Letter to Mike June 1971

Editor’s notes are in brackets [], original parentheses are as is ()

After an awkward graduation ceremony in South Bend in June of 1969, Dad returned home to Reno with his parents and younger sister Trish, then 9. Dad and his family were invited to a professor’s house off campus to celebrate. Grandpa Carl asked dad if he should wear a tie. Dad told him it wasn’t necessary. Every other man there wore a tie. Fury ensued. Photos of my dad at graduation lack a smile.

In the summer of 1969 Dad was to stay at home, preparing to be an English teacher at an all-girls Catholic school in California (I forget its name) and being paid to watch his sister. He graduated with a history major but after encountering O’Malley had the equivalent of an English major (there were no minors or second majors back then).

At some point, I’m not sure how long into the summer, dad got angry and took off and left his parents high and dry with their daughter. I imagine he dealt 21 at Harrah’s on Lake Tahoe, not too far from their home in Reno. I suspect that my dad was not a very attentive babysitter.

The next year I believe that dad lived in a basement studio apartment, prayed and read a lot, and saved money to pursue an English graduate degree at Trinity College in Dublin which O’Malley had recommended. I have not heard of him dating then or as an undergraduate.

During the 1969-1970 he taught the Aeneid to, I think, 9^th graders in English. One of his students became a family friend and she told me that at one point one of the girls read the word for torch, brazier, as brasier, a bra. Dad went deep red and continued the lesson.

I believe that Dad dealt 21 in the summer of 1970 at Harrah’s again, saving up to study in Ireland. In the fall he left for Dublin. He arrived a few weeks early and met a young American woman who intended to buy a restaurant in Norway. The two of them met up with a whiskey deliveryman and spent three weeks touring around Ireland and consuming a fair amount of whiskey. Dad hated Guinness.

Dad felt that Trinity was a joke and left early, perhaps not even finishing a term. His new American friend invited him to Norway. He kept up a correspondence with her for a year. He returned to Lake Tahoe and dealt 21 again. The overnight shift was the most lucrative and I believe my dad always did that.

At some point, perhaps in January 1971, dad applied to the Dominicans of the California Province with a novitiate in Berkley, I believe. Before he was accepted he replied to a letter of his undergraduate classmate, Mike H, who was either was pursuing a master’s degree at the Harvard Divinity School or had just finished in June 1971. He typed the letter below.

                                                                                                Friday evening

                                                                                                [20 June 71]

Mike,

Listening to Judy Collins [Tapestry?- one of my parents’ favorite albums, released in February of 1971] and realized that I have owed you a letter for some time now. I delayed writing back immediately because my mind was in. state of turmoil about the Dominican decision and because I thought that your letter lacked a necessary trust, which on rereading has no objective correlative [a term of T. S. Eliot’s] whatever. I suppose I was more anxious about my ambivalence than I was willing to admit.

At first, there was an overpowering certainty which I uncharacteristically trusted, then gnawing doubts about motives and timing. It is a great risk really, in such times as these and the initial reaction from everyone I knew was either outrightly hostile or skeptical. I hadn’t realized either how much more difficult that would make it all. I am sure that the situation at home (now more or less resolved after a series of visits and letters) had much to do with my going through with the application [Grandpa Carl thought that if Dad made it to ND he should be pursuing a lucrative career like law- Grandpa only accepted his career path when he was a widower and in Little Sisters of the Poor Home in St. Paul and another resident, a bishop, told Grandpa about the enormous impact dad was having on the Church], but that in itself is not a problem. It is my obsession with God which I sometimes distrust. I have tried to run from it, in every way I thought possible, but it never works. I felt naked and alone after those problems at home. I had nowhere to go and knew that there was no hope in running further. My decision to apply to the Dominicans was not prompted by a search for another home. I a resigned to being without one, and it certainly was not to pursue an ascetic perfectionism. I could have done that (and was much more likely to do so) outside a religious order. I think I need a certain milieu, expressly and intensely Christian (human) and I think that the Dominicans offer that possibility for growth. I trust less and less my elitist tendencies and living a life in common should aid in dispelling that. I have no illusions of becoming a “community man.” It would be false on my part and besides it would never work. (again besides I think it is sometimes a form of idolatry, as Bonhoeffer says).

As regards S.’s comments on Saint Albert’s [the Dominican house]… some of what he says is undoubtedly true, but most of what he says on the whole question of GTU [Graduate Theological Union] seems to me incredibly superficial. As if plunging into the whole system were necessary for genuine involvement. The Dominicans were the first to be involved there. The Jesuit and Franciscan involvements have proved less happy ones on the whole. They have lost all sense of community and identity as religious, and seem, for the most part to have abandoned any traditional Catholic viewpoint as “irrelevant” in the new Christian consciousness. That extraordinary naivete is hardly liberated, in fact the contrary seems to be true.

The Dominicans send all their men to GTU for theology but maintain their sense of community at Saint Albert’s and the house of studies at Berkeley. The Franciscans have apartments, and in the process have lost much (including 24 of 27 of their original group there). I can’t say if the Dominican concept is the superior one, but from my point of view it is more acceptable.

It is now Saturday evening. I was late for work last night so had to stop. The day has been leisurely…got off at 6:00 [AM], after working an hour overtime. I had thought for a while that it might be more. The people would not leave last night, but I got hot and broke everything so that I had few people toward the end. Dealing 21 can really be a hassle if you get obnoxious and or drunken people at your table which more often than not happens to me. I generally work a 9-5 shift [overnight], but get off around 4:15-4:30 except weekends when there is no way to get rid of tourists before daybreak. It was hard for me at first to get used to working at night and sleeping during the day, but am beginning to enjoy it now except that daily mass is almost impossible. I spent the afternoon reading Anais Nin’s diary and basking in the sun by the river (D. H. Lawrence would have approved). Then, Mass this evening with a groveling Indian missionary, loaded with platitudes and cliches (I honestly think style important and centrally revealing). I had two days off last week so I now have a stretch of eleven days without one. I really need more than that.

I should hear from the Dominicans soon on my application. I have not yet been accepted. With all my doubts and uncertainties, I find myself realizing, like the old man in Viper’s Tangle, that it is in my most lucid moments that I believe.

Summer plans are indefinite now. I may sell my car shortly which would mean borrowing my parents’ if they were amenable. Also a friend of mine [Sr. Mary N, OP, dad’s teacher at Manogue Catholic High School in Reno, who had fallen in love with my dad- it was always Platonic] is coming to the States from Strasbourg where she is working on her doctorate in theology and I am most anxious to see her. I feel closer to her than to anyone I think. She may need a ride to New York to catch a plane and that may be a further inducement. I would very much like to see you and to be able to talk to you- how good that would be. I hear occasionally from Kevin [an ND classmate] and miss him often. Surely the Midwest is calling. Even to see Notre Dame again. I will let you know when things are somewhat more clear.

Do write when the urge seizes, but don’t be overly passive in awaiting it.

Don