A Solitary Life

Even as the proverbial wee slip of a lad, I knew we were being distracted by the sleight of hand that went on in late December when it came to religion. Being born into the One Truth Faith didn't guarantee me a place in Catholic School but I was on the waiting list and me and Neil S from next door both ended up trading a walk down the block and up the hill to Pine Grove Manor School for a charter bus ride into New Brunswick and Saint Peter's (sic) School and Mrs. Hilge's third grade class on the top floor.

With the better of about five decades of hindsight that was a close to heaven as I will ever get. No regrets and if I had any I wouldn't voice them today, Palm Sunday, regarded by many, including those who've lapsed, as the start of Holy Week.

Probably because I'm related to someone who was almost Pope, I've found the stories of the life of Christ (and his death and resurrection), which underpins the establishment of Roman Catholicism (and all of Christianity), to always be compelling no matter the frame of mind or state of grace I'd been in while so doing.

I still lived at home when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar was released. It became a topic all of us who lived under his roof knew, instinctively, to never bring up, ever, in conversations with our Dad who, for reasons I really first learned on the day of his funeral, seemed to know more about the Catholic Church and the body of faith that held it together than any priest or nun I have ever, or will ever know. He never seemed like a King Herod's Song kind of guy.

I never offered to loan him my copy of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, but I still have one, somewhere in our basement having placed it into I-don't-know-how-many cardboard boxes throughout the years as I took my act on the road and sometimes elsewhere. Along with Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Trout Fishing in America it will always be one of my Desert Island books.

When I saw this report earlier in the week online, I flashed on a memory of Dad, having borrowed Mr. Fritsche's (a neighbor from down the street) New Testament, standing in our kitchen in Bloomfield Avenue with his tie and suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up, sight reading the Latin text and translating as he helped Bobby and me on a homework assignment a couple of years later for Sister Thomas Anne.

As I was typing that last line I remember his explanation about the actual meaning of the parable of the difficulties of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven and a camel passing through the eye of a needle but that will be a story for another time.
-bill kenny