Losing Faith
So I used to spit green beans into my napkin and pass it quietly under the table to my grandpa. It was a tough handoff because my grandparents’ kitchen table was round and Henry would usually sit to my left, and like most right-handed kids I had a weak left hand so sometimes I would just side arm the squishy paper ball right toward gramps’ polyester pants. ‘Why are you leaning over into your plate like that,’ grandma would say, my head practically sideways on the plate in order to ensure a safe toss. Gramps would stuff it in his pants I think, which was gross and probably uncomfortable now that I think about it all these years later, but it saved me from grandma. June wouldn’t let me chow the French bread and butter until I finished off the green beans and carrots. One time when I was six grandma caught us passing the napkin. ‘I know what you’re doing – hand it over,’ she said sternly. ‘Rose, it’s not his fault – he had a bowl of corn for lunch when we were watching the Sox. He’s full from vegetables.’ When my grandpa was trying to ‘win over’ grandma he’d call her Rose Honey’. For awhile I thought her name was Rose Honey. I always liked hearing it because he would smile when he said it and tilt his head in a funny way.
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This was in 1978, the same summer I peed off Heather Hughes’ picnic table in broad daylight. I didn’t see a problem with it. I was 6 years old and that’s what one does at that age. Heather was basically one of the guys. She and I would bicycle on our Huffys over to Bobby’s house and then ride through these big sand hills in the backwoods near our home in Connecticut.
In the end of summer for awhile my parents would take us up to Cape Cod for a week. Grandma and grandpa were there and we’d drive by these big sand dunes on the way to Provincetown. They seemed like mountains then.
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Eventually I grew up and in 1989 I drove all the way up through the hills of northern Connecticut to Case Street in Granby to ask Heather’s younger sister Shelly to the junior prom. I was so nervous. She said yes. But then I forgot to look behind me backing up and knocked over their basketball hoop. Mr. Hughes never let me hear the end of that one; it was one thing I was taking his youngest daughter to prom. They never did replace the basket and all that was left was a paved square with a hoop resting on the ground.
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By 1991, I was in college and picked my 4th choice, Bryant, the same school where ‘Coach’ from Cheers went and at the time where the New England Patriots practiced football. I went on spring break with friends to the Cancun Clipper Club, one of them this girl Jen Marron. I didn’t really know Jen all that well but I would soon realize why we were on the same trip.
I lived with my Italian grandmother, ‘Millie’, for a short time after college down in Fairlawn New Jersey. Born in the mountains near Napoli, Millie had lived this great life but by the time she and I shared a flat above my relatives, her Alzheimer’s was entering the middle innings. Millie sang old Sinatra tunes while I pressed my shirts for work and she chuckled every time the steam came out of the iron, as though it was new sound to her each time. Her memory may have been waning, but her smile and laugh had not.
In 1998, I left my Big Apple job and went to visit Jen’s college roommate in Boston and instead was taken by this girl with long hair, a big smile, and a voice like an angel. She was Jen’s best friend from grade school and she told me how she was a reporter like me but was going back to school to, get this, study pastoral ministry. It was odd, I’ll give you that, but sort of cool the way she talked about it.
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By 2000, her Uncle Mike was giving the homily at our wedding. Uncle Mike is a Jesuit priest you see, having studied in places like Japan, Iraq, and Australia. He amazes me as much as anyone in the world. 80 something years old, still has coffee ice cream most nights, has battled prostate cancer and heart conditions and yet carries on to this day teaching 18 year olds the politics of foreign governments at Gonzaga University. To his students, he’s Father Connolly. To those at our wedding, a Priest, but to my kids and to me, he’s Uncle Mike—the guy who likes ice cream, the Red Sox and a good debate. My oldest Jack really likes him. Probably because they are the same person – ambitious, opinionated, first borns.
By 2003, Jack was on the way. Janine was maybe 5 months along by the time our anniversary came in July. He was a bit of a miracle like all kids are particularly given what Bridget endured in the early years. We would write our top 10 goals in this old red book after every anniversary. One goal made the list that year that I’m not sure we ever believed but we put it on their nonetheless. ‘A beach cottage – buying one.’ Seemed possible yet impossible, the way it is every time your kid gets up to the foul line. I was making $8 an hour as a reporter back in 2003, my wife was a teacher for the Church. We were glass half full people I suppose, or delusional.
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Things started to turn a bit by 2008 when I decided to leave my reporter job of 10 years and join a small health policy outfit out of New York founded by of all people Ted Kennedy Jr, the son of the late Senator who spent his life battling disability and advocating for the less fortunate. He was this great inspirational boss and it was a great opportunity and I went for it. ‘You’re working for who,’ my mom said, still confused about what I did and how I actually got to work. She sat down, I told her again and she did the sign of the cross.
The move led me and Bridget down many other paths but opened doors for us to a new phase in our lives and by 2018, fifteen years after we wrote that top 10 list in our now frayed, red anniversary book, we got that beach cottage. What struck me today as I walked inside wasn’t so much how awesome this felt, but how eerily familiar the whole thing was.
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The cottage is in a little town called Truro, just south of those mountain-sized dunes my folks used to drive by when we vacationed on the cape. My dog, Zaggy, was the first one to walk into the house. Zag was named for Gonzaga, in honor of Uncle Mike. The house is set back on a lot filled with blueberry bushes and an old blacktop basketball court with a hoop resting on its side, almost as though something knocked it over. The house is about 2 miles from Route 6, just off Hughes Road. The number on the house, 15. The street: Priest Road. It was built in August 1972, four months before I was born. The neighbor stopped by to welcome us; she and her husband, and their dog Millie, were from Connecticut too. Our attorney, David Datz, this funny, smart, and generous guy who seemed to take the road less traveled when he avoided big practice law for his small practice in Provincetown, did his undergrad at, of all places, Bryant College. I drove up today to his office just past those dunes in Provincetown and I thought about my parents taking that trip when I was just a kid, how dad must have scraped together what he could from giving tennis lessons and mom’s preschool teaching to pay for that trip. I got a lot of emails and texts after the papers were signed today, most congratulating me and Janine, but I did get one call that stood out. It was from our real estate agent, Rose Kennedy – the one who helped us chill when we thought this wouldn’t happen, and who restored my faith in communication, in solving problems the old fashioned way–with a phone. Now it’s probably just coincidence, but maybe sending Truro’s Rose Kennedy into our life was my grandmother’s way of reminding me to eat my veggies, or maybe my old boss’s way of telling me not to forget those less fortunate.
I suppose most of the way life connects may just be coincidence, but maybe not. I’d like to believe the people and places from my past had a lot to do with where I sit today. And I know I haven’t lost faith in the idea that if you just write it down on paper, you give it life.