dave came from the wrong side of the tracks, his dad a drinker, while Monica’s folks were well off, but Monica saw all of David’s potential in his mother. She loved Dave’s mother.

When we first met, they were, as the cliché goes, poor as church mice,. Monica sewed and made clothes, and canned and I don’t know what all to make ends meet. After college, they tried to start a greenhouse business at one time, and David sold cigarettes for a major company for awhile. He was selling cigarettes in Dayton’s black neighborhoods right in the middle of the riot years. Financially, they struggled for a long time, but they both knew how to laugh, how to not take themselves too seriously. They were resilient people. Writing this when I haven’t talked to them in such a long period of time makes me miss them very much. Of course, when I see them again, I fear we’ll seem so ancient to each other that we won’t be able to recall the old magic. I’m planning a victory lap around the United States in the Spring now that I’m retired, and I’ll try to call on them on my way.

Both are very bright and Monica offered one of the most clear-eyed statements I’ve ever heard about vanity. We were discussing having to wear glasses all our lives. I started when I was 12 or younger. Her too. “Well,” she said, “I guess curiosity won out over vanity. I was always too interested in what was going on to go without my glasses.”

Among other things, Monica writes. She earns a small yearly income, writing about gardens and gardening. Her’s is a fascinating story. David and I used to sit around and gab about how we’d write the great American novels. She listened to us shoot the shit about it for years. Eventually, she took an $89 writing course and began to write. She told us that she got so tired of hearing David and me procrastinate about writing for a living that she thought she’d show us how. There was one hitch. She and David had eight kids. A ninth came along while Monica was in her mid-forties, and that baby was a Down’s Syndrome child, as Monica, always positive, says, “a blessing”. Anyhow....

Because of all those kids to take care of and the responsibilities of motherhood, Monica could only give her writing an hour each day around noon, but she was very disciplined about her writing. She told the older kids to take care of the younger (when school wasn’t in session), and she’d march into this little room off the kitchen and pull the door shut behind her and go at it. It was, I believe, more like a closet than a room. She said, when she first began pounding the keys, writing was so painful she had to force herself to write. It was agony, she said, but after years of locking herself away in the small room to write for an hour every afternoon, she said a magical transformation took place. After awhile, she didn’t feel whole or complete when she missed her hour of creating.

Taking a cue from her expensive writing course, Monica learned to look for things that interested her near to hand to write about. Her first sale was a character piece about a blind local priest she admired. Soon she sold a few gardening pieces and, then, she began writing a garden column for local newspapers in the Quad-Cities area of Iowa where they lived by that time. That’s where I last visited them. They kept cows in the mean winters there and had tales galore to tell about those times, just like the times in Ohio they tried to make a go of the greenhouse. They found mirth everywhere they looked. It was a joy to know them. Anne Tyler, a novelist I love, writes about people like David, Monica and their family.

Now they’re in Florida, and I haven’t seen them face to face in decades. Monica has published several collections of her newspaper columns. The last time I talked to her about writing, she said her writing earned about what a full time job at minimum wage would bring in. I believe Monica’s a respected horticulturist with the gardening crowd who has, on occasion, cultivated and observed plant species for various gardening magazines through the years. My fear is that I’ll over- or understate her expertise. She’s always been so honest and unassuming that I’d hate to embarrass her with bullshit.

David’s income, I imagine, is in six figures. I’ve known several financially successful men in my life but have never known how to do it for myself. My lack of success is awfully puzzling to this Nobody with my IQ and early competitiveness, and, sometimes, my musing leads to yet one more mild depression. I return to the thought that my failures are genetic and constitutional. Some days I clearly realize that all my life I’ve been hypersensitive and hyper vigilant and argumentative too. My own worst enemy, I live almost always with anxiety and draw few breaths free of fear and dread. I think that’s why I always remember fondly the image of Oscar Levant, trembling on the TV stage. I’m even tense when I don’t know I’m tense. Only rarely, when I experience a moment of deep calm, do I realize I’ve been tense and in pain for days and weeks.

But, hey, when I was younger, I recall many good days too, and my time at U. of D. was balmy in comparison to what was to come. I say they were okay, yet I clearly recall an afternoon at Savino’s, early in my intellectual days, when my mind and my fears were running rampant....

I go into the bathroom and find myself staring into the mirror, into my eyes. I was really hurting, and I tell myself that I’m feeling like I think Jesus must have felt as he was struggling against the ignorance of those “who know not what they do”. It’s during the days when Goldwater’s running for office and still in America’s days of nuclear fear, the days of “Dr. Strangelove”. I feared Goldwater’s philosophy of “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”, and I called him fool’s gold. I had the atomic symbols “au h2o” with the words “fool’s gold” beside them as a homemade sign in my car window. Now we’ve got a burning Bush who practices Goldwater’s philosophy without Barry’s intelligence. Anyhow, I’m staring into the mirror, then I chuckle to myself for having the audacity to imagine I’m Jesus and that I’m feeling his pain, but my pain before the mirror is real and hurtful, messianic or not. Looking into the mirror in those days reminded me frequently of Narcissus, and soon, I’d be accusing myself of the neuroticism of narcissism. My passion for self-abuse was nearly endless.

I recall less about Joe. We weren’t as close as Dave and I were. Joe went on to Ohio State to major in Far Eastern and Russian history and, eventually, took a trip to Russia, right after he got his master’s. He was debriefed by our government after his return. Soon after he got his degree, he divorced Nancy, and I didn’t think well of him for a time. Now, with my own three divorces, I’m no one to talk. I went on to fail at graduate school at Southern Illinois University while David, with all his responsibilities, went into the working world where he has been a huge success.

During my first two years at the U of D, the term, “the masses”, entered vocabulary. I don’t know how it entered my vocabulary, but it did—maybe when I read the “Communist Manifesto”. What began as a sense of camaraderie with my fellow workers soon degenerated into a term of abuse. How the term slipped from friendship to the other, I don’t know, but I would generalize unmercifully about “the masses”, both positively and negatively. I knew everything there was to know about the poor benighted and stupid “masses”. I don’t think I was alone in it. All of us seemed to know a lot about our laboring brothers in the struggle for “the masses” place in the world.

Our American history text was Commager and Morison’s, Growth of the American Republic. Many years later, I came across a complaint about that text because, the critic said, Morison who also wrote the official 15 volume naval history of the Second World War gave the Navy way too big a place in winning the war. I do recall, very vaguely, that the Pacific campaigns in that text seem bigger in my memory than the war in Europe. But who knows? That also might be the result of my reading all those WWII histories of the Marine Corp in high school. And then there was the television magnum opus “Victory At Sea” that impressed me so very much.

I vaguely remember my encounter with General Sociology too and groping to understand the science of social relations. That would be in the first semester of my sophomore year. By then I was in full bloom of my sophomoric ideas, but, isn’t that normal if you are getting out of college what you should be getting out of it? A sophomore should be burning with the flame of new ideas. He should be idealistic and romantic. One definition of education is a change in behavior, and I can guarantee that I was being changed.

I remember very little about epistemology and general metaphysics which came along in those first two years. I took those courses, plus logic, philosophy of psychology (phil psych, as we called it), natural theology and ethics at UD. I can say impressively that I hold a BA in English, with minors in philosophy and history, besides my MA in English and my MFA in Creative Writing. However, my philosophy minor is tainted. Because I wasn’t Catholic, the university couldn’t require me to take the religion courses they required of their Catholic students, but they could force me to take a philosophy minor which was based almost entirely on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Eventually, I had to learn about existentialism on my own. I may have mentioned in another place that my courses in Thomistic philosophy taught me how to debate anything with cutting rationalizations. The skill cost me more than one marriage. You can very easily win a battle in marriage and lose the war. Later, I was to learn that those courses laid the groundwork for my eventual understanding that human reason is an elaborate scheme for rationalizing selfish and instinctual behavior by the individual.

Recently, I came across an experiment, in Steven Pinker’s book, Blank Slate, which is even more revealing about the charade we human animals call reason. Some people suffer from seizures so severe and frequent that no medicine can control them. Some of these find relief when their corpus callosum is surgically severed, effectively separating their brain’s left hemisphere from the right. These people immediately have two selves in one body, each with a will of its own.

In experiments with these unfortunate subjects, a request is flashed to the right brain to get up from the chair and walk. The left brain, which has no idea why it got up and walked, is then asked why it did what it did. The left brain will opine, “To get a Coke,” making up a reason rather than being honest. Honest responses could be, “I don’t know,” or “You guys have been experimenting with me for some time, and I often find myself doing things for which I have no explanation.” Instead of speaking honestly, the left brain consistently attempts to make up reasons for its behavior. Pinker calls the left brain a “baloney generator” or “spin doctor”. So, when I argue with my political opposites these days, I do realize our arguments are exercises in dominance and aggression rather than attempts to change each other with good reasons.

I recall one poor brother who went bonkers, teaching one of my Thomistic philosophy courses. It was probably natural theology because St. Thomas’s five proofs for the existence of god were part of it. Anyhow, I and a couple of other students debated the hell out of him, questioning every proof. Even though I didn’t yet have a firm grip on the difference between inductive and deductive thinking, I was learning enough to see how most deductive reasoning is based firmly in empty space. Pinker’s information gives me further reason for my beliefs and fears.

Toward the end of that course, brother brought in and read a medieval tract by a peasant who adopted the voice of god and pontificated about man’s existence. The Marianist was so moved reading to us from this tract that he began crying. The peasant’s ranting seemed pretty silly to me. That summer, following the course, brother cracked up and couldn’t return to teaching. I always prided myself, imagining that I had something to do with his crack up. I imagined I was that powerful.

The theories of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin came my way at this time too, and I tried to read one of his several books, but he was too obtuse for me. Paleontologist and biologist as well as Jesuit, he attempted to reconcile evolution with Bible truths. His books were banned by the Catholic Church, and, since he was a Jesuit, he obeyed their commandment that he should not publish his books in his lifetime. He got around them by giving his work to friends to publish after he was deceased.

What most intrigued me about Chardin’s concepts was his idea that spirit was evolving into the world and that people would eventually be born without bodies, that spirit would inherit and live on the earth. His concept was a fun thing to imagine. I liked it; it had its feet in global mud. Chardin extensively interpreted Bible passages as referring to scientific concepts. Unfortunately, his work eventually became yet another example by which I came to understand that when it comes to Bible interpretation, any kind of literary interpretation, really any kind, goes. With rationality, you can bend ideas to fit just about any thesis you want them to. Almost all reason is fiction and mythology. For much of my life I got lost in the figments of my reasonable imagination. It was pretty scary. Only inductive reason and scientific experimentation and replication of experiments tie the mind by a firm anchor to the sensual world.

I should mention two more courses the University couldn’t force on me: Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC or Rotcee, as it was called) and gym. My previous service exempted me from those courses, so I could take more meat than some of my fellow students.


University of Dayton was smaller than it is now. Our student union was a cozy annex off a hallway between two large buildings. In fact, I think our tiny cafeteria was called “The Annex”. The Annex and hallway were packed with students in the winter. I recall lots of lively discussion in The Annex, and, later, at other universities, the coffee shop became more important than the classroom in my education.

I had an interesting sexual encounter during these early days. In those few buildings that made up the University of Dayton in the early 60’s, you could find empty rooms to study in. One day, I just happened to go into a study room with two long tables in it. It was much smaller than a classroom, and I sat down at one of the tables and began to study. A young woman sat at the other table, facing me. I was probably drawn into the room by the sight of this girl, but I also had to study. However, I soon noticed that the girl’s legs were spread, and I could see her panties.

Yes, I got me the old “beaver shot” as it was called. After a time, she began to flap her legs open and closed, and I swear I could smell the hot wet smell of her crotch. I imagined she was turning herself on by squeezing the lips of her vagina between her thighs. Something about the way she dressed and looked made me think she was a vulnerable Catholic woman, demur, eyes ever lowered in humility, but horny as hell, waiting for a real man to ravish her. She suggested that old cliché: still water runs deep.

I could barely concentrate on the book open before me on the table. I was frozen in place. I tried to talk myself into approaching her. She remained quite a long time before leaving. I returned many days at the same time, and for awhile, she also showed up and took her seat opposite me, or I’d show up and take my seat opposite her. She gave me lot’s of beaver shots. I swear she knew what she was doing, but I couldn’t make myself follow up in any way. I never even spoke to her, nor her to me. Our eyes never met. Then it ended, and I can’t recall why. Maybe a new semester and different schedules?

As I prepared for midterms the second semester of my sophomore year, our first son was born in March of 1962. Beverly really wanted that child. She surprised me one night after an evening out of eating, drinking and dancing. She had a few more drinks than usual. She was drunk to tell the truth, and when I lay her down on our bed and began to undress her for screwing (she wore that beautiful black dress that hugged her hips), she moaned, “I want a baby. Give me a baby.”

Not long after that night, we conceived. Beverly showed so little, and she was so shy that we didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant until her sixth month. Throughout Bev’s pregnancy, we employed an old Italian remedy to combat stretch marks. Every night, I rubbed in a thick coat of olive oil. That alone kept our sex life alive, and she never got stretch marks.

Beverly was several weeks late in delivery. She had several false starts. We fed her malts laced with castor oil and drove her over bumpy roads trying to dislodge Sean. None of that worked. He came when he was ready to come.

I was studying Chaucer in original middle-English in the waiting room when Sean was born. In those days men weren’t allowed in the delivery room so I stayed with Bev in the labor room until they took her away to deliver, and I went out to read Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”.

When Sean was finally born, I went upstairs to see him lying bloody in the hospital bassinet. Beverly came from an almost all girl family and I came from an almost all boy family. I stared down at the purplish bloody twisted creature, and my words to him were exultant: “We won!”