Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in S.T. Stratton's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003
1:53 pm	Kindly Light: The Life of A Discard KINDLY LIGHT: Life as a Discard S.T. Stratton sts@thedoghousemail.com Page 1. Chapter One Life on Russell Road Maybe I ought to tell this story as some omniscent observer, a sort of spirit staring down at life. Hell, you'd call that being a fly on the wall. I don't want to be a fly on the wall. Somebody might smack me with a newspaper and I'd never finish this damn book. So let me lead you on this trip. Don't hold my hand. Just walk beside me and keep your hands off me. We're walking up long steep hill now along a sidewalk, woods on either side of the street. This is Russell Road and your breath is going to come in short pants before we reach the first house ahead of us. That's where Didi and Robin lived, two pretty girls who gave me and other boys wet dreams. Robin is dead now. She was killed in a head-on collision one night on a bridge. Her boyfriend was drunk, veered into the oncoming traffic and Robin wound up in a casket at the age of 19. Robin had dark brown hair, brown eyes and a body that stepped right out of a Playboy centerfold. She had all the assets, tits, shapely hips, beautiful legs and an ass that set fires in guys' hearts. Now Robin was seven years older than I but that didn't stop me from drooling once my hormones starting nipping at me. Didi was lean, lanky and had the misfortune of being flatchested. Guys still got off daydreaming about her. She sure wasn't ordinary but she just didn't have those assets I mentioned about Robin. Sit awhile here in front of the house where those girls lived. This is the house where Robin and Didi lived with their mothers who were sisters. I have no idea what happened to their fathers. Maybe they just took off. We never heard anybody speak of them. The girls were not sisters. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters and teachers. Like all the houses on this street, it is a white frame structure built about 1925. I wasn't around then so can't say for sure but the style is one common in that time. Big front porches with swings, metal chairs and two or three steps to climb to the porch. Everybody who walked up this hill would stop right here to sit on the wall in front of the house where Didi and Robin lived. Old Mrs. Carrick told me one day the way to stop breathing so fast from the long uphill climb was to sit here and do five fast and short breaths. It worked. The best thing about this wall is it isn't high right here and that's because of the steep grade. It's about three feet high here, just perfect for a brief rest. Let's go on up the hill now. It begins to flatten a bit now as we approach a midpoint. Look across the street at those woods full of big oaks and pines. I used to run hide in those woods to escape things I'm going to tell you about. The woods became my refuge when the old man went on a tear and stripped my pants off me to lash me with four foot long switches he'd cut for my beatings. Beating me was the old man's entertainment. So we walk past the old Gregory home then the Moyers and the Cranstons and the Smithsons. Just in case you're wondering, those are not their real names. Some of these people really were innocent and decent people so I'll protect them and not even reveal the real names of the others. Russell Road flattens right here in front of the Cranstons. Across the street, the woods end at that point and there's the house of the strangest people on the street, the Fortis family. Next to them going up the hill is the Swanson's house and then the Willmans. Then comes Mrs. Carrick's duplex and her tenant is Mrs. Stryker and her son, Hugo. Best I can tell you about Hugo is that he was one of two people I knew as a child who hated Jews. I saw Hugo bash a Jewish kid one day and it had me in tears. Now the other guy who hated Jews was the old man, the head of the house where I lived. I won't call him my father because he wasn't. He used every epithet in the books to describe Jews, blacks, Orientals, Hispanics and he had a few more epithets for everyone except his own brothers, sisters and that weird woman he called Mo-Ma. Yeah, she was his mother and lived to be 84 and if she ever smiled, I never saw it. She was as petty as he was. So was one of his brothers who owned a big business in town and so was one of his sisters. Keep that sister in mind. Her name was Lizzie and she was full of hate. Well this house right here with the long front porch, the white swing and two green metal chairs is where I lived for about 7 years. Look down the driveway and you can see the basement windows. That first set of windows is the whipping room the old man built. He kept his collection of switches there and built a platform for me to stand on while he beat hell out of me. That platform was two feet by two feet square and about eight inches high. I'd be home, listening to the radio and he'd come grab my hand and haul me down the basement steps, 13 of them. I counted them so that's why I know there were 13 steps. I'd be begging him not to beat me but it did no good. He held my wrist so tight the circulation would be cut off before reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he'd yank me to the right into that whipping room, force me onto his platform, rip off my pants and underpants and throw one arm around my neck to hold me and then came the lashes. I once counted 28. I'd catch glimpses of his face as he lashed me and what I remember most is that goddammed lascivious grin on his face depicting the joy he got out of beating me. I was six years old when those beatings started and they continued until I left that place when I was 11. I never gave him a reason to whip me. Didn't have to. It was strictly perverted entertainment for him. Was he a pervert in the true sense? Oh yeah. He was the most pornographic human I've ever known. If I didn't like certain foods like fried chard, boiled okra, stewed yellow squash and pork fat, I tried to shove it aside on my plate. The old man's fist would come flying into my face because I didn't like the food he liked and I'd go sailing out of my chair onto the floor and he'd grab my wrist and off we'd go to his whipping room. Time after time that happened in my years around that bastard. Did my mother care? Not a bit. She seemed to enjoy the beatings as much as he did. I recall several times when she'd lash out at me with slaps in the face, or she'd grab the belt off my pants and use it to blast away at me. She always made up excuses for it. Mother was a damned liar and also had that disease known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was her proxy. She used me to gain sympathy for herself. She'd make up lies about me and spread them like butter on bread and that served to get her family on her side. Her mother made no attempt to hide the fact she hated me. Neither did her brothers except for one, Charlie. But Charlie had been an outcast himself so he and I eventually became close but I was 22 by then. I had two brothers, or what is passed off as brothers. The older one loved the beatings I got and arranged several for me on days he'd get bored and wanted to hear me scream for my life. I used to swim in the river which was forbidden so he'd run tell that couple passed off to me as parents about it. What he didn't tell was that he also was swimming in the river. And big brother used to enjoy hurling insults at me. He got points for abusing me, I guess. I know they had nothing but praise for him. The younger one discovered my plight and decided he could make points by getting me in trouble too so he did. Brothers? Not really. Not to me anyway. Now my mother had a brother named Jack and that is his real name. I use it for a reason. He was a pedophile and I was his target. Twice when I was young, he tried to sodomize me. The first time I just poked him in the face with my elbow and he quit but slapped me in the face and on the side of my head. He warned me I had better not tell or he'd beat me up. He was 30 then and I was about 9. The second time he did it I was 11 and his brother, Charlie, was asleep in a room across the hall from me. Jack was drunk that night and crawled in my bed and began poking his erection at my butt. He had my hair in his hand that time but I shouted and Charlie heard it and came running. Charlie proved he was my friend that night. He grabbed Jack and the two of them went off in Charlie's car. Next morning when I saw Jack he had two black eyes, a broken nose and some missing teeth. According to the account his mother gave, Jack was beaten up by two thugs at a barbecue restaurant! I knew better. Charlie winked at me and I knew right away how that asshole brother of his got his beating. It struck me as odd two thugs would beat up a guy but not take his expensive watch, his wallet, or money from his pocket. Truth never got in my grandmother's way. It never got in the way of my mother either, or that old man she'd married. Or anybody in his family or in my mother's family. Except for Charlie. He was so candid he was hated. Charlie left home after that and moved to Seattle. I missed him and wrote him. He wrote back always in the tone of a truly caring man. Once he told me he understood my fear and wished he and his new wife, Marguerite, could adopt me. I wished they could have. Even after I left that place, that thing that was passed off as my home on Russell Road, I kept writing Charlie and Marguerite and they wrote back within a week everytime. Chapter Two St. Francis Home for Children Look at this photo of the old orphanage. It was built around 1900, a Spanish style stucco two-story building. See the two wings, one on the north end and the other on the south? Those were our dormitories. Boys lived in the North Wing and girls lived in the South Wing. Walk that long corridor between the two wings and you came to a wall. I have no idea what was on the south side of the wall. That was the girls' side of it, but over here where I lived in the boys' area the wall had a lifesize statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird. Behind him was that prayer I came to love so much and said so often while kneeling and lighting my candle. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. I was 8 years-old the first time I came to St. Francis, rescued from the violent ways of my home life on Russell Road. This old white stucco building was where I discovered peace and love for the first time. Kids under 10 slept on the first floor, boys to the north and girls to the south. On the first floor we were not separated by a wall. It was administrative offices, the refectory and the chapel that kept boys and girls apart down there. We went to school at St. Anne's School which was about a half mile southwest of the orphanage over at Mission Beach. St. Anne's almost touched the beach while St. Francis sat about eight blocks from the ocean up on the slope here. God, I loved that place and those cool Pacific breezes day and night. San Diego was a Navy town then. It still is but sailors and marines today are much better behaved. When I was at St. Francis we were never allowed to go downtown. Broadway back then was nothing but taverns, drunken servicemen and whores. Well, they did have locker clubs like the old Seven Seas for sailors and marines to buy space to change into civvies. Anytime we left the campus at St. Francis, we went on a blue and white bus and they'd haul us to the San Diego Zoo, a neighborhood movie theater to see Walt Disney films, or to a park distant from the servicemen. San Diego then and now has more parks than nearly any city in the world so we had plenty of places to go and they took us on trips every weekend. There would be four or five nuns along, a couple of priests and some of the Jesuit Brothers. They served as our guardians but they also were great guys to get into a softball game, touch football, and soccer. That's where I first learned to play soccer and that was long before it was popular in most of the United States. I loved to run and I'd get one of the brothers to tag along on a quiet jog around a park. I have no idea how far we'd run or how long either. Time and distance didn't mean a thing. It was my thinking time. Brother Phillip understood I wanted quiet when running and he seemed to enjoy the solitude as much as I did. Father Joe Kearney, a Jesuit priest, sometimes joined us while we ran. Father Joe had a girlfriend but not many people knew it. I spotted her waiting for him in the park one day when he, Brother Phillip and I were running. Father Joe veered off to catch up to this woman whose name was Anita. I won't say her middle and last names but I will tell you the initials of her three given names, including her confirmation name, came out AMDG. Why do I tell you that? Okay, I'll tell you why. Father wrote mystery stories and novels and he sold them. One of his mystery novels had a dedication in the front of the book. It read this way: "To AMDG" . Father was no dummie. He'd never have used her initials if they had been anything else. Among the Jesuits, AMDG stands for the motto of the Society of Jesus -- Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For you who don't understand Latin, in English it means For the Greater Glory of God. So Father Joe would run over with his woman friend and disappear for a little while. I have no idea where they went. Maybe they found a park bench to sit on or a concession stand out in the woods. Brother Phillip and I just kept running. I knew about Father Joe's woman friend when I was eight and she was still his friend when I made my second and final trip to St. Francis Home for Children at the age of 11. As I grew into my teen years, I began to understand even a vow of chastity has to be renewed every so often. I suspect Father Joe renewed his a little more often than some other priests. But I digress. If you don't like digression, go write your own damned novel. This is mine and I'll tell it my way. I go off on tangents just like Father Joe veered off on tangents from our running to hook up with AMDG. In geometry, if you remember your days in that dull subject, a tangent is a diversion from a course along a line, or you might go off on a tangent while you're out running and spot a cute woman. Hot pants are a known cause of tangents and AMDG was Miss Hot Pants. Get it now? My first trip to St. Francis occurred so quietly I hardly knew what was going on. I'd been taken by police to Juvenile Court and figured whatever it was the old man hated in me, the law must hate even worse. I kept looking for the gas chamber while I sat in Judge Odin's chambers. When he arrived in his black robe he looked just like a Jesuit priest and he had one of them with him. It was Father Joe. That made me sure my execution was at hand. I honestly felt that way. When your whole family keeps beating you up and telling you that you're bad, evil, and all that, you figure a courtroom is your last stop before you enter the gas chamber even if you don't know what you've done and I never did know. Judge Odin sat at his big desk, opened a folder and Father Joe sat beside me. I was in tears by then and filled with fear. Father Joe pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and had me blow my nose. Judge Odin's secretary brought me a cup of water and I waited for the death sentence to be handed down. I was amazed when the judge told me he was assigning me to St. Francis Home for Children on a temporary basis. He never said a thing about my mother or the man she married or those two weird and abusive brothers I had. Secretly, I was hoping they were going to get the gas chamber. Nobody ever did say what prompted my assignment to St. Francis but I was assured it was a place I'd enjoy and it wasn't a prison or detention home. I remember Father Joe saying it is a home for boys and girls like me. After Judge Odin signed the papers, I left with Father Joe and we got into his black Chevy and began the trip from Juvenile Court to St. Francis. I saw that two story Spanish style building for the first time that summer morning just after my eighth birthday. It had a wrought iron fence around it but there was no gate, no guard tower and no one carrying guns. I saw kids playing games, having fun on swings and slides, and there were teenagers playing ball and obviously having fun. We drove behind the building and right then I saw a place I knew I wanted to go. It was a huge swimming pool with diving board and a lifeguard stand. Father asked me if I liked to swim and for the first time I smiled. I loved to swim. There were pool hours posted and Father said I could swim everyday the weather permitted during my designated swim hours. Hey, two hours a day of swimming? Yeah. This was St. Francis showing me a welcome mat to a peaceful life. I was led into my dorm in the North Wing and shown to my bed,a comfortable looking single bed in a small but comofortable room I would share with another boy also eight years old. His name was Jerry and from the minute we met we became friends. He'd lived here a year and loved the place. I asked him if he was going to stay until he was grown up and he said he guessed so since he was up for adoption but "nobody wants me." Father Joe patted Jerry's head and told him St. Francis of Assisi always wants him as his child. I was issued clothing, comfortable clothing, I might say. There were shorts and t shirts, jeans and sport shirts, socks, two pair of tennies as we called our tennis shoes, one pair of black dress shoes, underwear, a bath towel to exhange everyday for a new one, a hand towel and wash cloth, and my own four drawer chest. On the wall behind our two beds were brass crucifixes. On my pillow was a rosary and a medal of St. Francis on a silver chain. A child's St. Joseph Missal also was on my bed. On the wall facing the foot of our beds were paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi. I was offered my choice of religious statues for my chest of drawers and I asked for St. Francis. A Jesuit Brother went down the hall and returned with my statue of St. Francis. Jerry had one of St. Robert Bellarmine on his chest of drawers. Along the wall beside the door were two small student desks. Mine was the one in the corner. Actually even Jerry had one in the corner considering the small closet we shared was next to his desk. We had dark wooden desks and dark wooden chairs. Inside my desk, I found pencils, crayons, tablets and an eraser. Nothing was elegant but everything suggested peace. I could handle that easily after the life I'd led with my mother and that bunch on Russell Road. "Jerry will show you around, Kieran,'' Father Joe said. "We don't fly by a big rulebook here. You'll have a schedule but it's nothing to be afraid of. And don't forget we are about an hour from lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, gravy, potatos and green beans today, boys." Father and the brother with him left and Jerry began telling me about life at St. Francis. He said I would like the place and the food especially. "It's okay having seconds," he said. My new friend told me there was no rule about how to dress. We were allowed to be comfortable. "So go barefoot is you want to. I do," he said. "So do most kids here." It was easy to see my new friend dressed in the manner of Huck Finn and out in the playground I'd already noticed the boys and girls both were comfortable. It looked like a real home only it had no parents. Some kids, including me, were put there by court order and only on a temporary basis while some strange thing called an inquiry took place. I hoped it was like burning sinners at the stake and my old family might be getting cooked. No such luck as time would tell. Jerry gave me the walking tour of St. Francis, first stopping at the refectory where I whiffed the aroma of roast beef being readied for the tables. We ducked into the chapel, genuflected and paused a minute or so to say our boyhood Catholic prayers we'd learned. Jerry looked at me and suggested we do one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Gloria together so we did. Later, he told me he always offered his prayers up to the Sacred Heart with the appeal some loving family would adopt him. Next to the refectory was a theater where movies were shown twice a week. They might be travel films or sometimes a Disney film and other times a religous life would be depicted in the movie. St. Francis Home for Children never failed to appeal to our religous heritage even in the case of kids like me, and I'd gotten to a point of near despair because of my life at home. St. Francis and the Jesuit priests I met there would lead me out of that wilderness. Give credit to Father Joe who discovered my love of poetry and nurtured it with the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a Jesuit priest whose works talk of lives approaching despair but never quite crumbling into it. Hopkins always finds hope and the Jesuit priests at St. Francis would eventually give me the hope my family never gave. Lawyers eventually crawled into my life like a bunch of bedbugs or rats. The two representing my family obtained a court order requiring visitations weekly with my mother, her brutal husband and the two jokers who posed as my brothers. The priests and nuns at St. Francis were appalled. So was I. But here came the so-called family trying to protect their reputations. Neighbors had been told, I learned, that I was a bad kid and placed in detention. The neighbors on Russell Road agreed with them. Why else did they beat me so much if I wasn't a bad kid, a recalcitrant little criminal. My mother and that man in her life were determined to make themselves look good at my expense. In my own mind I wondered why a court would allow parents who so blatantly lied and brutalized me to visit. Don't the police reports mean anything to the court? It was beyond my eight year old mind to understand that strange thing called justice. It's beyond my mind even now as I stare at the thick crop of once blond hair that is now gray. But I learned quickly lawyers could do anything they wanted. They are worse than an infestation of cockroaches. They are people devoid of a conscience. If my family was well practiced at lying, lawyers were true aces at it. I learned and still believe that to be a lawyer, you first have to be a sociopath. The court's order had come out of Sacramento, not from Judge Odin. A lawyer hired by my family had done some judge shopping and found the judge he needed. Now don't get all uppity about America and justice being for all. Back then, kids and criminals were allowed to have lawyers but they had to have the money to pay for them or do without. So nobody ever represented me and the police reports were never laid before that second judge. My first three months at St. Francis were the most peaceful I'd known. It was a warm place and while strict in some ways, the nuns who ran the place were never unfair, brutal or even close to being unkind to us. I've always heard tales of nuns whacking little kids on the knuckles. It never happened to me or to anyone I knew. The toughest order I ever got from a nun was to stand on the wall, meaning face the wall for 15 minutes for some misbehavior. It was fair. Like any kid, I could chatter out of place, or get angry over something or get into a scrap with another kid. Standing on the wall was the toughest punishment I ever faced with those nuns. I did get a swat on my butt one time, one swat was all and it was with a ping pong paddle. One swat and 2000 tears later, I was doing my penance which included an apology to the boy I'd pushed down in an argument over a baseball game. Breakfast at St. Francis began at 6 a.m. with prayers from the spiral stair rostrum at the front of the refectory. We stood for the prayer and took our seats about as fast as the word "Amen" dropped from the priest's lips. For those untrained in Catholic ways, that amen came at the end of the blessing -- In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. We crossed ourselves and plopped out little butts into our chairs and grabbed our juice glasses. At every meal, the food was served family style. Plates and bowls of food were sat near the head of the table where all serving began. A priest, a brother or a nun sat at the head of every table. One of the older boys or girls sat at the foot of the table. A typical breakfast included eggs with a meat except on Friday when we'd have fish even at breakfast. The breakfast also included pancakes, French toast or waffles. Big 12-ounce glasses sat before each kid's plate and pitchers of milk were in the middle of the table. We remained seated throughout the meal waiting for a priest to climb the spiral stairway again to give us the morning announcements and close our morning meal with a prayer for our safety and health. At all times, prayers concluding the three daily meals ended with the same words: "Lead us, O Heavenly Father, to learn to forgive those who have wronged us." It made sense considering most of us kids at St. Francis were discards from the rubble heap of American family life. I was about to be thrust right back into that rubble heap because of lawyers and that judge in Sacramento. After that court order, one Saturday a month the family drove to St. Francis for a visit. So that was a Saturday I missed being on the trips to the park or out to a movie or an amusement park. Any kid who had Saturday visits required by the court lost his Saturday recreation privileges as a result of decision by the fair minded judges. Now brace yourselves because I'm about to digress again. It was such things as decisions by judges, such as the one that eventually threw me right back into the pit of hell, that led me to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not for one minute believe those words "liberty and justice for all." My life was all the proof I needed for that and as I grew into my teen years, especially at the age of 16, I was to witness the absence of liberty and justice for black Americans. So you superpatriots with you goddammed hands over your hearts, keep on lying to yourselves. Some of us know better. We had to endure the pain inflicted by your stinking American justice system. Like I said before, if you don't like my digressions, go write your own novel. And don't ask me why I don't stand when you say the stupid pledge. It is a big lie. Well, the terrible and dreaded Saturday of my first family visit came. I stood at the window of the visitor center, a building apart from the main two story building where we kids lived and the nuns and priests ruled with love in their hearts. I was nervous as I watched for the family to drive through the front gate. Sister Luke stood by me and tried to reassure me she would be nearby. That nun knew this visit was wrong but she wasn't allowed to tell me that. I could sense it though. It was around 10 a.m. when I saw the red Buick come up the drive toward the visitor center. What a joke. There they stood like perfect people dressed in their finest attire. Hell, they probably bought that stuff just to make this visit so they could convince a court they really were good parents, and convince those neighbors they were very caring because they'd gone to a reform school -- that's how they presented it -- to visit me. The old man appeared sober for a change. With Sister Luke at my side, they pawed at me and spoke so lovingly in an effort to convince this wily old nun of their good hearts. I don't think Sister was fooled at all. She sat right there in the room with me until my mother said looked at her and told her the court said the visit would be private. Sister knew the rule too so she excused herself but she was wise enough to stay close at hand. About five minutes after she left, my face was swatted by the old man as he lit into me with a tirade about my comments to the police. I'd embarassed him by telling the police the truth if what that meant. As soon as my scream went up after my face was slapped, here came Sister Luke and Father Daniel O'Casey. The sister took my hand and led me out of the room and O'Casey, who was a big man with a deep voice, bellowed out "You have to leave now. Visit over." I was taken to a washroom to clean my face of the tears and then Sister led me out the back of the building, out of view of my mother and her wonderful hubby and good sons. I remember telling Sister Luke I never wanted to see them in the first place and now I'd missed my rec day with the other kids. She understood and told me about five or six other kids also had to miss the rec day and after their visits were over, Father O'Casey would open the swimming pool for those of us left behind that day. He did. God bless Father O'Casey. Justice took its usual course and refused to allow Sister Luke and Father O'Casey to file briefs on my behalf. I had no lawyer so what had happened that first visiting day would happen again at my next visiting day. Four more times it happened and the court would deny the nun and priest standing in the case even though they had acquired a volunteer attorney from the church. Are you beginning to get my point about liberty and justice in America? The court even ruled that attorney could not represent me because I was too young to choose my own legal counsel. So he appointed one for me and that guy never once visited me. He just conceded all the points made by my parents and their two lawyers. I spent 11 months at St. Francis and just before my ninth birthday, that fair minded judge up in Sacramento ordered me out of St. Francis and back into the life of my family. Two more years of hell would be spent before two eyewitnesses stepped forward in my behalf and my time at home was terminated forever. To this day I have no idea who stepped forward but I surmise it might have been the couple who moved into the vacant house right next door to my parents on Russell Road. They always seemed like nice people. The case was back in Judge Odin's hands and this time a lawyer represented me. He was not court appointed, I might add. Somebody out there had hired him and Judge Odin, the first and only fair minded judge I've known, let him represent me. It meant, I, a boy of 10 going on 11, had been given standing in the Superior Court of the State of California. It was in Judge Odin's chambers where the question came to me from the judge himself. Did I want to be placed permanently in the custody of the state as its ward housed at St. Francis and did I want the parental rights of my so-called family terminated. The judge carefully explained his question as he asked it. My own lawyer had explained to me it would be asked. He had urged me to think about it but told me not to answer it even to him. I was to answer it only when it was asked by the judge. I stood before the judge's big desk and answered "Yessir" to both questions. After the family's two lawyers made their pleas, Judge Odin read his order declaring my family unfit and making me a ward of the state. His final words remain indelible in my memory. "Kieran Patrick (name deleted), you are hereby declared a ward of the State of California to be housed at St. Francis Home for Children in San Diego; and to immediately be made eligible for adoption." At my request, Judge Odin also terminated my use of the family name. My time in Hell had ended. I was going to the only decent home I ever would have. I was never adopted and neither was Jerry who was again to be my roommate and friend at St. Francis. We were considered too old by families seeking to adopt. You might wonder why I kept my given names, Kieran Patrick. Well, I was a bastard child. My mother, a touring musician in a band, had frolicked with a cropduster pilot the December before my birth. She got pregnant, called him and begged for help. Scott was his first name and Stratton his last. Scott told her he would raise the child, boy or girl. He was 25 and in the ensuing months he decided on two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. He wanted his son to be named Kieran Patrick and if it was a girl, she would have been Kirsten Patricia. Scott had a girlfriend who agreed to accept his child so things looked good for me before my birth. But a month before I was born, Scott Stratton's little cropdusting plane burst into flames and crashed near a farm in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. His mother had suffered a stroke and his father was unable to raise a child for him. His sister was too young and still in school and his girlfriend opted out. But I had learned about Scott Stratton and I had seen his photos and letters. He would have been a terrific dad for anyone. So when my birth name was terminated by the court, a third order of the court granted me my real biological father's last name. When I was born, my mother had given me the names chosen by my biological father in hope his parents, despite their infirmities, would take me on. Life was not to be that good to me, not at the beginning anyway. But things did get better quickly once I was home again at St. Francis. I just didn't have the good sense to stay there as you will see when the train gets rolling down the tracks. Chapter Three Seal of the Confessional Meekly, we'd clasp our hands in front of us and stand like little saints waiting our turn to kneel and squeal in the confessional. It was easy to go to confession because of the seal of silence imposed on priests who hear confessions. Still, a kid might be a little uneasy sometimes as his turn in the confessional approached, Every Saturday at noon, boys walked into the chapel at St. Francis, genuflected and ducked into a back bench and knelt in silent meditation before going to confession. As we sat there, we rubbed our beads and kept our eyes on the four confessional booths each bearing the name of the priest in that confessional. For you non-Catholics, we watched the lines closely because we knew which priest we didn't want hearing our confession. No kid in his right mind wanted to confess to Father McNulty who was the Superior of this Jesuit community. McNulty dealt out penances so tough a kid might be on his knees saying the Rosary everyday for a month. He chewed ass, to put it mildly. Confessing to Father McNulty could take a long time even for a short list of bad deeds. He lectured us about our errant ways. It was not unusual to see an older teenager leave McNulty's confessional in tears. Priests counseled us during our confessions to avoid the occasion of sin. Father McNulty would spend several minutes lecturing the penitent young sinners on that subject. When I was around 13, I once thought he was about to suggest I amputate my hand to rid myself of my occasion of sin. By the time he told me to say my Act of Contrition while he pronounced the absolution, I was wiping my tearful face on my shirt sleeve. He'd ordered me to attend a novena which is nine days of prayer, say the Rosary twice daily for a week and avoid temptation by telling myself regularly my hands were meant to work for God and for not my own immoral pleasure. You could take the same sin into Father Larimore's confessional and come out in under two minutes with a penance of one Hail Mary, one Our Father and one Gloria to be offered up to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now with that description of Saturdays at confession time, I almost wager you can figure which priest's booth we all wanted to get into. Father Larimore had a line about 10 deep at all times. Father Kearney's line was also deep even if he was a little more strict than Father Larimore. Father O'Casey's confessional was one to avoid because you were so sure he could be heard through soundproof walls. You wanted to shush him when he began questioning your activities. He was lenient, but even his whispers rattled windows. There never was a line of boys at Father McNulty's confessional but one of the nuns was present to direct a waiting sinner to the next available booth and that often landed a quivering kid in Father Superior's confessional. You could grow calluses on your knees in that booth. I used to wonder if sore knees weren't as much the cause of tears on leaving his confessional as were Father McNulty's admonitions to the repentant ones. I said we squealed in the confessional. True, we did. We squealed on ourselves. We never mentioned any other kid, boy or girl, with whom we had shared some sinful enterprise. Nor would the priests ask us to identify our companions in sin. Don't get the wrong idea. Those sins committed with others weren't sexual at all but we were kids and we knew how to swipe things like bottles of Coca-Cola off the delivery truck, or candy from the back of an open van. Now I have to contradict myself. Some of our miscreant deeds were a bit risque but they didn't include sexual assault. Since we had allowances given to us weekly -- a whole half dollar at age 12 -- four or five boys might pool enough money to pay an adult to go into some store and buy us a titallating magazine. The most popular one back in my day was Sunshine and Health. It ran about a dollar and contained about 50 browntone photos of women in their lingerie but sometimes without a bra. Rearview photos without the hindrance of panties were common. The adult we'd pay to buy the magazine, which we all called our "dirty book," would receive a half dollar from five lusty boys so there was $1.50 spent on every issue. That reduced our pocket money by 30 cents, but we'd get it all back. We recovered our entire cost by loaning the dirty book to other boys for a nickel for one hour's reading time. Whichever one of us loaned it out got the nickel. None of us was ever a loser in the fine art of loaning out the dirty book, but we often were caught by the nuns, brothers or priests. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it when we were caught and whoever got caught zipped his lips and didn't rat on his pals. By the time any of us were nabbed with the dirty book, all of us who invested in it had recovered our money several times over. There were between 60 and 70 boys ages 11 to 18 in that upstairs dormitory and nearly everyone of them spent a nickel for an hour's worth of reading time. Some guys would pay more than once for the thrills in the dirty book. It depended on who caught you as to the disposition of things. If a nun nabbed the offender, she'd have him standing in the Mother Superior's office for a lecture followed by a prayer and the order to confess the sin. At least one confessional, and usually two, would be open at all daily masses and the Mother Superior specified we had to make our confession at the next daily mass. When I was nabbed, the next morning's mass gave me only one choice of confessors, Father Daniel O'Casey. I figured everybody in the church would hear his roaring voice when I fessed up to possessing the dirty book. At least he was brief, and probably suppressed a bit of laughter when he heard what I had in my hands while lying on my bed when I was caught. I was more grateful Father McNulty wasn't the confessor who heard my great sin that morning. He might have had me punch out my eyes as well as cut off my hand. You could always tell which guys had been partners in purchasing the dirty book. They were standing at the same confessional, or avoiding communion that day. All of us thought of ourselves as the first kids in history to buy a sexy magazine and use it in strengthening our wrists and fingers. We dreaded telling priests we had used some of our allowance in the buying the book and taken money from other boys in loaning it out for reading, and other pleasures. There seemed to be a conspiracy worked out among the priests when we confessed to being capitalists who had made a bit of money on a nudie book we'd bought and loaned. Invariably, the priest, regardless of who it was, asked how much money we made and we'd give the figure. I once made about 75 cents loaning out the dirty book which meant I had a net gain of 45 cents on my 30 cent share in the investment. My penance on that occasion was to forfeit two weeks allowance, and in addition I had to drop the 75 cents in loan money into the poor box. That left me penniless for three weeks. A group of boys one day pooled a bit of their allowance and went to a restoom in a nearby cafe and bought one condom for 50 cents. The condom never was meant to be used for sex. It was just for showing off and that rubber was passed around for look-see at two pennies for a few seconds. All we did was hold that darn thing in our hands and laugh. The investors in that item also made their money back and eventually one of them was nabbed showing it off. I have no idea what the priest who heard that kid's confession asked him and I don't even know if he drew Father McNulty at the next morning's mass. In the dorm, the boys did discuss whether or not the mere possession of that condom constituted a mortal sin or a venal sin. My only experience in that line was that Father Larimore decided my handing over two cents to hold it a few seconds and get some giggles amounted to a venal sin. I suspect Father McNulty might have viewed it as the occasion of sin and maybe bordering on a mortal sin. Glad I never had to find out or I might have been worrying about what to amputate to avoid that occasion of sin. Confession sometimes put a boy into the position of being humbled before someone he offended. It was one thing to apologize to a kid you'd bopped in the eye during a brawl, but it was something else to have to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and fess up and pay for stealing candy or something else. I gained some experience in fessing up and paying. Jerry had swiped two Hershey bars and shared his booty with me. He told me how he acquired the candy but I was such a chocolate candy fiend, it didn't matter. I gobbled down the chocolate bar with delight. Nobody caught us. They didn't have to. We were well educated Catholic boys and the next morning at mass we stood at Father Kearney's booth, the only one available. When I confessed to my role as receiver of stolen goods, Father said, "How many of you got in on this chocolate candy theft?" I told him it was just me and a friend and I never once mentioned Jerry by name. I didn't have to. Jerry fessed up to his deed and both of us were given the same penance. We had to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and hand the owner a nickel each to pay for the two candy bars Jerry had taken. Mr. Dodd forgave us and accepted our money. We were worried he would banish us from his store which would have hurt tremendously since it was one of only two stores close to the orphanage and we'd already been banned at the grocery store. Our banishment from the grocery came because we, along with four other boys, had stolen the Coca-Colas off the truck delivering the bottles to the store. Jerry and a boy named Andy months before that removed a whole box of candy from the back of a delivery van at that same market. Both confessed and both had to go pay the store for the candy. Neither Jerrry nor Andy was banished from market that first time. It was the next theft, the great Coca-Cola raid, that led to the banishment and Andy wasn't involved that day. I was and from that day on, Jerry and I were banished by the manager. We were terrified what might happen if the manager caught us in the store so we avoided the place. One night Father Kearney took Jerry and me out for a drive to help him load what he called "supplies" into the trunk of his car. We thought he meant school supplies. He was talking about boxes of margarine and jelly. Father pulled up in front of that market and Jerry and I stared at each other and knew we had to tell the priest we were banished at that place. Father knew about our soft drink heist but he had no idea the manager had forbidden us to enter his store again. Nonetheless he was sure he could escort us into the store, pay for the merchandise waiting to be picked up and there would be no problem. He was wrong. As soon as we walked into the market with the priest, the manager came with his finger wagging. He told Father he was welcome to come in but he had to leave us outside in the car. He didn't even want us near the front door of his store, he told Father Kearney. He referred to us as "dammed little urchins." We blushed and began walking out but the priest told us to stay. Father Kearney told the manager why we were with him and that we had done our penance, paid for the things taken and should be given another chance. We were only 12, he told the manager. The manager was insistent. Jerry and I were never to set foot in his store again. We thought that ended the dispute. Father told us to come with him and we'd go find another store to contract for services to St. Francis Home for Children. Since the orphans' home did about $30,000 a year in business with that store, the manager relented but he set conditions. We could come to the store to help load supplies but we'd have to go on the back dock to load the boxes into Father Kearney's car. We were never to be inside his store. The manager and one of his clerks escorted Jerry and me to the dock and the clerk stood with us. That was my last time in that market. It also was the last time St. Francis Home for Children spent a penny at that store. The contract went to a store in Mission Beach after that. Jesuits believe in forgiveness and when an errant youth confessed his sin to a priest then made amends to the person offended, which we had done, the priests believed forgiveness should be awarded. The unforgiving attitude of the store manager cost his store the business of the large community at St. Francis. It was declared off limits to all residents of St. Francis from that day on. I never participated in theft after that time nor did Andy. Jerry's fingers were a bit more sticky so he had to learn the hard way by losing privileges and large parts of his allowance but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was no longer lifting things from stores. A loss of privileges involved real penalties. It meant spending movie nights in the detention room with whichever nun might be in charge. His penalties also cut into his allowance. Each year, if we had good behavior, we would receive a raise in our allowance. A 15 or 16 year old got a dollar a week, a lot of money in the 1950s. Misconduct could cost a kid his annual raise in allowance. Detention didn't mean sit and study. It meant sitting on a hardwood bench in silence for an hour at a time, hands folded in your lap. An hour is a long time in a kid's life and Jerry probably held the all time record for detentions at St. Francis. I know he had around 30 of them at one time posted on the yellow sheet outside the office of the Prefect of Discipline. Detention was always served a day at a time. Any kid on detention on weekends lost the weekend trips but only spent one hour a day in the detention room. The rest of his day might be spent at ping pong, throwing a ball, or just walking around the campus. Leaving the campus would add 5 detentions and the one being served would not be credited which meant you actually had six added. Jerry was not a bad kid, not at all. He never injured anyone physically other then in defending himself and he could be ferocious in that regard. Like many of us, he'd been abused at home and it took a time to get over the effects of it. Jerry was a very gentle kid, considerate of others, a fun kid to know and be around, always willing to share his softball or his glove or bat. If another boy was injured in a game, Jerry was the first to stop the game to make sure the kid was not badly hurt. Teachers liked him and so did all the kids at St. Francis. He just had some hard times growing up and learning to trust and be trusted, but at St. Francis the patience of good leaders guided most us to productive lives. We earned points for acts of good citizenship. Points didn't earn money for you but they did get special favors such as a new mitt, a ball, a cap, a set of much desired swim trunks or tickets to be exchanged for rental of roller skates at the Rollerdrome, or a surfboard at Ocean Beach Pier. We also earned points for amusement park rides and that old Mission Beach roller coaster kept my eyes on the straight and narrow many times. Kids at St. Francis developed bonds with each other. We depended on each other and through the subtle teachings of the Jesuit priests we kept each other away from trouble. Older kids became counselors to the younger children, helping them with homework and soothing their anguished hearts. Death does not distinguish the young from the old and we learned that lesson three times during my stay at St. Francis. Twice it claimed the lives of older boys, both times from illness. Tom was 17 when he fell ill with spinal meningitis and died about three weeks later. He was the elected dormitory president and we all respected him Vince was a tall Italian boy who suffered from asthma and died one night in the infirmary while waiting for the ambulance to take him to Childrens Hospital. He also was 17. David and I were 12 when he died in an accident. We had been close friends. We were both members of the St. Francis Boy Choir and I was called on to sing the boy soprano solo part of the Sanctus at his requiem mass. My body trembled as I sang, accompanied by the organist. Somehow I got through it and then broke into tears. Even today when I hear the mournful Sanctus of Hector Berlioz, I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and my memory fills with images of David. He had straight blond hair that spilled over the sides of his head, a slender kid but about an inch or maybe two inches taller than me. He was nearsighted and wore glasses. He was a rare kid who never joined the crowd in poking fun at someone. David was the sort of kid who would stand by the victim of ridicule and befriend him. He wasn't a loudmouth. He was a leader among us. I guess it is such kids as David who are chosen by the Almighty to be called from the earth in their youth. Their dying leaves the model of a good life to remember. I have never forgotten my friend and he had an enduring impact on me. My own son carries his name today and he too has blond straight hair flopping over the side of his head, and he also wears glasses. Chapter Four Humor on top Father McNulty, the Superior of this Jesuit community, was a lean and lanky man in his sixties. His bulbous nose ended in a bright red hue which was often the subject of jokes in the dorm. His ruddy face rarely broke into a smile but when it did, the occasion would set off laughter in any room. Father seemed to reserve his Irish wit for special occasions, such as Thanksgiving dinner in the refectory, a night he chose to mounted the spiral staircase to deliver the greetings, the prayer and a brief homily. After the dinner, the priest strode up the spiral stairs, blessed us and then delivered his Thanksgiving homily which lasted about five minutes. After his prayer, he said he had a few announcements. When Father McNulty said he had announcements, all eyes turned to him. He momentarily fell silent, grimacing and gripping the podium. Not a single priest, nun or brother rose to go to his aid and we kept staring at the grimacing old man. His feet shuffled and suddenly the sound of a loud fart echoed from where he stood. Kids dropped their heads and bit their lips to restrain their laughter. "Oh, I feel so much better now," Father McNulty said with a smile creasing his craggy face. The laughter of the young orphans grew louder but we couldn't help noticing the priests, nuns and brothers all had well contained smiles as if they knew Father McNulty was up to something. The old priest leaned over and picked up the small rug on the podium and removed a whoopee cushion and held it aloft for all to see. "Whoppee!" he proclaimed. "Now who do you suppose bought this little device?" Father McNulty's eyes immediately fell on me. "Come, come, Kieran, is this perhaps yours?" I blushed and finally stood and muttered, "Yes, Father. I'm sorry, but I didn't put it up there for you to step on." He assured me he knew I hadn't placed it up there. "I placed it here, son, right beneath my feet," he said. Jerry and Andy immediately rose and admitted their complicity in the whoopee cushion. "How much did you boys pay for this?" Father asked. I told him we'd paid 49 cents for it at the magic shop. The shop was popular among the boys at St. Francis. We often bought stinky bombs there to set off in the dorm at night, or rubber snakes or spiders to place beneath the sheets of a boy's bed. The black widow spiders were more realistic than the snakes and always provoked fear when a boy's feet touched a whole colony of them under his sheet. The snakes looked real only from a distance but under the sheets they felt very icky. In my time at St. Francis, I was the victim of the snake and spider treatment at separate times. So were all the boys. The whoopee cushion was a new device at the magic shop. The older ones often didn't go off when someone sat on them because the rubber sealed tightly. But these new ones had a softer outlet pipe. The instructions told us for the more splattering sounds, use a blob of cream in the tube, and for really explosive sounds, use a touch of cream in the tube. Our intention in buying the whoopee cushion had been to place it under the thin cushion of our dorm president's wooden chair in the refectory. Thomas, the president in 1952 when this incident took place, had a great sense of humor but he could be a bossy guy and was a bit arrogant. Seniors tend to get that way as most high school kids can tell you. Since Andy, Jerry and I were assigned that day to the morning crew to set tables in the refectory, we lightly creamed the whoopee cushion and slid it beneath the cloth on his chair. It never went off, of course, and we had no idea why until the big evening meal that Thanksgiving Day. The three of us sat at our table not knowing if we about to be shamed by the Superior or counseled in public by him. He held that little red rubber cushion in his hand, wagging it back and forth as he talked. He remained serious for only a few seconds then broke into a grin. "God gave us a sense of humor so that we might have a means of overcoming the tensions of our days," Father said. Father told the whole gathering how he'd seen us sneak the little rubber bag under the cloth cushion on Thomas' chair that morning. In his finest Irish brogue, he told us he had once been a boy and enjoyed playing such jokes on schoolmates and even on his teachers. "But this is a much finer bag than the ones we had when I was a boy," he said with a grin. "In my day, those bags often just went 'Whoosh' and we were so disappointed." The kids in the refectory laughed merrily as Father McNulty continued to regale us with tales of his days in Ireland and pranks he'd played on his schoolmates and some pranks played on him. "Do you children realize even priests play pranks on each other? Yes, we do. At our morning staff meeting today, I placed Kieran's little whoopee cushion on Father Latimore's chair and he came up from his chair exclaiming the sound didn't come from him. That made it all the funnier," he said. He looked once more into my eyes and this time apologized for thwarting my little joke on Thomas. "I just couldn't resist playing that same joke on Father Latimore," he said. With that Father McNulty once more blessed the gathering and offered a benediction. When he came down the staircase, he called out to me. "Here, son, enjoy your little pranks," he said. "This harms no one and it brought laughter and joy to us all. The essence of a good sense of humor is that it never injures others and it does not subject them to ridicule. God would approve of your choice of pranks." In the days ahead, Father McNulty talked more about the humor of young people. He was never averse to using himself as the butt of a joke to make his point. Once during a homily he mentioned he'd had one of the other priests take him to a liquor store a few nights earlier. To assure he had our full attention, Father employed a joke told by the boys in the dorm. "In case you wonder why I had to go to a liquor store," he said, "I needed some new red lights for my nose." We had no idea he knew about us joking that from time to time he bought new red lights for his nose. His story that night led into the revelation the owner of the store had reported two older teens from St. Francis for trying to purchase a bottle of whiskey from him. Although Father never mentioned the names of the boys, all of us on the second floor knew he was talking about two seniors on our floor, Tony and Julio. Both were 17 and thought surely they looked 21 and for that matter, so did we. I was 14 at the time but wise enough not to try my boyish face in any liquor store. Father said the good man who owned the liquor store didn't turn the boys into the police, He knew them as boys from the orphanage so he called Father McNulty to tell him two of his charges had tried to foist fake ID cards on him. The proprietor described the boys perfectly and Father met them both as they walked in the back door of St. Francis. Father took up the fake ID cards which were Selective Service System cards they'd purchased on the street. "I may be old and my eyesight might not be as sharp as it once was,'' Father said, "but I'm like the liquor store owner. I could see the two culprits didn't weigh anywhere close to 170 and 180 pounds as the ID cards said they did. And they also don't have blue eyes." Julio weighed about 130 pounds and Tony weighed about 140. Both had dark brown eyes and were slender. About the only thing on the ID cards that matched them was the heighth. Both were about 6 feet tall. "I wonder," Father McNulty said, "what our boys were going to do with a pint bottle of a whiskey called Mellow Corn. You don't suppose they were going to give it to Father O'Casey for his birthday, do you? What an awful choice of whiskey. Father O'Casey drinks Old Bushmill, not that cheap yellow stuff our two good boys tried to buy." Father then revealed he and his fellow priests had bought Father O'Casey a fifth of Old Bushmill for his birthday then added, "That's why I had Father Kearney drive me to the liquor store. Of course, I also bought those red lights for my nose while I was there." He then proceeded to tell us about the hazards of alcohol being consumed by young people. When the young try to act out the roles of adults, they invariably do so with excesses. A boy who sneaks off to smoke will smoke 10 cigarettes and finally quit when he's turned green and sick. A boy using alcohol thinks drunkenness is to be admired and sets out to prove he can hold his liquor only to become fall down drunk, vomiting and, if he is lucky, ends up the next day with a violent hangover, unable to eat and wishing he'd never done that. The boy less fortunate, he said, may wind up in a jail cell, a hospital ward or even dead from alcohol poisoning. "The young tend to excesses, never considering there are limits even for them," he said. While his tone was serious, Father McNulty freely sprinkled his message with humor to hold the attention of his young audience. Chapter Five /div>v style="text-align: center;">Black Robes</div> Jesuits don't wear the traditional button-up and button-down cassock other priests wear. The Jebs have their own style and it's a black robe tied with a sash. No buttons. It's one of many things that distinguish the Jesuit priest from other priests and it goes back to origins of the Society of Jesus, back in the 16th century. Jesuits are tradition bound but non-traditional when compared to other orders of priests. As a group, Jesuits are the scholars of Catholocism. As a boy schooled by Jesuits I found myself wondering about a vocation as a priest. It's not something romantic like being a soldier of fortune or a great actor. It is a sense the boy is being summoned by God to a calling. By the time he reaches 15, the youngster begins to weigh in his mind what he is surrendering if he becomes a priest and girls are chief among those things to be given up. It's one thing for kids to play tag or hide and seek with girls, or a softball game or hit the beach for surfing or volleyball. It's quite another to decide you will forego sexual pleasures with women and to give up thoughts of fathering children. Half a boy's brainpower at 15 is spent in reveries about sleeping with a girl. Much of his time in the confessional may be devoted to how he handles that when alone. By the time he is 16, a boy's homones are like thunder and lightning. He imagines flesh and muscle of girls, thinks of the often erroneous lessons on sex he's learned from other boys and chances are, if the boy was like me, all he'd ever seen of a naked female was in that magazine he called the dirty book. Teenage boys are like male dogs, always in heat. At that age, I used to wonder how guys could surrender that to become priests. What is a priestly calling, anyway? Not even a priest can answer that one. But any kid in a Catholic school knows what it takes to become a priest. If he chooses to become a Jesuit, it was a 15 year term in the seminary back when I was a boy. It began with two years in the novitiate, a time of virtual silence for the budding young seminarian. There was a period set aside for the novices to speak, but they had to speak Latin even in casual conversations with each other. "Latine, Frater," a Jesuit seminarian would be admonished if he spoke in English to a fellow seminarian or to a priest. The two years in the novitiate were a time of contemplation, meditation, reflection and decision. To be sure there were classes. Jesuits, after all, are educators. In that two year novitiate, a young seminarian would become steeped in classics, religious studies, science and, of course, Latin. The novice immersed himself in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the mass, the prayers of the Church, and when walking the novitiate grounds, he usually looked like he was muttering to himself as he stared into some little book in his hands. Actually, he was muttering to himself. In Latin, of course. Those first two years in the Jesuit seminary compare well to life as a Benedictine monk bound by the vow of silence. If a youngster finishes the two years in the novitiate, he has a decision to make. Will he or won't he take his first vows? During the time in the novitiate, a seminarian can pack his bag and leave at will. Once he takes those first vows, called temporal vows, he is bound under a religious contract with the Almighty. The vows can be terminated and the seminarian departs but few make that move once they complete the novitiate. The next step in a young Jesuit seminarian's life is spent in the Juniorate. That's real school, full time college plus the schooling to become a priest. Language studies, math, sciences, literature, writing, art and music fill out these years. Religous studies are the main component, though. At the end of that time, the young Jesuit isn't through with school. He's then in the Philosophate for three years. After seven years of intense study, contemplation, prayer and reflection, the average Jesuit will be around 24 years-old and will have an education that is worth at least one PhD. Two things occur at this stage. First, the seminary student takes his final or perpetual vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. He is now commited for a lifetime as a Jesuit. The second thing the young seminarian encounters is his first experience in the field as a teacher. The time is known as the Regency and the young Jeb spends three years at it. He could be sent anywhere on the planet the Jesuits have a community devoted to teaching. It is common to put the new teacher in a place where his faith and commitment are truly tested, such as a mosquito infested country in the South Pacific or Central America. After Regency, the seminarian returns to his Province's university and is considered to be in the Jesuit Theosophate for four years. The focus is on complex religious issues and also involves studies of other religions. At the conclu Current Mood: Reflective Current Music: James Galway: Meditations (Comment on this)
1:11 pm	Kindly Light: The Life of A Discard KINDLY LIGHT: Life as a Discard S.T. Stratton sts@thedoghousemail.com Page 1. Chapter One Life on Russell Road Maybe I ought to tell this story as some omniscent observer, a sort of spirit staring down at life. Hell, you'd call that being a fly on the wall. I don't want to be a fly on the wall. Somebody might smack me with a newspaper and I'd never finish this damn book. So let me lead you on this trip. Don't hold my hand. Just walk beside me and keep your hands off me. We're walking up long steep hill now along a sidewalk, woods on either side of the street. This is Russell Road and your breath is going to come in short pants before we reach the first house ahead of us. That's where Didi and Robin lived, two pretty girls who gave me and other boys wet dreams. Robin is dead now. She was killed in a head-on collision one night on a bridge. Her boyfriend was drunk, veered into the oncoming traffic and Robin wound up in a casket at the age of 19. Robin had dark brown hair, brown eyes and a body that stepped right out of a Playboy centerfold. She had all the assets, tits, shapely hips, beautiful legs and an ass that set fires in guys' hearts. Now Robin was seven years older than I but that didn't stop me from drooling once my hormones starting nipping at me. Didi was lean, lanky and had the misfortune of being flatchested. Guys still got off daydreaming about her. She sure wasn't ordinary but she just didn't have those assets I mentioned about Robin. Sit awhile here in front of the house where those girls lived. This is the house where Robin and Didi lived with their mothers who were sisters. I have no idea what happened to their fathers. Maybe they just took off. We never heard anybody speak of them. The girls were not sisters. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters and teachers. Like all the houses on this street, it is a white frame structure built about 1925. I wasn't around then so can't say for sure but the style is one common in that time. Big front porches with swings, metal chairs and two or three steps to climb to the porch. Everybody who walked up this hill would stop right here to sit on the wall in front of the house where Didi and Robin lived. Old Mrs. Carrick told me one day the way to stop breathing so fast from the long uphill climb was to sit here and do five fast and short breaths. It worked. The best thing about this wall is it isn't high right here and that's because of the steep grade. It's about three feet high here, just perfect for a brief rest. Let's go on up the hill now. It begins to flatten a bit now as we approach a midpoint. Look across the street at those woods full of big oaks and pines. I used to run hide in those woods to escape things I'm going to tell you about. The woods became my refuge when the old man went on a tear and stripped my pants off me to lash me with four foot long switches he'd cut for my beatings. Beating me was the old man's entertainment. So we walk past the old Gregory home then the Moyers and the Cranstons and the Smithsons. Just in case you're wondering, those are not their real names. Some of these people really were innocent and decent people so I'll protect them and not even reveal the real names of the others. Russell Road flattens right here in front of the Cranstons. Across the street, the woods end at that point and there's the house of the strangest people on the street, the Fortis family. Next to them going up the hill is the Swanson's house and then the Willmans. Then comes Mrs. Carrick's duplex and her tenant is Mrs. Stryker and her son, Hugo. Best I can tell you about Hugo is that he was one of two people I knew as a child who hated Jews. I saw Hugo bash a Jewish kid one day and it had me in tears. Now the other guy who hated Jews was the old man, the head of the house where I lived. I won't call him my father because he wasn't. He used every epithet in the books to describe Jews, blacks, Orientals, Hispanics and he had a few more epithets for everyone except his own brothers, sisters and that weird woman he called Mo-Ma. Yeah, she was his mother and lived to be 84 and if she ever smiled, I never saw it. She was as petty as he was. So was one of his brothers who owned a big business in town and so was one of his sisters. Keep that sister in mind. Her name was Lizzie and she was full of hate. Well this house right here with the long front porch, the white swing and two green metal chairs is where I lived for about 7 years. Look down the driveway and you can see the basement windows. That first set of windows is the whipping room the old man built. He kept his collection of switches there and built a platform for me to stand on while he beat hell out of me. That platform was two feet by two feet square and about eight inches high. I'd be home, listening to the radio and he'd come grab my hand and haul me down the basement steps, 13 of them. I counted them so that's why I know there were 13 steps. I'd be begging him not to beat me but it did no good. He held my wrist so tight the circulation would be cut off before reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he'd yank me to the right into that whipping room, force me onto his platform, rip off my pants and underpants and throw one arm around my neck to hold me and then came the lashes. I once counted 28. I'd catch glimpses of his face as he lashed me and what I remember most is that goddammed lascivious grin on his face depicting the joy he got out of beating me. I was six years old when those beatings started and they continued until I left that place when I was 11. I never gave him a reason to whip me. Didn't have to. It was strictly perverted entertainment for him. Was he a pervert in the true sense? Oh yeah. He was the most pornographic human I've ever known. If I didn't like certain foods like fried chard, boiled okra, stewed yellow squash and pork fat, I tried to shove it aside on my plate. The old man's fist would come flying into my face because I didn't like the food he liked and I'd go sailing out of my chair onto the floor and he'd grab my wrist and off we'd go to his whipping room. Time after time that happened in my years around that bastard. Did my mother care? Not a bit. She seemed to enjoy the beatings as much as he did. I recall several times when she'd lash out at me with slaps in the face, or she'd grab the belt off my pants and use it to blast away at me. She always made up excuses for it. Mother was a damned liar and also had that disease known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was her proxy. She used me to gain sympathy for herself. She'd make up lies about me and spread them like butter on bread and that served to get her family on her side. Her mother made no attempt to hide the fact she hated me. Neither did her brothers except for one, Charlie. But Charlie had been an outcast himself so he and I eventually became close but I was 22 by then. I had two brothers, or what is passed off as brothers. The older one loved the beatings I got and arranged several for me on days he'd get bored and wanted to hear me scream for my life. I used to swim in the river which was forbidden so he'd run tell that couple passed off to me as parents about it. What he didn't tell was that he also was swimming in the river. And big brother used to enjoy hurling insults at me. He got points for abusing me, I guess. I know they had nothing but praise for him. The younger one discovered my plight and decided he could make points by getting me in trouble too so he did. Brothers? Not really. Not to me anyway. Now my mother had a brother named Jack and that is his real name. I use it for a reason. He was a pedophile and I was his target. Twice when I was young, he tried to sodomize me. The first time I just poked him in the face with my elbow and he quit but slapped me in the face and on the side of my head. He warned me I had better not tell or he'd beat me up. He was 30 then and I was about 9. The second time he did it I was 11 and his brother, Charlie, was asleep in a room across the hall from me. Jack was drunk that night and crawled in my bed and began poking his erection at my butt. He had my hair in his hand that time but I shouted and Charlie heard it and came running. Charlie proved he was my friend that night. He grabbed Jack and the two of them went off in Charlie's car. Next morning when I saw Jack he had two black eyes, a broken nose and some missing teeth. According to the account his mother gave, Jack was beaten up by two thugs at a barbecue restaurant! I knew better. Charlie winked at me and I knew right away how that asshole brother of his got his beating. It struck me as odd two thugs would beat up a guy but not take his expensive watch, his wallet, or money from his pocket. Truth never got in my grandmother's way. It never got in the way of my mother either, or that old man she'd married. Or anybody in his family or in my mother's family. Except for Charlie. He was so candid he was hated. Charlie left home after that and moved to Seattle. I missed him and wrote him. He wrote back always in the tone of a truly caring man. Once he told me he understood my fear and wished he and his new wife, Marguerite, could adopt me. I wished they could have. Even after I left that place, that thing that was passed off as my home on Russell Road, I kept writing Charlie and Marguerite and they wrote back within a week everytime. Chapter Two St. Francis Home for Children Look at this photo of the old orphanage. It was built around 1900, a Spanish style stucco two-story building. See the two wings, one on the north end and the other on the south? Those were our dormitories. Boys lived in the North Wing and girls lived in the South Wing. Walk that long corridor between the two wings and you came to a wall. I have no idea what was on the south side of the wall. That was the girls' side of it, but over here where I lived in the boys' area the wall had a lifesize statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird. Behind him was that prayer I came to love so much and said so often while kneeling and lighting my candle. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. I was 8 years-old the first time I came to St. Francis, rescued from the violent ways of my home life on Russell Road. This old white stucco building was where I discovered peace and love for the first time. Kids under 10 slept on the first floor, boys to the north and girls to the south. On the first floor we were not separated by a wall. It was administrative offices, the refectory and the chapel that kept boys and girls apart down there. We went to school at St. Anne's School which was about a half mile southwest of the orphanage over at Mission Beach. St. Anne's almost touched the beach while St. Francis sat about eight blocks from the ocean up on the slope here. God, I loved that place and those cool Pacific breezes day and night. San Diego was a Navy town then. It still is but sailors and marines today are much better behaved. When I was at St. Francis we were never allowed to go downtown. Broadway back then was nothing but taverns, drunken servicemen and whores. Well, they did have locker clubs like the old Seven Seas for sailors and marines to buy space to change into civvies. Anytime we left the campus at St. Francis, we went on a blue and white bus and they'd haul us to the San Diego Zoo, a neighborhood movie theater to see Walt Disney films, or to a park distant from the servicemen. San Diego then and now has more parks than nearly any city in the world so we had plenty of places to go and they took us on trips every weekend. There would be four or five nuns along, a couple of priests and some of the Jesuit Brothers. They served as our guardians but they also were great guys to get into a softball game, touch football, and soccer. That's where I first learned to play soccer and that was long before it was popular in most of the United States. I loved to run and I'd get one of the brothers to tag along on a quiet jog around a park. I have no idea how far we'd run or how long either. Time and distance didn't mean a thing. It was my thinking time. Brother Phillip understood I wanted quiet when running and he seemed to enjoy the solitude as much as I did. Father Joe Kearney, a Jesuit priest, sometimes joined us while we ran. Father Joe had a girlfriend but not many people knew it. I spotted her waiting for him in the park one day when he, Brother Phillip and I were running. Father Joe veered off to catch up to this woman whose name was Anita. I won't say her middle and last names but I will tell you the initials of her three given names, including her confirmation name, came out AMDG. Why do I tell you that? Okay, I'll tell you why. Father wrote mystery stories and novels and he sold them. One of his mystery novels had a dedication in the front of the book. It read this way: "To AMDG" . Father was no dummie. He'd never have used her initials if they had been anything else. Among the Jesuits, AMDG stands for the motto of the Society of Jesus -- Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For you who don't understand Latin, in English it means For the Greater Glory of God. So Father Joe would run over with his woman friend and disappear for a little while. I have no idea where they went. Maybe they found a park bench to sit on or a concession stand out in the woods. Brother Phillip and I just kept running. I knew about Father Joe's woman friend when I was eight and she was still his friend when I made my second and final trip to St. Francis Home for Children at the age of 11. As I grew into my teen years, I began to understand even a vow of chastity has to be renewed every so often. I suspect Father Joe renewed his a little more often than some other priests. But I digress. If you don't like digression, go write your own damned novel. This is mine and I'll tell it my way. I go off on tangents just like Father Joe veered off on tangents from our running to hook up with AMDG. In geometry, if you remember your days in that dull subject, a tangent is a diversion from a course along a line, or you might go off on a tangent while you're out running and spot a cute woman. Hot pants are a known cause of tangents and AMDG was Miss Hot Pants. Get it now? My first trip to St. Francis occurred so quietly I hardly knew what was going on. I'd been taken by police to Juvenile Court and figured whatever it was the old man hated in me, the law must hate even worse. I kept looking for the gas chamber while I sat in Judge Odin's chambers. When he arrived in his black robe he looked just like a Jesuit priest and he had one of them with him. It was Father Joe. That made me sure my execution was at hand. I honestly felt that way. When your whole family keeps beating you up and telling you that you're bad, evil, and all that, you figure a courtroom is your last stop before you enter the gas chamber even if you don't know what you've done and I never did know. Judge Odin sat at his big desk, opened a folder and Father Joe sat beside me. I was in tears by then and filled with fear. Father Joe pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and had me blow my nose. Judge Odin's secretary brought me a cup of water and I waited for the death sentence to be handed down. I was amazed when the judge told me he was assigning me to St. Francis Home for Children on a temporary basis. He never said a thing about my mother or the man she married or those two weird and abusive brothers I had. Secretly, I was hoping they were going to get the gas chamber. Nobody ever did say what prompted my assignment to St. Francis but I was assured it was a place I'd enjoy and it wasn't a prison or detention home. I remember Father Joe saying it is a home for boys and girls like me. After Judge Odin signed the papers, I left with Father Joe and we got into his black Chevy and began the trip from Juvenile Court to St. Francis. I saw that two story Spanish style building for the first time that summer morning just after my eighth birthday. It had a wrought iron fence around it but there was no gate, no guard tower and no one carrying guns. I saw kids playing games, having fun on swings and slides, and there were teenagers playing ball and obviously having fun. We drove behind the building and right then I saw a place I knew I wanted to go. It was a huge swimming pool with diving board and a lifeguard stand. Father asked me if I liked to swim and for the first time I smiled. I loved to swim. There were pool hours posted and Father said I could swim everyday the weather permitted during my designated swim hours. Hey, two hours a day of swimming? Yeah. This was St. Francis showing me a welcome mat to a peaceful life. I was led into my dorm in the North Wing and shown to my bed,a comfortable looking single bed in a small but comofortable room I would share with another boy also eight years old. His name was Jerry and from the minute we met we became friends. He'd lived here a year and loved the place. I asked him if he was going to stay until he was grown up and he said he guessed so since he was up for adoption but "nobody wants me." Father Joe patted Jerry's head and told him St. Francis of Assisi always wants him as his child. I was issued clothing, comfortable clothing, I might say. There were shorts and t shirts, jeans and sport shirts, socks, two pair of tennies as we called our tennis shoes, one pair of black dress shoes, underwear, a bath towel to exhange everyday for a new one, a hand towel and wash cloth, and my own four drawer chest. On the wall behind our two beds were brass crucifixes. On my pillow was a rosary and a medal of St. Francis on a silver chain. A child's St. Joseph Missal also was on my bed. On the wall facing the foot of our beds were paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi. I was offered my choice of religious statues for my chest of drawers and I asked for St. Francis. A Jesuit Brother went down the hall and returned with my statue of St. Francis. Jerry had one of St. Robert Bellarmine on his chest of drawers. Along the wall beside the door were two small student desks. Mine was the one in the corner. Actually even Jerry had one in the corner considering the small closet we shared was next to his desk. We had dark wooden desks and dark wooden chairs. Inside my desk, I found pencils, crayons, tablets and an eraser. Nothing was elegant but everything suggested peace. I could handle that easily after the life I'd led with my mother and that bunch on Russell Road. "Jerry will show you around, Kieran,'' Father Joe said. "We don't fly by a big rulebook here. You'll have a schedule but it's nothing to be afraid of. And don't forget we are about an hour from lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, gravy, potatos and green beans today, boys." Father and the brother with him left and Jerry began telling me about life at St. Francis. He said I would like the place and the food especially. "It's okay having seconds," he said. My new friend told me there was no rule about how to dress. We were allowed to be comfortable. "So go barefoot is you want to. I do," he said. "So do most kids here." It was easy to see my new friend dressed in the manner of Huck Finn and out in the playground I'd already noticed the boys and girls both were comfortable. It looked like a real home only it had no parents. Some kids, including me, were put there by court order and only on a temporary basis while some strange thing called an inquiry took place. I hoped it was like burning sinners at the stake and my old family might be getting cooked. No such luck as time would tell. Jerry gave me the walking tour of St. Francis, first stopping at the refectory where I whiffed the aroma of roast beef being readied for the tables. We ducked into the chapel, genuflected and paused a minute or so to say our boyhood Catholic prayers we'd learned. Jerry looked at me and suggested we do one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Gloria together so we did. Later, he told me he always offered his prayers up to the Sacred Heart with the appeal some loving family would adopt him. Next to the refectory was a theater where movies were shown twice a week. They might be travel films or sometimes a Disney film and other times a religous life would be depicted in the movie. St. Francis Home for Children never failed to appeal to our religous heritage even in the case of kids like me, and I'd gotten to a point of near despair because of my life at home. St. Francis and the Jesuit priests I met there would lead me out of that wilderness. Give credit to Father Joe who discovered my love of poetry and nurtured it with the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a Jesuit priest whose works talk of lives approaching despair but never quite crumbling into it. Hopkins always finds hope and the Jesuit priests at St. Francis would eventually give me the hope my family never gave. Lawyers eventually crawled into my life like a bunch of bedbugs or rats. The two representing my family obtained a court order requiring visitations weekly with my mother, her brutal husband and the two jokers who posed as my brothers. The priests and nuns at St. Francis were appalled. So was I. But here came the so-called family trying to protect their reputations. Neighbors had been told, I learned, that I was a bad kid and placed in detention. The neighbors on Russell Road agreed with them. Why else did they beat me so much if I wasn't a bad kid, a recalcitrant little criminal. My mother and that man in her life were determined to make themselves look good at my expense. In my own mind I wondered why a court would allow parents who so blatantly lied and brutalized me to visit. Don't the police reports mean anything to the court? It was beyond my eight year old mind to understand that strange thing called justice. It's beyond my mind even now as I stare at the thick crop of once blond hair that is now gray. But I learned quickly lawyers could do anything they wanted. They are worse than an infestation of cockroaches. They are people devoid of a conscience. If my family was well practiced at lying, lawyers were true aces at it. I learned and still believe that to be a lawyer, you first have to be a sociopath. The court's order had come out of Sacramento, not from Judge Odin. A lawyer hired by my family had done some judge shopping and found the judge he needed. Now don't get all uppity about America and justice being for all. Back then, kids and criminals were allowed to have lawyers but they had to have the money to pay for them or do without. So nobody ever represented me and the police reports were never laid before that second judge. My first three months at St. Francis were the most peaceful I'd known. It was a warm place and while strict in some ways, the nuns who ran the place were never unfair, brutal or even close to being unkind to us. I've always heard tales of nuns whacking little kids on the knuckles. It never happened to me or to anyone I knew. The toughest order I ever got from a nun was to stand on the wall, meaning face the wall for 15 minutes for some misbehavior. It was fair. Like any kid, I could chatter out of place, or get angry over something or get into a scrap with another kid. Standing on the wall was the toughest punishment I ever faced with those nuns. I did get a swat on my butt one time, one swat was all and it was with a ping pong paddle. One swat and 2000 tears later, I was doing my penance which included an apology to the boy I'd pushed down in an argument over a baseball game. Breakfast at St. Francis began at 6 a.m. with prayers from the spiral stair rostrum at the front of the refectory. We stood for the prayer and took our seats about as fast as the word "Amen" dropped from the priest's lips. For those untrained in Catholic ways, that amen came at the end of the blessing -- In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. We crossed ourselves and plopped out little butts into our chairs and grabbed our juice glasses. At every meal, the food was served family style. Plates and bowls of food were sat near the head of the table where all serving began. A priest, a brother or a nun sat at the head of every table. One of the older boys or girls sat at the foot of the table. A typical breakfast included eggs with a meat except on Friday when we'd have fish even at breakfast. The breakfast also included pancakes, French toast or waffles. Big 12-ounce glasses sat before each kid's plate and pitchers of milk were in the middle of the table. We remained seated throughout the meal waiting for a priest to climb the spiral stairway again to give us the morning announcements and close our morning meal with a prayer for our safety and health. At all times, prayers concluding the three daily meals ended with the same words: "Lead us, O Heavenly Father, to learn to forgive those who have wronged us." It made sense considering most of us kids at St. Francis were discards from the rubble heap of American family life. I was about to be thrust right back into that rubble heap because of lawyers and that judge in Sacramento. After that court order, one Saturday a month the family drove to St. Francis for a visit. So that was a Saturday I missed being on the trips to the park or out to a movie or an amusement park. Any kid who had Saturday visits required by the court lost his Saturday recreation privileges as a result of decision by the fair minded judges. Now brace yourselves because I'm about to digress again. It was such things as decisions by judges, such as the one that eventually threw me right back into the pit of hell, that led me to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not for one minute believe those words "liberty and justice for all." My life was all the proof I needed for that and as I grew into my teen years, especially at the age of 16, I was to witness the absence of liberty and justice for black Americans. So you superpatriots with you goddammed hands over your hearts, keep on lying to yourselves. Some of us know better. We had to endure the pain inflicted by your stinking American justice system. Like I said before, if you don't like my digressions, go write your own novel. And don't ask me why I don't stand when you say the stupid pledge. It is a big lie. Well, the terrible and dreaded Saturday of my first family visit came. I stood at the window of the visitor center, a building apart from the main two story building where we kids lived and the nuns and priests ruled with love in their hearts. I was nervous as I watched for the family to drive through the front gate. Sister Luke stood by me and tried to reassure me she would be nearby. That nun knew this visit was wrong but she wasn't allowed to tell me that. I could sense it though. It was around 10 a.m. when I saw the red Buick come up the drive toward the visitor center. What a joke. There they stood like perfect people dressed in their finest attire. Hell, they probably bought that stuff just to make this visit so they could convince a court they really were good parents, and convince those neighbors they were very caring because they'd gone to a reform school -- that's how they presented it -- to visit me. The old man appeared sober for a change. With Sister Luke at my side, they pawed at me and spoke so lovingly in an effort to convince this wily old nun of their good hearts. I don't think Sister was fooled at all. She sat right there in the room with me until my mother said looked at her and told her the court said the visit would be private. Sister knew the rule too so she excused herself but she was wise enough to stay close at hand. About five minutes after she left, my face was swatted by the old man as he lit into me with a tirade about my comments to the police. I'd embarassed him by telling the police the truth if what that meant. As soon as my scream went up after my face was slapped, here came Sister Luke and Father Daniel O'Casey. The sister took my hand and led me out of the room and O'Casey, who was a big man with a deep voice, bellowed out "You have to leave now. Visit over." I was taken to a washroom to clean my face of the tears and then Sister led me out the back of the building, out of view of my mother and her wonderful hubby and good sons. I remember telling Sister Luke I never wanted to see them in the first place and now I'd missed my rec day with the other kids. She understood and told me about five or six other kids also had to miss the rec day and after their visits were over, Father O'Casey would open the swimming pool for those of us left behind that day. He did. God bless Father O'Casey. Justice took its usual course and refused to allow Sister Luke and Father O'Casey to file briefs on my behalf. I had no lawyer so what had happened that first visiting day would happen again at my next visiting day. Four more times it happened and the court would deny the nun and priest standing in the case even though they had acquired a volunteer attorney from the church. Are you beginning to get my point about liberty and justice in America? The court even ruled that attorney could not represent me because I was too young to choose my own legal counsel. So he appointed one for me and that guy never once visited me. He just conceded all the points made by my parents and their two lawyers. I spent 11 months at St. Francis and just before my ninth birthday, that fair minded judge up in Sacramento ordered me out of St. Francis and back into the life of my family. Two more years of hell would be spent before two eyewitnesses stepped forward in my behalf and my time at home was terminated forever. To this day I have no idea who stepped forward but I surmise it might have been the couple who moved into the vacant house right next door to my parents on Russell Road. They always seemed like nice people. The case was back in Judge Odin's hands and this time a lawyer represented me. He was not court appointed, I might add. Somebody out there had hired him and Judge Odin, the first and only fair minded judge I've known, let him represent me. It meant, I, a boy of 10 going on 11, had been given standing in the Superior Court of the State of California. It was in Judge Odin's chambers where the question came to me from the judge himself. Did I want to be placed permanently in the custody of the state as its ward housed at St. Francis and did I want the parental rights of my so-called family terminated. The judge carefully explained his question as he asked it. My own lawyer had explained to me it would be asked. He had urged me to think about it but told me not to answer it even to him. I was to answer it only when it was asked by the judge. I stood before the judge's big desk and answered "Yessir" to both questions. After the family's two lawyers made their pleas, Judge Odin read his order declaring my family unfit and making me a ward of the state. His final words remain indelible in my memory. "Kieran Patrick (name deleted), you are hereby declared a ward of the State of California to be housed at St. Francis Home for Children in San Diego; and to immediately be made eligible for adoption." At my request, Judge Odin also terminated my use of the family name. My time in Hell had ended. I was going to the only decent home I ever would have. I was never adopted and neither was Jerry who was again to be my roommate and friend at St. Francis. We were considered too old by families seeking to adopt. You might wonder why I kept my given names, Kieran Patrick. Well, I was a bastard child. My mother, a touring musician in a band, had frolicked with a cropduster pilot the December before my birth. She got pregnant, called him and begged for help. Scott was his first name and Stratton his last. Scott told her he would raise the child, boy or girl. He was 25 and in the ensuing months he decided on two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. He wanted his son to be named Kieran Patrick and if it was a girl, she would have been Kirsten Patricia. Scott had a girlfriend who agreed to accept his child so things looked good for me before my birth. But a month before I was born, Scott Stratton's little cropdusting plane burst into flames and crashed near a farm in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. His mother had suffered a stroke and his father was unable to raise a child for him. His sister was too young and still in school and his girlfriend opted out. But I had learned about Scott Stratton and I had seen his photos and letters. He would have been a terrific dad for anyone. So when my birth name was terminated by the court, a third order of the court granted me my real biological father's last name. When I was born, my mother had given me the names chosen by my biological father in hope his parents, despite their infirmities, would take me on. Life was not to be that good to me, not at the beginning anyway. But things did get better quickly once I was home again at St. Francis. I just didn't have the good sense to stay there as you will see when the train gets rolling down the tracks. Chapter Three Seal of the Confessional Meekly, we'd clasp our hands in front of us and stand like little saints waiting our turn to kneel and squeal in the confessional. It was easy to go to confession because of the seal of silence imposed on priests who hear confessions. Still, a kid might be a little uneasy sometimes as his turn in the confessional approached, Every Saturday at noon, boys walked into the chapel at St. Francis, genuflected and ducked into a back bench and knelt in silent meditation before going to confession. As we sat there, we rubbed our beads and kept our eyes on the four confessional booths each bearing the name of the priest in that confessional. For you non-Catholics, we watched the lines closely because we knew which priest we didn't want hearing our confession. No kid in his right mind wanted to confess to Father McNulty who was the Superior of this Jesuit community. McNulty dealt out penances so tough a kid might be on his knees saying the Rosary everyday for a month. He chewed ass, to put it mildly. Confessing to Father McNulty could take a long time even for a short list of bad deeds. He lectured us about our errant ways. It was not unusual to see an older teenager leave McNulty's confessional in tears. Priests counseled us during our confessions to avoid the occasion of sin. Father McNulty would spend several minutes lecturing the penitent young sinners on that subject. When I was around 13, I once thought he was about to suggest I amputate my hand to rid myself of my occasion of sin. By the time he told me to say my Act of Contrition while he pronounced the absolution, I was wiping my tearful face on my shirt sleeve. He'd ordered me to attend a novena which is nine days of prayer, say the Rosary twice daily for a week and avoid temptation by telling myself regularly my hands were meant to work for God and for not my own immoral pleasure. You could take the same sin into Father Larimore's confessional and come out in under two minutes with a penance of one Hail Mary, one Our Father and one Gloria to be offered up to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now with that description of Saturdays at confession time, I almost wager you can figure which priest's booth we all wanted to get into. Father Larimore had a line about 10 deep at all times. Father Kearney's line was also deep even if he was a little more strict than Father Larimore. Father O'Casey's confessional was one to avoid because you were so sure he could be heard through soundproof walls. You wanted to shush him when he began questioning your activities. He was lenient, but even his whispers rattled windows. There never was a line of boys at Father McNulty's confessional but one of the nuns was present to direct a waiting sinner to the next available booth and that often landed a quivering kid in Father Superior's confessional. You could grow calluses on your knees in that booth. I used to wonder if sore knees weren't as much the cause of tears on leaving his confessional as were Father McNulty's admonitions to the repentant ones. I said we squealed in the confessional. True, we did. We squealed on ourselves. We never mentioned any other kid, boy or girl, with whom we had shared some sinful enterprise. Nor would the priests ask us to identify our companions in sin. Don't get the wrong idea. Those sins committed with others weren't sexual at all but we were kids and we knew how to swipe things like bottles of Coca-Cola off the delivery truck, or candy from the back of an open van. Now I have to contradict myself. Some of our miscreant deeds were a bit risque but they didn't include sexual assault. Since we had allowances given to us weekly -- a whole half dollar at age 12 -- four or five boys might pool enough money to pay an adult to go into some store and buy us a titallating magazine. The most popular one back in my day was Sunshine and Health. It ran about a dollar and contained about 50 browntone photos of women in their lingerie but sometimes without a bra. Rearview photos without the hindrance of panties were common. The adult we'd pay to buy the magazine, which we all called our "dirty book," would receive a half dollar from five lusty boys so there was $1.50 spent on every issue. That reduced our pocket money by 30 cents, but we'd get it all back. We recovered our entire cost by loaning the dirty book to other boys for a nickel for one hour's reading time. Whichever one of us loaned it out got the nickel. None of us was ever a loser in the fine art of loaning out the dirty book, but we often were caught by the nuns, brothers or priests. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it when we were caught and whoever got caught zipped his lips and didn't rat on his pals. By the time any of us were nabbed with the dirty book, all of us who invested in it had recovered our money several times over. There were between 60 and 70 boys ages 11 to 18 in that upstairs dormitory and nearly everyone of them spent a nickel for an hour's worth of reading time. Some guys would pay more than once for the thrills in the dirty book. It depended on who caught you as to the disposition of things. If a nun nabbed the offender, she'd have him standing in the Mother Superior's office for a lecture followed by a prayer and the order to confess the sin. At least one confessional, and usually two, would be open at all daily masses and the Mother Superior specified we had to make our confession at the next daily mass. When I was nabbed, the next morning's mass gave me only one choice of confessors, Father Daniel O'Casey. I figured everybody in the church would hear his roaring voice when I fessed up to possessing the dirty book. At least he was brief, and probably suppressed a bit of laughter when he heard what I had in my hands while lying on my bed when I was caught. I was more grateful Father McNulty wasn't the confessor who heard my great sin that morning. He might have had me punch out my eyes as well as cut off my hand. You could always tell which guys had been partners in purchasing the dirty book. They were standing at the same confessional, or avoiding communion that day. All of us thought of ourselves as the first kids in history to buy a sexy magazine and use it in strengthening our wrists and fingers. We dreaded telling priests we had used some of our allowance in the buying the book and taken money from other boys in loaning it out for reading, and other pleasures. There seemed to be a conspiracy worked out among the priests when we confessed to being capitalists who had made a bit of money on a nudie book we'd bought and loaned. Invariably, the priest, regardless of who it was, asked how much money we made and we'd give the figure. I once made about 75 cents loaning out the dirty book which meant I had a net gain of 45 cents on my 30 cent share in the investment. My penance on that occasion was to forfeit two weeks allowance, and in addition I had to drop the 75 cents in loan money into the poor box. That left me penniless for three weeks. A group of boys one day pooled a bit of their allowance and went to a restoom in a nearby cafe and bought one condom for 50 cents. The condom never was meant to be used for sex. It was just for showing off and that rubber was passed around for look-see at two pennies for a few seconds. All we did was hold that darn thing in our hands and laugh. The investors in that item also made their money back and eventually one of them was nabbed showing it off. I have no idea what the priest who heard that kid's confession asked him and I don't even know if he drew Father McNulty at the next morning's mass. In the dorm, the boys did discuss whether or not the mere possession of that condom constituted a mortal sin or a venal sin. My only experience in that line was that Father Larimore decided my handing over two cents to hold it a few seconds and get some giggles amounted to a venal sin. I suspect Father McNulty might have viewed it as the occasion of sin and maybe bordering on a mortal sin. Glad I never had to find out or I might have been worrying about what to amputate to avoid that occasion of sin. Confession sometimes put a boy into the position of being humbled before someone he offended. It was one thing to apologize to a kid you'd bopped in the eye during a brawl, but it was something else to have to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and fess up and pay for stealing candy or something else. I gained some experience in fessing up and paying. Jerry had swiped two Hershey bars and shared his booty with me. He told me how he acquired the candy but I was such a chocolate candy fiend, it didn't matter. I gobbled down the chocolate bar with delight. Nobody caught us. They didn't have to. We were well educated Catholic boys and the next morning at mass we stood at Father Kearney's booth, the only one available. When I confessed to my role as receiver of stolen goods, Father said, "How many of you got in on this chocolate candy theft?" I told him it was just me and a friend and I never once mentioned Jerry by name. I didn't have to. Jerry fessed up to his deed and both of us were given the same penance. We had to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and hand the owner a nickel each to pay for the two candy bars Jerry had taken. Mr. Dodd forgave us and accepted our money. We were worried he would banish us from his store which would have hurt tremendously since it was one of only two stores close to the orphanage and we'd already been banned at the grocery store. Our banishment from the grocery came because we, along with four other boys, had stolen the Coca-Colas off the truck delivering the bottles to the store. Jerry and a boy named Andy months before that removed a whole box of candy from the back of a delivery van at that same market. Both confessed and both had to go pay the store for the candy. Neither Jerrry nor Andy was banished from market that first time. It was the next theft, the great Coca-Cola raid, that led to the banishment and Andy wasn't involved that day. I was and from that day on, Jerry and I were banished by the manager. We were terrified what might happen if the manager caught us in the store so we avoided the place. One night Father Kearney took Jerry and me out for a drive to help him load what he called "supplies" into the trunk of his car. We thought he meant school supplies. He was talking about boxes of margarine and jelly. Father pulled up in front of that market and Jerry and I stared at each other and knew we had to tell the priest we were banished at that place. Father knew about our soft drink heist but he had no idea the manager had forbidden us to enter his store again. Nonetheless he was sure he could escort us into the store, pay for the merchandise waiting to be picked up and there would be no problem. He was wrong. As soon as we walked into the market with the priest, the manager came with his finger wagging. He told Father he was welcome to come in but he had to leave us outside in the car. He didn't even want us near the front door of his store, he told Father Kearney. He referred to us as "dammed little urchins." We blushed and began walking out but the priest told us to stay. Father Kearney told the manager why we were with him and that we had done our penance, paid for the things taken and should be given another chance. We were only 12, he told the manager. The manager was insistent. Jerry and I were never to set foot in his store again. We thought that ended the dispute. Father told us to come with him and we'd go find another store to contract for services to St. Francis Home for Children. Since the orphans' home did about $30,000 a year in business with that store, the manager relented but he set conditions. We could come to the store to help load supplies but we'd have to go on the back dock to load the boxes into Father Kearney's car. We were never to be inside his store. The manager and one of his clerks escorted Jerry and me to the dock and the clerk stood with us. That was my last time in that market. It also was the last time St. Francis Home for Children spent a penny at that store. The contract went to a store in Mission Beach after that. Jesuits believe in forgiveness and when an errant youth confessed his sin to a priest then made amends to the person offended, which we had done, the priests believed forgiveness should be awarded. The unforgiving attitude of the store manager cost his store the business of the large community at St. Francis. It was declared off limits to all residents of St. Francis from that day on. I never participated in theft after that time nor did Andy. Jerry's fingers were a bit more sticky so he had to learn the hard way by losing privileges and large parts of his allowance but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was no longer lifting things from stores. A loss of privileges involved real penalties. It meant spending movie nights in the detention room with whichever nun might be in charge. His penalties also cut into his allowance. Each year, if we had good behavior, we would receive a raise in our allowance. A 15 or 16 year old got a dollar a week, a lot of money in the 1950s. Misconduct could cost a kid his annual raise in allowance. Detention didn't mean sit and study. It meant sitting on a hardwood bench in silence for an hour at a time, hands folded in your lap. An hour is a long time in a kid's life and Jerry probably held the all time record for detentions at St. Francis. I know he had around 30 of them at one time posted on the yellow sheet outside the office of the Prefect of Discipline. Detention was always served a day at a time. Any kid on detention on weekends lost the weekend trips but only spent one hour a day in the detention room. The rest of his day might be spent at ping pong, throwing a ball, or just walking around the campus. Leaving the campus would add 5 detentions and the one being served would not be credited which meant you actually had six added. Jerry was not a bad kid, not at all. He never injured anyone physically other then in defending himself and he could be ferocious in that regard. Like many of us, he'd been abused at home and it took a time to get over the effects of it. Jerry was a very gentle kid, considerate of others, a fun kid to know and be around, always willing to share his softball or his glove or bat. If another boy was injured in a game, Jerry was the first to stop the game to make sure the kid was not badly hurt. Teachers liked him and so did all the kids at St. Francis. He just had some hard times growing up and learning to trust and be trusted, but at St. Francis the patience of good leaders guided most us to productive lives. We earned points for acts of good citizenship. Points didn't earn money for you but they did get special favors such as a new mitt, a ball, a cap, a set of much desired swim trunks or tickets to be exchanged for rental of roller skates at the Rollerdrome, or a surfboard at Ocean Beach Pier. We also earned points for amusement park rides and that old Mission Beach roller coaster kept my eyes on the straight and narrow many times. Kids at St. Francis developed bonds with each other. We depended on each other and through the subtle teachings of the Jesuit priests we kept each other away from trouble. Older kids became counselors to the younger children, helping them with homework and soothing their anguished hearts. Death does not distinguish the young from the old and we learned that lesson three times during my stay at St. Francis. Twice it claimed the lives of older boys, both times from illness. Tom was 17 when he fell ill with spinal meningitis and died about three weeks later. He was the elected dormitory president and we all respected him Vince was a tall Italian boy who suffered from asthma and died one night in the infirmary while waiting for the ambulance to take him to Childrens Hospital. He also was 17. David and I were 12 when he died in an accident. We had been close friends. We were both members of the St. Francis Boy Choir and I was called on to sing the boy soprano solo part of the Sanctus at his requiem mass. My body trembled as I sang, accompanied by the organist. Somehow I got through it and then broke into tears. Even today when I hear the mournful Sanctus of Hector Berlioz, I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and my memory fills with images of David. He had straight blond hair that spilled over the sides of his head, a slender kid but about an inch or maybe two inches taller than me. He was nearsighted and wore glasses. He was a rare kid who never joined the crowd in poking fun at someone. David was the sort of kid who would stand by the victim of ridicule and befriend him. He wasn't a loudmouth. He was a leader among us. I guess it is such kids as David who are chosen by the Almighty to be called from the earth in their youth. Their dying leaves the model of a good life to remember. I have never forgotten my friend and he had an enduring impact on me. My own son carries his name today and he too has blond straight hair flopping over the side of his head, and he also wears glasses. Chapter Four Humor on top Father McNulty, the Superior of this Jesuit community, was a lean and lanky man in his sixties. His bulbous nose ended in a bright red hue which was often the subject of jokes in the dorm. His ruddy face rarely broke into a smile but when it did, the occasion would set off laughter in any room. Father seemed to reserve his Irish wit for special occasions, such as Thanksgiving dinner in the refectory, a night he chose to mounted the spiral staircase to deliver the greetings, the prayer and a brief homily. After the dinner, the priest strode up the spiral stairs, blessed us and then delivered his Thanksgiving homily which lasted about five minutes. After his prayer, he said he had a few announcements. When Father McNulty said he had announcements, all eyes turned to him. He momentarily fell silent, grimacing and gripping the podium. Not a single priest, nun or brother rose to go to his aid and we kept staring at the grimacing old man. His feet shuffled and suddenly the sound of a loud fart echoed from where he stood. Kids dropped their heads and bit their lips to restrain their laughter. "Oh, I feel so much better now," Father McNulty said with a smile creasing his craggy face. The laughter of the young orphans grew louder but we couldn't help noticing the priests, nuns and brothers all had well contained smiles as if they knew Father McNulty was up to something. The old priest leaned over and picked up the small rug on the podium and removed a whoopee cushion and held it aloft for all to see. "Whoppee!" he proclaimed. "Now who do you suppose bought this little device?" Father McNulty's eyes immediately fell on me. "Come, come, Kieran, is this perhaps yours?" I blushed and finally stood and muttered, "Yes, Father. I'm sorry, but I didn't put it up there for you to step on." He assured me he knew I hadn't placed it up there. "I placed it here, son, right beneath my feet," he said. Jerry and Andy immediately rose and admitted their complicity in the whoopee cushion. "How much did you boys pay for this?" Father asked. I told him we'd paid 49 cents for it at the magic shop. The shop was popular among the boys at St. Francis. We often bought stinky bombs there to set off in the dorm at night, or rubber snakes or spiders to place beneath the sheets of a boy's bed. The black widow spiders were more realistic than the snakes and always provoked fear when a boy's feet touched a whole colony of them under his sheet. The snakes looked real only from a distance but under the sheets they felt very icky. In my time at St. Francis, I was the victim of the snake and spider treatment at separate times. So were all the boys. The whoopee cushion was a new device at the magic shop. The older ones often didn't go off when someone sat on them because the rubber sealed tightly. But these new ones had a softer outlet pipe. The instructions told us for the more splattering sounds, use a blob of cream in the tube, and for really explosive sounds, use a touch of cream in the tube. Our intention in buying the whoopee cushion had been to place it under the thin cushion of our dorm president's wooden chair in the refectory. Thomas, the president in 1952 when this incident took place, had a great sense of humor but he could be a bossy guy and was a bit arrogant. Seniors tend to get that way as most high school kids can tell you. Since Andy, Jerry and I were assigned that day to the morning crew to set tables in the refectory, we lightly creamed the whoopee cushion and slid it beneath the cloth on his chair. It never went off, of course, and we had no idea why until the big evening meal that Thanksgiving Day. The three of us sat at our table not knowing if we about to be shamed by the Superior or counseled in public by him. He held that little red rubber cushion in his hand, wagging it back and forth as he talked. He remained serious for only a few seconds then broke into a grin. "God gave us a sense of humor so that we might have a means of overcoming the tensions of our days," Father said. Father told the whole gathering how he'd seen us sneak the little rubber bag under the cloth cushion on Thomas' chair that morning. In his finest Irish brogue, he told us he had once been a boy and enjoyed playing such jokes on schoolmates and even on his teachers. "But this is a much finer bag than the ones we had when I was a boy," he said with a grin. "In my day, those bags often just went 'Whoosh' and we were so disappointed." The kids in the refectory laughed merrily as Father McNulty continued to regale us with tales of his days in Ireland and pranks he'd played on his schoolmates and some pranks played on him. "Do you children realize even priests play pranks on each other? Yes, we do. At our morning staff meeting today, I placed Kieran's little whoopee cushion on Father Latimore's chair and he came up from his chair exclaiming the sound didn't come from him. That made it all the funnier," he said. He looked once more into my eyes and this time apologized for thwarting my little joke on Thomas. "I just couldn't resist playing that same joke on Father Latimore," he said. With that Father McNulty once more blessed the gathering and offered a benediction. When he came down the staircase, he called out to me. "Here, son, enjoy your little pranks," he said. "This harms no one and it brought laughter and joy to us all. The essence of a good sense of humor is that it never injures others and it does not subject them to ridicule. God would approve of your choice of pranks." In the days ahead, Father McNulty talked more about the humor of young people. He was never averse to using himself as the butt of a joke to make his point. Once during a homily he mentioned he'd had one of the other priests take him to a liquor store a few nights earlier. To assure he had our full attention, Father employed a joke told by the boys in the dorm. "In case you wonder why I had to go to a liquor store," he said, "I needed some new red lights for my nose." We had no idea he knew about us joking that from time to time he bought new red lights for his nose. His story that night led into the revelation the owner of the store had reported two older teens from St. Francis for trying to purchase a bottle of whiskey from him. Although Father never mentioned the names of the boys, all of us on the second floor knew he was talking about two seniors on our floor, Tony and Julio. Both were 17 and thought surely they looked 21 and for that matter, so did we. I was 14 at the time but wise enough not to try my boyish face in any liquor store. Father said the good man who owned the liquor store didn't turn the boys into the police, He knew them as boys from the orphanage so he called Father McNulty to tell him two of his charges had tried to foist fake ID cards on him. The proprietor described the boys perfectly and Father met them both as they walked in the back door of St. Francis. Father took up the fake ID cards which were Selective Service System cards they'd purchased on the street. "I may be old and my eyesight might not be as sharp as it once was,'' Father said, "but I'm like the liquor store owner. I could see the two culprits didn't weigh anywhere close to 170 and 180 pounds as the ID cards said they did. And they also don't have blue eyes." Julio weighed about 130 pounds and Tony weighed about 140. Both had dark brown eyes and were slender. About the only thing on the ID cards that matched them was the heighth. Both were about 6 feet tall. "I wonder," Father McNulty said, "what our boys were going to do with a pint bottle of a whiskey called Mellow Corn. You don't suppose they were going to give it to Father O'Casey for his birthday, do you? What an awful choice of whiskey. Father O'Casey drinks Old Bushmill, not that cheap yellow stuff our two good boys tried to buy." Father then revealed he and his fellow priests had bought Father O'Casey a fifth of Old Bushmill for his birthday then added, "That's why I had Father Kearney drive me to the liquor store. Of course, I also bought those red lights for my nose while I was there." He then proceeded to tell us about the hazards of alcohol being consumed by young people. When the young try to act out the roles of adults, they invariably do so with excesses. A boy who sneaks off to smoke will smoke 10 cigarettes and finally quit when he's turned green and sick. A boy using alcohol thinks drunkenness is to be admired and sets out to prove he can hold his liquor only to become fall down drunk, vomiting and, if he is lucky, ends up the next day with a violent hangover, unable to eat and wishing he'd never done that. The boy less fortunate, he said, may wind up in a jail cell, a hospital ward or even dead from alcohol poisoning. "The young tend to excesses, never considering there are limits even for them," he said. While his tone was serious, Father McNulty freely sprinkled his message with humor to hold the attention of his young audience. We used to joke among ourselves that Father McNulty went to the liquor store to buy batteries for the red lights in his nostrils. </div>v style="text-align: center;">Black Robes</div> Jesuits don't wear the traditional button-up and button-down cassock other priests wear. The Jebs have their own style and it's a black robe tied with a sash. No buttons. It's one of many things that distinguish the Jesuit priest from other priests and it goes back to origins of the Society of Jesus, back in the 16th century. Jesuits are tradition bound but non-traditional when compared to other orders of priests. As a group, Jesuits are the scholars of Catholocism. As a boy schooled by Jesuits I found myself wondering about a vocation as a priest. It's not something romantic like being a soldier of fortune or a great actor. It is a sense the boy is being summoned by God to a calling. By the time he reaches 15, the youngster begins to weigh in his mind what he is surrendering if he becomes a priest and girls are chief among those things to be given up. It's one thing for kids to play tag or hide and seek with girls, or a softball game or hit the beach for surfing or volleyball. It's quite another to decide you will forego sexual pleasures with women and to give up thoughts of fathering children. Half a boy's brainpower at 15 is spent in reveries about sleeping with a girl. Much of his time in the confessional may be devoted to how he handles that when alone. By the time he is 16, a boy's homones are like thunder and lightning. He imagines flesh and muscle of girls, thinks of the often erroneous lessons on sex he's learned from other boys and chances are, if the boy was like me, all he'd ever seen of a naked female was in that magazine he called the dirty book. Teenage boys are like male dogs, always in heat. At that age, I used to wonder how guys could surrender that to become priests. What is a priestly calling, anyway? Not even a priest can answer that one. But any kid in a Catholic school knows what it takes to become a priest. If he chooses to become a Jesuit, it was a 15 year term in the seminary back when I was a boy. It began with two years in the novitiate, a time of virtual silence for the budding young seminarian. There was a period set aside for the novices to speak, but they had to speak Latin even in casual conversations with each other. "Latine, Frater," a Jesuit seminarian would be admonished if he spoke in English to a fellow seminarian or to a priest. The two years in the novitiate were a time of contemplation, meditation, reflection and decision. To be sure there were classes. Jesuits, after all, are educators. In that two year novitiate, a young seminarian would become steeped in classics, religious studies, science and, of course, Latin. The novice immersed himself in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the mass, the prayers of the Church, and when walking the novitiate grounds, he usually looked like he was muttering to himself as he stared into some little book in his hands. Actually, he was muttering to himself. In Latin, of course. Those first two years in the Jesuit seminary compare well to life as a Benedictine monk bound by the vow of silence. If a youngster finishes the two years in the novitiate, he has a decision to make. Will he or won't he take his first vows? During the time in the novitiate, a seminarian can pack his bag and leave at will. Once he takes those first vows, called temporal vows, he is bound under a religious contract with the Almighty. The vows can be terminated and the seminarian departs but few make that move once they complete the novitiate. The next step in a young Jesuit seminarian's life is spent in the Juniorate. That's real school, full time college plus the schooling to become a priest. Language studies, math, sciences, literature, writing, art and music fill out these years. Religous studies are the main component, though. At the end of that time, the young Jesuit isn't through with school. He's then in the Philosophate for three years. After seven years of intense study, contemplation, prayer and reflection, the average Jesuit will be around 24 years-old and will have an education that is worth at least one PhD. Two things occur at this stage. First, the seminary student takes his final or perpetual vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. He is now commited for a lifetime as a Jesuit. The second thing the young seminarian encounters is his first experience in the field as a teacher. The time is known as the Regency and the young Jeb spends three years at it. He could be sent anywhere on the planet the Jesuits have a community devoted to teaching. It is common to put the new teacher in a place where his faith and commitment are truly tested, such as a mosquito infested country in the South Pacific or Central America. After Regency, the seminarian returns to his Province's university and is considered to be in the Jesuit Theosophate for four years. The focus is on comple Current Mood: Reflective Current Music: James Galway: Meditations (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 15th, 2003
4:00 pm	Kindly Light: The Life of A Discard KINDLY LIGHT: Life as a Discard S.T. Stratton sts@thedoghousemail.com Page 1. Chapter One Life on Russell Road Maybe I ought to tell this story as some omniscent observer, a sort of spirit staring down at life. Hell, you'd call that being a fly on the wall. I don't want to be a fly on the wall. Somebody might smack me with a newspaper and I'd never finish this damn book. So let me lead you on this trip. Don't hold my hand. Just walk beside me and keep your hands off me. We're walking up long steep hill now along a sidewalk, woods on either side of the street. This is Russell Road and your breath is going to come in short pants before we reach the first house ahead of us. That's where Didi and Robin lived, two pretty girls who gave me and other boys wet dreams. Robin is dead now. She was killed in a head-on collision one night on a bridge. Her boyfriend was drunk, veered into the oncoming traffic and Robin wound up in a casket at the age of 19. Robin had dark brown hair, brown eyes and a body that stepped right out of a Playboy centerfold. She had all the assets, tits, shapely hips, beautiful legs and an ass that set fires in guys' hearts. Now Robin was seven years older than I but that didn't stop me from drooling once my hormones starting nipping at me. Didi was lean, lanky and had the misfortune of being flatchested. Guys still got off daydreaming about her. She sure wasn't ordinary but she just didn't have those assets I mentioned about Robin. Sit awhile here in front of the house where those girls lived. This is the house where Robin and Didi lived with their mothers who were sisters. I have no idea what happened to their fathers. Maybe they just took off. We never heard anybody speak of them. The girls were not sisters. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters and teachers. Like all the houses on this street, it is a white frame structure built about 1925. I wasn't around then so can't say for sure but the style is one common in that time. Big front porches with swings, metal chairs and two or three steps to climb to the porch. Everybody who walked up this hill would stop right here to sit on the wall in front of the house where Didi and Robin lived. Old Mrs. Carrick told me one day the way to stop breathing so fast from the long uphill climb was to sit here and do five fast and short breaths. It worked. The best thing about this wall is it isn't high right here and that's because of the steep grade. It's about three feet high here, just perfect for a brief rest. Let's go on up the hill now. It begins to flatten a bit now as we approach a midpoint. Look across the street at those woods full of big oaks and pines. I used to run hide in those woods to escape things I'm going to tell you about. The woods became my refuge when the old man went on a tear and stripped my pants off me to lash me with four foot long switches he'd cut for my beatings. Beating me was the old man's entertainment. So we walk past the old Gregory home then the Moyers and the Cranstons and the Smithsons. Just in case you're wondering, those are not their real names. Some of these people really were innocent and decent people so I'll protect them and not even reveal the real names of the others. Russell Road flattens right here in front of the Cranstons. Across the street, the woods end at that point and there's the house of the strangest people on the street, the Fortis family. Next to them going up the hill is the Swanson's house and then the Willmans. Then comes Mrs. Carrick's duplex and her tenant is Mrs. Stryker and her son, Hugo. Best I can tell you about Hugo is that he was one of two people I knew as a child who hated Jews. I saw Hugo bash a Jewish kid one day and it had me in tears. Now the other guy who hated Jews was the old man, the head of the house where I lived. I won't call him my father because he wasn't. He used every epithet in the books to describe Jews, blacks, Orientals, Hispanics and he had a few more epithets for everyone except his own brothers, sisters and that weird woman he called Mo-Ma. Yeah, she was his mother and lived to be 84 and if she ever smiled, I never saw it. She was as petty as he was. So was one of his brothers who owned a big business in town and so was one of his sisters. Keep that sister in mind. Her name was Lizzie and she was full of hate. Well this house right here with the long front porch, the white swing and two green metal chairs is where I lived for about 7 years. Look down the driveway and you can see the basement windows. That first set of windows is the whipping room the old man built. He kept his collection of switches there and built a platform for me to stand on while he beat hell out of me. That platform was two feet by two feet square and about eight inches high. I'd be home, listening to the radio and he'd come grab my hand and haul me down the basement steps, 13 of them. I counted them so that's why I know there were 13 steps. I'd be begging him not to beat me but it did no good. He held my wrist so tight the circulation would be cut off before reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he'd yank me to the right into that whipping room, force me onto his platform, rip off my pants and underpants and throw one arm around my neck to hold me and then came the lashes. I once counted 28. I'd catch glimpses of his face as he lashed me and what I remember most is that goddammed lascivious grin on his face depicting the joy he got out of beating me. I was six years old when those beatings started and they continued until I left that place when I was 11. I never gave him a reason to whip me. Didn't have to. It was strictly perverted entertainment for him. Was he a pervert in the true sense? Oh yeah. He was the most pornographic human I've ever known. If I didn't like certain foods like fried chard, boiled okra, stewed yellow squash and pork fat, I tried to shove it aside on my plate. The old man's fist would come flying into my face because I didn't like the food he liked and I'd go sailing out of my chair onto the floor and he'd grab my wrist and off we'd go to his whipping room. Time after time that happened in my years around that bastard. Did my mother care? Not a bit. She seemed to enjoy the beatings as much as he did. I recall several times when she'd lash out at me with slaps in the face, or she'd grab the belt off my pants and use it to blast away at me. She always made up excuses for it. Mother was a damned liar and also had that disease known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was her proxy. She used me to gain sympathy for herself. She'd make up lies about me and spread them like butter on bread and that served to get her family on her side. Her mother made no attempt to hide the fact she hated me. Neither did her brothers except for one, Charlie. But Charlie had been an outcast himself so he and I eventually became close but I was 22 by then. I had two brothers, or what is passed off as brothers. The older one loved the beatings I got and arranged several for me on days he'd get bored and wanted to hear me scream for my life. I used to swim in the river which was forbidden so he'd run tell that couple passed off to me as parents about it. What he didn't tell was that he also was swimming in the river. And big brother used to enjoy hurling insults at me. He got points for abusing me, I guess. I know they had nothing but praise for him. The younger one discovered my plight and decided he could make points by getting me in trouble too so he did. Brothers? Not really. Not to me anyway. Now my mother had a brother named Jack and that is his real name. I use it for a reason. He was a pedophile and I was his target. Twice when I was young, he tried to sodomize me. The first time I just poked him in the face with my elbow and he quit but slapped me in the face and on the side of my head. He warned me I had better not tell or he'd beat me up. He was 30 then and I was about 9. The second time he did it I was 11 and his brother, Charlie, was asleep in a room across the hall from me. Jack was drunk that night and crawled in my bed and began poking his erection at my butt. He had my hair in his hand that time but I shouted and Charlie heard it and came running. Charlie proved he was my friend that night. He grabbed Jack and the two of them went off in Charlie's car. Next morning when I saw Jack he had two black eyes, a broken nose and some missing teeth. According to the account his mother gave, Jack was beaten up by two thugs at a barbecue restaurant! I knew better. Charlie winked at me and I knew right away how that asshole brother of his got his beating. It struck me as odd two thugs would beat up a guy but not take his expensive watch, his wallet, or money from his pocket. Truth never got in my grandmother's way. It never got in the way of my mother either, or that old man she'd married. Or anybody in his family or in my mother's family. Except for Charlie. He was so candid he was hated. Charlie left home after that and moved to Seattle. I missed him and wrote him. He wrote back always in the tone of a truly caring man. Once he told me he understood my fear and wished he and his new wife, Marguerite, could adopt me. I wished they could have. Even after I left that place, that thing that was passed off as my home on Russell Road, I kept writing Charlie and Marguerite and they wrote back within a week everytime. Chapter Two St. Francis Home for Children Look at this photo of the old orphanage. It was built around 1900, a Spanish style stucco two-story building. See the two wings, one on the north end and the other on the south? Those were our dormitories. Boys lived in the North Wing and girls lived in the South Wing. Walk that long corridor between the two wings and you came to a wall. I have no idea what was on the south side of the wall. That was the girls' side of it, but over here where I lived in the boys' area the wall had a lifesize statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird. Behind him was that prayer I came to love so much and said so often while kneeling and lighting my candle. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. I was 8 years-old the first time I came to St. Francis, rescued from the violent ways of my home life on Russell Road. This old white stucco building was where I discovered peace and love for the first time. Kids under 10 slept on the first floor, boys to the north and girls to the south. On the first floor we were not separated by a wall. It was administrative offices, the refectory and the chapel that kept boys and girls apart down there. We went to school at St. Anne's School which was about a half mile southwest of the orphanage over at Mission Beach. St. Anne's almost touched the beach while St. Francis sat about eight blocks from the ocean up on the slope here. God, I loved that place and those cool Pacific breezes day and night. San Diego was a Navy town then. It still is but sailors and marines today are much better behaved. When I was at St. Francis we were never allowed to go downtown. Broadway back then was nothing but taverns, drunken servicemen and whores. Well, they did have locker clubs like the old Seven Seas for sailors and marines to buy space to change into civvies. Anytime we left the campus at St. Francis, we went on a blue and white bus and they'd haul us to the San Diego Zoo, a neighborhood movie theater to see Walt Disney films, or to a park distant from the servicemen. San Diego then and now has more parks than nearly any city in the world so we had plenty of places to go and they took us on trips every weekend. There would be four or five nuns along, a couple of priests and some of the Jesuit Brothers. They served as our guardians but they also were great guys to get into a softball game, touch football, and soccer. That's where I first learned to play soccer and that was long before it was popular in most of the United States. I loved to run and I'd get one of the brothers to tag along on a quiet jog around a park. I have no idea how far we'd run or how long either. Time and distance didn't mean a thing. It was my thinking time. Brother Phillip understood I wanted quiet when running and he seemed to enjoy the solitude as much as I did. Father Joe Kearney, a Jesuit priest, sometimes joined us while we ran. Father Joe had a girlfriend but not many people knew it. I spotted her waiting for him in the park one day when he, Brother Phillip and I were running. Father Joe veered off to catch up to this woman whose name was Anita. I won't say her middle and last names but I will tell you the initials of her three given names, including her confirmation name, came out AMDG. Why do I tell you that? Okay, I'll tell you why. Father wrote mystery stories and novels and he sold them. One of his mystery novels had a dedication in the front of the book. It read this way: "To AMDG" . Father was no dummie. He'd never have used her initials if they had been anything else. Among the Jesuits, AMDG stands for the motto of the Society of Jesus -- Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For you who don't understand Latin, in English it means For the Greater Glory of God. So Father Joe would run over with his woman friend and disappear for a little while. I have no idea where they went. Maybe they found a park bench to sit on or a concession stand out in the woods. Brother Phillip and I just kept running. I knew about Father Joe's woman friend when I was eight and she was still his friend when I made my second and final trip to St. Francis Home for Children at the age of 11. As I grew into my teen years, I began to understand even a vow of chastity has to be renewed every so often. I suspect Father Joe renewed his a little more often than some other priests. But I digress. If you don't like digression, go write your own damned novel. This is mine and I'll tell it my way. I go off on tangents just like Father Joe veered off on tangents from our running to hook up with AMDG. In geometry, if you remember your days in that dull subject, a tangent is a diversion from a course along a line, or you might go off on a tangent while you're out running and spot a cute woman. Hot pants are a known cause of tangents and AMDG was Miss Hot Pants. Get it now? My first trip to St. Francis occurred so quietly I hardly knew what was going on. I'd been taken by police to Juvenile Court and figured whatever it was the old man hated in me, the law must hate even worse. I kept looking for the gas chamber while I sat in Judge Odin's chambers. When he arrived in his black robe he looked just like a Jesuit priest and he had one of them with him. It was Father Joe. That made me sure my execution was at hand. I honestly felt that way. When your whole family keeps beating you up and telling you that you're bad, evil, and all that, you figure a courtroom is your last stop before you enter the gas chamber even if you don't know what you've done and I never did know. Judge Odin sat at his big desk, opened a folder and Father Joe sat beside me. I was in tears by then and filled with fear. Father Joe pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and had me blow my nose. Judge Odin's secretary brought me a cup of water and I waited for the death sentence to be handed down. I was amazed when the judge told me he was assigning me to St. Francis Home for Children on a temporary basis. He never said a thing about my mother or the man she married or those two weird and abusive brothers I had. Secretly, I was hoping they were going to get the gas chamber. Nobody ever did say what prompted my assignment to St. Francis but I was assured it was a place I'd enjoy and it wasn't a prison or detention home. I remember Father Joe saying it is a home for boys and girls like me. After Judge Odin signed the papers, I left with Father Joe and we got into his black Chevy and began the trip from Juvenile Court to St. Francis. I saw that two story Spanish style building for the first time that summer morning just after my eighth birthday. It had a wrought iron fence around it but there was no gate, no guard tower and no one carrying guns. I saw kids playing games, having fun on swings and slides, and there were teenagers playing ball and obviously having fun. We drove behind the building and right then I saw a place I knew I wanted to go. It was a huge swimming pool with diving board and a lifeguard stand. Father asked me if I liked to swim and for the first time I smiled. I loved to swim. There were pool hours posted and Father said I could swim everyday the weather permitted during my designated swim hours. Hey, two hours a day of swimming? Yeah. This was St. Francis showing me a welcome mat to a peaceful life. I was led into my dorm in the North Wing and shown to my bed,a comfortable looking single bed in a small but comofortable room I would share with another boy also eight years old. His name was Jerry and from the minute we met we became friends. He'd lived here a year and loved the place. I asked him if he was going to stay until he was grown up and he said he guessed so since he was up for adoption but "nobody wants me." Father Joe patted Jerry's head and told him St. Francis of Assisi always wants him as his child. I was issued clothing, comfortable clothing, I might say. There were shorts and t shirts, jeans and sport shirts, socks, two pair of tennies as we called our tennis shoes, one pair of black dress shoes, underwear, a bath towel to exhange everyday for a new one, a hand towel and wash cloth, and my own four drawer chest. On the wall behind our two beds were brass crucifixes. On my pillow was a rosary and a medal of St. Francis on a silver chain. A child's St. Joseph Missal also was on my bed. On the wall facing the foot of our beds were paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi. I was offered my choice of religious statues for my chest of drawers and I asked for St. Francis. A Jesuit Brother went down the hall and returned with my statue of St. Francis. Jerry had one of St. Robert Bellarmine on his chest of drawers. Along the wall beside the door were two small student desks. Mine was the one in the corner. Actually even Jerry had one in the corner considering the small closet we shared was next to his desk. We had dark wooden desks and dark wooden chairs. Inside my desk, I found pencils, crayons, tablets and an eraser. Nothing was elegant but everything suggested peace. I could handle that easily after the life I'd led with my mother and that bunch on Russell Road. "Jerry will show you around, Kieran,'' Father Joe said. "We don't fly by a big rulebook here. You'll have a schedule but it's nothing to be afraid of. And don't forget we are about an hour from lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, gravy, potatos and green beans today, boys." Father and the brother with him left and Jerry began telling me about life at St. Francis. He said I would like the place and the food especially. "It's okay having seconds," he said. My new friend told me there was no rule about how to dress. We were allowed to be comfortable. "So go barefoot is you want to. I do," he said. "So do most kids here." It was easy to see my new friend dressed in the manner of Huck Finn and out in the playground I'd already noticed the boys and girls both were comfortable. It looked like a real home only it had no parents. Some kids, including me, were put there by court order and only on a temporary basis while some strange thing called an inquiry took place. I hoped it was like burning sinners at the stake and my old family might be getting cooked. No such luck as time would tell. Jerry gave me the walking tour of St. Francis, first stopping at the refectory where I whiffed the aroma of roast beef being readied for the tables. We ducked into the chapel, genuflected and paused a minute or so to say our boyhood Catholic prayers we'd learned. Jerry looked at me and suggested we do one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Gloria together so we did. Later, he told me he always offered his prayers up to the Sacred Heart with the appeal some loving family would adopt him. Next to the refectory was a theater where movies were shown twice a week. They might be travel films or sometimes a Disney film and other times a religous life would be depicted in the movie. St. Francis Home for Children never failed to appeal to our religous heritage even in the case of kids like me, and I'd gotten to a point of near despair because of my life at home. St. Francis and the Jesuit priests I met there would lead me out of that wilderness. Give credit to Father Joe who discovered my love of poetry and nurtured it with the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a Jesuit priest whose works talk of lives approaching despair but never quite crumbling into it. Hopkins always finds hope and the Jesuit priests at St. Francis would eventually give me the hope my family never gave. Lawyers eventually crawled into my life like a bunch of bedbugs or rats. The two representing my family obtained a court order requiring visitations weekly with my mother, her brutal husband and the two jokers who posed as my brothers. The priests and nuns at St. Francis were appalled. So was I. But here came the so-called family trying to protect their reputations. Neighbors had been told, I learned, that I was a bad kid and placed in detention. The neighbors on Russell Road agreed with them. Why else did they beat me so much if I wasn't a bad kid, a recalcitrant little criminal. My mother and that man in her life were determined to make themselves look good at my expense. In my own mind I wondered why a court would allow parents who so blatantly lied and brutalized me to visit. Don't the police reports mean anything to the court? It was beyond my eight year old mind to understand that strange thing called justice. It's beyond my mind even now as I stare at the thick crop of once blond hair that is now gray. But I learned quickly lawyers could do anything they wanted. They are worse than an infestation of cockroaches. They are people devoid of a conscience. If my family was well practiced at lying, lawyers were true aces at it. I learned and still believe that to be a lawyer, you first have to be a sociopath. The court's order had come out of Sacramento, not from Judge Odin. A lawyer hired by my family had done some judge shopping and found the judge he needed. Now don't get all uppity about America and justice being for all. Back then, kids and criminals were allowed to have lawyers but they had to have the money to pay for them or do without. So nobody ever represented me and the police reports were never laid before that second judge. My first three months at St. Francis were the most peaceful I'd known. It was a warm place and while strict in some ways, the nuns who ran the place were never unfair, brutal or even close to being unkind to us. I've always heard tales of nuns whacking little kids on the knuckles. It never happened to me or to anyone I knew. The toughest order I ever got from a nun was to stand on the wall, meaning face the wall for 15 minutes for some misbehavior. It was fair. Like any kid, I could chatter out of place, or get angry over something or get into a scrap with another kid. Standing on the wall was the toughest punishment I ever faced with those nuns. I did get a swat on my butt one time, one swat was all and it was with a ping pong paddle. One swat and 2000 tears later, I was doing my penance which included an apology to the boy I'd pushed down in an argument over a baseball game. Breakfast at St. Francis began at 6 a.m. with prayers from the spiral stair rostrum at the front of the refectory. We stood for the prayer and took our seats about as fast as the word "Amen" dropped from the priest's lips. For those untrained in Catholic ways, that amen came at the end of the blessing -- In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. We crossed ourselves and plopped out little butts into our chairs and grabbed our juice glasses. At every meal, the food was served family style. Plates and bowls of food were sat near the head of the table where all serving began. A priest, a brother or a nun sat at the head of every table. One of the older boys or girls sat at the foot of the table. A typical breakfast included eggs with a meat except on Friday when we'd have fish even at breakfast. The breakfast also included pancakes, French toast or waffles. Big 12-ounce glasses sat before each kid's plate and pitchers of milk were in the middle of the table. We remained seated throughout the meal waiting for a priest to climb the spiral stairway again to give us the morning announcements and close our morning meal with a prayer for our safety and health. At all times, prayers concluding the three daily meals ended with the same words: "Lead us, O Heavenly Father, to learn to forgive those who have wronged us." It made sense considering most of us kids at St. Francis were discards from the rubble heap of American family life. I was about to be thrust right back into that rubble heap because of lawyers and that judge in Sacramento. After that court order, one Saturday a month the family drove to St. Francis for a visit. So that was a Saturday I missed being on the trips to the park or out to a movie or an amusement park. Any kid who had Saturday visits required by the court lost his Saturday recreation privileges as a result of decision by the fair minded judges. Now brace yourselves because I'm about to digress again. It was such things as decisions by judges, such as the one that eventually threw me right back into the pit of hell, that led me to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not for one minute believe those words "liberty and justice for all." My life was all the proof I needed for that and as I grew into my teen years, especially at the age of 16, I was to witness the absence of liberty and justice for black Americans. So you superpatriots with you goddammed hands over your hearts, keep on lying to yourselves. Some of us know better. We had to endure the pain inflicted by your stinking American justice system. Like I said before, if you don't like my digressions, go write your own novel. And don't ask me why I don't stand when you say the stupid pledge. It is a big lie. Well, the terrible and dreaded Saturday of my first family visit came. I stood at the window of the visitor center, a building apart from the main two story building where we kids lived and the nuns and priests ruled with love in their hearts. I was nervous as I watched for the family to drive through the front gate. Sister Luke stood by me and tried to reassure me she would be nearby. That nun knew this visit was wrong but she wasn't allowed to tell me that. I could sense it though. It was around 10 a.m. when I saw the red Buick come up the drive toward the visitor center. What a joke. There they stood like perfect people dressed in their finest attire. Hell, they probably bought that stuff just to make this visit so they could convince a court they really were good parents, and convince those neighbors they were very caring because they'd gone to a reform school -- that's how they presented it -- to visit me. The old man appeared sober for a change. With Sister Luke at my side, they pawed at me and spoke so lovingly in an effort to convince this wily old nun of their good hearts. I don't think Sister was fooled at all. She sat right there in the room with me until my mother said looked at her and told her the court said the visit would be private. Sister knew the rule too so she excused herself but she was wise enough to stay close at hand. About five minutes after she left, my face was swatted by the old man as he lit into me with a tirade about my comments to the police. I'd embarassed him by telling the police the truth if what that meant. As soon as my scream went up after my face was slapped, here came Sister Luke and Father Daniel O'Casey. The sister took my hand and led me out of the room and O'Casey, who was a big man with a deep voice, bellowed out "You have to leave now. Visit over." I was taken to a washroom to clean my face of the tears and then Sister led me out the back of the building, out of view of my mother and her wonderful hubby and good sons. I remember telling Sister Luke I never wanted to see them in the first place and now I'd missed my rec day with the other kids. She understood and told me about five or six other kids also had to miss the rec day and after their visits were over, Father O'Casey would open the swimming pool for those of us left behind that day. He did. God bless Father O'Casey. Justice took its usual course and refused to allow Sister Luke and Father O'Casey to file briefs on my behalf. I had no lawyer so what had happened that first visiting day would happen again at my next visiting day. Four more times it happened and the court would deny the nun and priest standing in the case even though they had acquired a volunteer attorney from the church. Are you beginning to get my point about liberty and justice in America? The court even ruled that attorney could not represent me because I was too young to choose my own legal counsel. So he appointed one for me and that guy never once visited me. He just conceded all the points made by my parents and their two lawyers. I spent 11 months at St. Francis and just before my ninth birthday, that fair minded judge up in Sacramento ordered me out of St. Francis and back into the life of my family. Two more years of hell would be spent before two eyewitnesses stepped forward in my behalf and my time at home was terminated forever. To this day I have no idea who stepped forward but I surmise it might have been the couple who moved into the vacant house right next door to my parents on Russell Road. They always seemed like nice people. The case was back in Judge Odin's hands and this time a lawyer represented me. He was not court appointed, I might add. Somebody out there had hired him and Judge Odin, the first and only fair minded judge I've known, let him represent me. It meant, I, a boy of 10 going on 11, had been given standing in the Superior Court of the State of California. It was in Judge Odin's chambers where the question came to me from the judge himself. Did I want to be placed permanently in the custody of the state as its ward housed at St. Francis and did I want the parental rights of my so-called family terminated. The judge carefully explained his question as he asked it. My own lawyer had explained to me it would be asked. He had urged me to think about it but told me not to answer it even to him. I was to answer it only when it was asked by the judge. I stood before the judge's big desk and answered "Yessir" to both questions. After the family's two lawyers made their pleas, Judge Odin read his order declaring my family unfit and making me a ward of the state. His final words remain indelible in my memory. "Kieran Patrick (name deleted), you are hereby declared a ward of the State of California to be housed at St. Francis Home for Children in San Diego; and to immediately be made eligible for adoption." At my request, Judge Odin also terminated my use of the family name. My time in Hell had ended. I was going to the only decent home I ever would have. I was never adopted and neither was Jerry who was again to be my roommate and friend at St. Francis. We were considered too old by families seeking to adopt. You might wonder why I kept my given names, Kieran Patrick. Well, I was a bastard child. My mother, a touring musician in a band, had frolicked with a cropduster pilot the December before my birth. She got pregnant, called him and begged for help. Scott was his first name and Stratton his last. Scott told her he would raise the child, boy or girl. He was 25 and in the ensuing months he decided on two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. He wanted his son to be named Kieran Patrick and if it was a girl, she would have been Kirsten Patricia. Scott had a girlfriend who agreed to accept his child so things looked good for me before my birth. But a month before I was born, Scott Stratton's little cropdusting plane burst into flames and crashed near a farm in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. His mother had suffered a stroke and his father was unable to raise a child for him. His sister was too young and still in school and his girlfriend opted out. But I had learned about Scott Stratton and I had seen his photos and letters. He would have been a terrific dad for anyone. So when my birth name was terminated by the court, a third order of the court granted me my real biological father's last name. When I was born, my mother had given me the names chosen by my biological father in hope his parents, despite their infirmities, would take me on. Life was not to be that good to me, not at the beginning anyway. But things did get better quickly once I was home again at St. Francis. I just didn't have the good sense to stay there as you will see when the train gets rolling down the tracks. Chapter Three Seal of the Confessional Meekly, we'd clasp our hands in front of us and stand like little saints waiting our turn to kneel and squeal in the confessional. It was easy to go to confession because of the seal of silence imposed on priests who hear confessions. Still, a kid might be a little uneasy sometimes as his turn in the confessional approached, Every Saturday at noon, boys walked into the chapel at St. Francis, genuflected and ducked into a back bench and knelt in silent meditation before going to confession. As we sat there, we rubbed our beads and kept our eyes on the four confessional booths each bearing the name of the priest in that confessional. For you non-Catholics, we watched the lines closely because we knew which priest we didn't want hearing our confession. No kid in his right mind wanted to confess to Father McNulty who was the Superior of this Jesuit community. McNulty dealt out penances so tough a kid might be on his knees saying the Rosary everyday for a month. He chewed ass, to put it mildly. Confessing to Father McNulty could take a long time even for a short list of bad deeds. He lectured us about our errant ways. It was not unusual to see an older teenager leave McNulty's confessional in tears. Priests counseled us during our confessions to avoid the occasion of sin. Father McNulty would spend several minutes lecturing the penitent young sinners on that subject. When I was around 13, I once thought he was about to suggest I amputate my hand to rid myself of my occasion of sin. By the time he told me to say my Act of Contrition while he pronounced the absolution, I was wiping my tearful face on my shirt sleeve. He'd ordered me to attend a novena which is nine days of prayer, say the Rosary twice daily for a week and avoid temptation by telling myself regularly my hands were meant to work for God and for not my own immoral pleasure. You could take the same sin into Father Larimore's confessional and come out in under two minutes with a penance of one Hail Mary, one Our Father and one Gloria to be offered up to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now with that description of Saturdays at confession time, I almost wager you can figure which priest's booth we all wanted to get into. Father Larimore had a line about 10 deep at all times. Father Kearney's line was also deep even if he was a little more strict than Father Larimore. Father O'Casey's confessional was one to avoid because you were so sure he could be heard through soundproof walls. You wanted to shush him when he began questioning your activities. He was lenient, but even his whispers rattled windows. There never was a line of boys at Father McNulty's confessional but one of the nuns was present to direct a waiting sinner to the next available booth and that often landed a quivering kid in Father Superior's confessional. You could grow calluses on your knees in that booth. I used to wonder if sore knees weren't as much the cause of tears on leaving his confessional as were Father McNulty's admonitions to the repentant ones. I said we squealed in the confessional. True, we did. We squealed on ourselves. We never mentioned any other kid, boy or girl, with whom we had shared some sinful enterprise. Nor would the priests ask us to identify our companions in sin. Don't get the wrong idea. Those sins committed with others weren't sexual at all but we were kids and we knew how to swipe things like bottles of Coca-Cola off the delivery truck, or candy from the back of an open van. Now I have to contradict myself. Some of our miscreant deeds were a bit risque but they didn't include sexual assault. Since we had allowances given to us weekly -- a whole half dollar at age 12 -- four or five boys might pool enough money to pay an adult to go into some store and buy us a titallating magazine. The most popular one back in my day was Sunshine and Health. It ran about a dollar and contained about 50 browntone photos of women in their lingerie but sometimes without a bra. Rearview photos without the hindrance of panties were common. The adult we'd pay to buy the magazine, which we all called our "dirty book," would receive a half dollar from five lusty boys so there was $1.50 spent on every issue. That reduced our pocket money by 30 cents, but we'd get it all back. We recovered our entire cost by loaning the dirty book to other boys for a nickel for one hour's reading time. Whichever one of us loaned it out got the nickel. None of us was ever a loser in the fine art of loaning out the dirty book, but we often were caught by the nuns, brothers or priests. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it when we were caught and whoever got caught zipped his lips and didn't rat on his pals. By the time any of us were nabbed with the dirty book, all of us who invested in it had recovered our money several times over. There were between 60 and 70 boys ages 11 to 18 in that upstairs dormitory and nearly everyone of them spent a nickel for an hour's worth of reading time. Some guys would pay more than once for the thrills in the dirty book. It depended on who caught you as to the disposition of things. If a nun nabbed the offender, she'd have him standing in the Mother Superior's office for a lecture followed by a prayer and the order to confess the sin. At least one confessional, and usually two, would be open at all daily masses and the Mother Superior specified we had to make our confession at the next daily mass. When I was nabbed, the next morning's mass gave me only one choice of confessors, Father Daniel O'Casey. I figured everybody in the church would hear his roaring voice when I fessed up to possessing the dirty book. At least he was brief, and probably suppressed a bit of laughter when he heard what I had in my hands while lying on my bed when I was caught. I was more grateful Father McNulty wasn't the confessor who heard my great sin that morning. He might have had me punch out my eyes as well as cut off my hand. You could always tell which guys had been partners in purchasing the dirty book. They were standing at the same confessional, or avoiding communion that day. All of us thought of ourselves as the first kids in history to buy a sexy magazine and use it in strengthening our wrists and fingers. We dreaded telling priests we had used some of our allowance in the buying the book and taken money from other boys in loaning it out for reading, and other pleasures. There seemed to be a conspiracy worked out among the priests when we confessed to being capitalists who had made a bit of money on a nudie book we'd bought and loaned. Invariably, the priest, regardless of who it was, asked how much money we made and we'd give the figure. I once made about 75 cents loaning out the dirty book which meant I had a net gain of 45 cents on my 30 cent share in the investment. My penance on that occasion was to forfeit two weeks allowance, and in addition I had to drop the 75 cents in loan money into the poor box. That left me penniless for three weeks. A group of boys one day pooled a bit of their allowance and went to a restoom in a nearby cafe and bought one condom for 50 cents. The condom never was meant to be used for sex. It was just for showing off and that rubber was passed around for look-see at two pennies for a few seconds. All we did was hold that darn thing in our hands and laugh. The investors in that item also made their money back and eventually one of them was nabbed showing it off. I have no idea what the priest who heard that kid's confession asked him and I don't even know if he drew Father McNulty at the next morning's mass. In the dorm, the boys did discuss whether or not the mere possession of that condom constituted a mortal sin or a venal sin. My only experience in that line was that Father Larimore decided my handing over two cents to hold it a few seconds and get some giggles amounted to a venal sin. I suspect Father McNulty might have viewed it as the occasion of sin and maybe bordering on a mortal sin. Glad I never had to find out or I might have been worrying about what to amputate to avoid that occasion of sin. Confession sometimes put a boy into the position of being humbled before someone he offended. It was one thing to apologize to a kid you'd bopped in the eye during a brawl, but it was something else to have to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and fess up and pay for stealing candy or something else. I gained some experience in fessing up and paying. Jerry had swiped two Hershey bars and shared his booty with me. He told me how he acquired the candy but I was such a chocolate candy fiend, it didn't matter. I gobbled down the chocolate bar with delight. Nobody caught us. They didn't have to. We were well educated Catholic boys and the next morning at mass we stood at Father Kearney's booth, the only one available. When I confessed to my role as receiver of stolen goods, Father said, "How many of you got in on this chocolate candy theft?" I told him it was just me and a friend and I never once mentioned Jerry by name. I didn't have to. Jerry fessed up to his deed and both of us were given the same penance. We had to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and hand the owner a nickel each to pay for the two candy bars Jerry had taken. Mr. Dodd forgave us and accepted our money. We were worried he would banish us from his store which would have hurt tremendously since it was one of only two stores close to the orphanage and we'd already been banned at the grocery store. Our banishment from the grocery came because we, along with four other boys, had stolen the Coca-Colas off the truck delivering the bottles to the store. Jerry and a boy named Andy months before that removed a whole box of candy from the back of a delivery van at that same market. Both confessed and both had to go pay the store for the candy. Neither Jerrry nor Andy was banished from market that first time. It was the next theft, the great Coca-Cola raid, that led to the banishment and Andy wasn't involved that day. I was and from that day on, Jerry and I were banished by the manager. We were terrified what might happen if the manager caught us in the store so we avoided the place. One night Father Kearney took Jerry and me out for a drive to help him load what he called "supplies" into the trunk of his car. We thought he meant school supplies. He was talking about boxes of margarine and jelly. Father pulled up in front of that market and Jerry and I stared at each other and knew we had to tell the priest we were banished at that place. Father knew about our soft drink heist but he had no idea the manager had forbidden us to enter his store again. Nonetheless he was sure he could escort us into the store, pay for the merchandise waiting to be picked up and there would be no problem. He was wrong. As soon as we walked into the market with the priest, the manager came with his finger wagging. He told Father he was welcome to come in but he had to leave us outside in the car. He didn't even want us near the front door of his store, he told Father Kearney. He referred to us as "dammed little urchins." We blushed and began walking out but the priest told us to stay. Father Kearney told the manager why we were with him and that we had done our penance, paid for the things taken and should be given another chance. We were only 12, he told the manager. The manager was insistent. Jerry and I were never to set foot in his store again. We thought that ended the dispute. Father told us to come with him and we'd go find another store to contract for services to St. Francis Home for Children. Since the orphans' home did about $30,000 a year in business with that store, the manager relented but he set conditions. We could come to the store to help load supplies but we'd have to go on the back dock to load the boxes into Father Kearney's car. We were never to be inside his store. The manager and one of his clerks escorted Jerry and me to the dock and the clerk stood with us. That was my last time in that market. It also was the last time St. Francis Home for Children spent a penny at that store. The contract went to a store in Mission Beach after that. Jesuits believe in forgiveness and when an errant youth confessed his sin to a priest then made amends to the person offended, which we had done, the priests believed forgiveness should be awarded. The unforgiving attitude of the store manager cost his store the business of the large community at St. Francis. It was declared off limits to all residents of St. Francis from that day on. I never participated in theft after that time nor did Andy. Jerry's fingers were a bit more sticky so he had to learn the hard way by losing privileges and large parts of his allowance but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was no longer lifting things from stores. A loss of privileges involved real penalties. It meant spending movie nights in the detention room with whichever nun might be in charge. His penalties also cut into his allowance. Each year, if we had good behavior, we would receive a raise in our allowance. A 15 or 16 year old got a dollar a week, a lot of money in the 1950s. Misconduct could cost a kid his annual raise in allowance. Detention didn't mean sit and study. It meant sitting on a hardwood bench in silence for an hour at a time, hands folded in your lap. An hour is a long time in a kid's life and Jerry probably held the all time record for detentions at St. Francis. I know he had around 30 of them at one time posted on the yellow sheet outside the office of the Prefect of Discipline. Detention was always served a day at a time. Any kid on detention on weekends lost the weekend trips but only spent one hour a day in the detention room. The rest of his day might be spent at ping pong, throwing a ball, or just walking around the campus. Leaving the campus would add 5 detentions and the one being served would not be credited which meant you actually had six added. Jerry was not a bad kid, not at all. He never injured anyone physically other then in defending himself and he could be ferocious in that regard. Like many of us, he'd been abused at home and it took a time to get over the effects of it. Jerry was a very gentle kid, considerate of others, a fun kid to know and be around, always willing to share his softball or his glove or bat. If another boy was injured in a game, Jerry was the first to stop the game to make sure the kid was not badly hurt. Teachers liked him and so did all the kids at St. Francis. He just had some hard times growing up and learning to trust and be trusted, but at St. Francis the patience of good leaders guided most us to productive lives. We earned points for acts of good citizenship. Points didn't earn money for you but they did get special favors such as a new mitt, a ball, a cap, a set of much desired swim trunks or tickets to be exchanged for rental of roller skates at the Rollerdrome, or a surfboard at Ocean Beach Pier. We also earned points for amusement park rides and that old Mission Beach roller coaster kept my eyes on the straight and narrow many times. Kids at St. Francis developed bonds with each other. We depended on each other and through the subtle teachings of the Jesuit priests we kept each other away from trouble. Older kids became counselors to the younger children, helping them with homework and soothing their anguished hearts. Death does not distinguish the young from the old and we learned that lesson three times during my stay at St. Francis. Twice it claimed the lives of older boys, both times from illness. Tom was 17 when he fell ill with spinal meningitis and died about three weeks later. He was the elected dormitory president and we all respected him Vince was a tall Italian boy who suffered from asthma and died one night in the infirmary while waiting for the ambulance to take him to Childrens Hospital. He also was 17. David and I were 12 when he died in an accident. We had been close friends. We were both members of the St. Francis Boy Choir and I was called on to sing the boy soprano solo part of the Sanctus at his requiem mass. My body trembled as I sang, accompanied by the organist. Somehow I got through it and then broke into tears. Even today when I hear the mournful Sanctus of Hector Berlioz, I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and my memory fills with images of David. He had straight blond hair that spilled over the sides of his head, a slender kid but about an inch or maybe two inches taller than me. He was nearsighted and wore glasses. He was a rare kid who never joined the crowd in poking fun at someone. David was the sort of kid who would stand by the victim of ridicule and befriend him. He wasn't a loudmouth. He was a leader among us. I guess it is such kids as David who are chosen by the Almighty to be called from the earth in their youth. Their dying leaves the model of a good life to remember. I have never forgotten my friend and he had an enduring impact on me. My own son carries his name today and he too has blond straight hair flopping over the side of his head, and he also wears glasses. Chapter Four Humor on top Father McNulty, the Superior of this Jesuit community, was a lean and lanky man in his sixties. His bulbous nose ended in a bright red hue which was often the subject of jokes in the dorm. His ruddy face rarely broke into a smile but when it did, the occasion would set off laughter in any room. Father seemed to reserve his Irish wit for special occasions, such as Thanksgiving dinner in the refectory, a night he chose to mounted the spiral staircase to deliver the greetings, the prayer and a brief homily. After the dinner, the priest strode up the spiral stairs, blessed us and then delivered his Thanksgiving homily which lasted about five minutes. After his prayer, he said he had a few announcements. When Father McNulty said he had announcements, all eyes turned to him. He momentarily fell silent, grimacing and gripping the podium. Not a single priest, nun or brother rose to go to his aid and we kept staring at the grimacing old man. His feet shuffled and suddenly the sound of a loud fart echoed from where he stood. Kids dropped their heads and bit their lips to restrain their laughter. "Oh, I feel so much better now," Father McNulty said with a smile creasing his craggy face. The laughter of the young orphans grew louder but we couldn't help noticing the priests, nuns and brothers all had well contained smiles as if they knew Father McNulty was up to something. The old priest leaned over and picked up the small rug on the podium and removed a whoopee cushion and held it aloft for all to see. "Whoppee!" he proclaimed. "Now who do you suppose bought this little device?" Father McNulty's eyes immediately fell on me. "Come, come, Kieran, is this perhaps yours?" I blushed and finally stood and muttered, "Yes, Father. I'm sorry, but I didn't put it up there for you to step on." He assured me he knew I hadn't placed it up there. "I placed it here, son, right beneath my feet," he said. Jerry and Andy immediately rose and admitted their complicity in the whoopee cushion. "How much did you boys pay for this?" Father asked. I told him we'd paid 49 cents for it at the magic shop. The shop was popular among the boys at St. Francis. We often bought stinky bombs there to set off in the dorm at night, or rubber snakes or spiders to place beneath the sheets of a boy's bed. The black widow spiders were more realistic than the snakes and always provoked fear when a boy's feet touched a whole colony of them under his sheet. The snakes looked real only from a distance but under the sheets they felt very icky. In my time at St. Francis, I was the victim of the snake and spider treatment at separate times. So were all the boys. The whoopee cushion was a new device at the magic shop. The older ones often didn't go off when someone sat on them because the rubber sealed tightly. But these new ones had a softer outlet pipe. The instructions told us for the more splattering sounds, use a blob of cream in the tube, and for really explosive sounds, use a touch of cream in the tube. Our intention in buying the whoopee cushion had been to place it under the thin cushion of our dorm president's wooden chair in the refectory. Thomas, the president in 1952 when this incident took place, had a great sense of humor but he could be a bossy guy and was a bit arrogant. Seniors tend to get that way as most high school kids can tell you. Since Andy, Jerry and I were assigned that day to the morning crew to set tables in the refectory, we lightly creamed the whoopee cushion and slid it beneath the cloth on his chair. It never went off, of course, and we had no idea why until the big evening meal that Thanksgiving Day. The three of us sat at our table not knowing if we about to be shamed by the Superior or counseled in public by him. He held that little red rubber cushion in his hand, wagging it back and forth as he talked. He remained serious for only a few seconds then broke into a grin. "God gave us a sense of humor so that we might have a means of overcoming the tensions of our days," Father said. Father told the whole gathering how he'd seen us sneak the little rubber bag under the cloth cushion on Thomas' chair that morning. In his finest Irish brogue, he told us he had once been a boy and enjoyed playing such jokes on schoolmates and even on his teachers. "But this is a much finer bag than the ones we had when I was a boy," he said with a grin. "In my day, those bags often just went 'Whoosh' and we were so disappointed." The kids in the refectory laughed merrily as Father McNulty continued to regale us with tales of his days in Ireland and pranks he'd played on his schoolmates and some pranks played on him. "Do you children realize even priests play pranks on each other? Yes, we do. At our morning staff meeting today, I placed Kieran's little whoopee cushion on Father Latimore's chair and he came up from his chair exclaiming the sound didn't come from him. That made it all the funnier," he said. He looked once more into my eyes and this time apologized for thwarting my little joke on Thomas. "I just couldn't resist playing that same joke on Father Latimore," he said. With that Father McNulty once more blessed the gathering and offered a benediction. When he came down the staircase, he called out to me. "Here, son, enjoy your little pranks," he said. "This harms no one and it brought laughter and joy to us all. The essence of a good sense of humor is that it never injures others and it does not subject them to ridicule. God would approve of your choice of pranks." In the days ahead, Father McNulty talked more about the humor of young people. He was never averse to using himself as the butt of a joke to make his point. Once during a homily he mentioned he'd had one of the other priests take him to a liquor store a few nights earlier. To assure he had our full attention, Father employed a joke told by the boys in the dorm. "In case you wonder why I had to go to a liquor store," he said, "I needed some new red lights for my nose." We had no idea he knew about us joking that from time to time he bought new red lights for his nose. His story that night led into the revelation the owner of the store had reported two older teens from St. Francis for trying to purchase a bottle of whiskey from him. Although Father never mentioned the names of the boys, all of us on the second floor knew he was talking about two seniors on our floor, Tony and Julio. Both were 17 and thought surely they looked 21 and for that matter, so did we. I was 14 at the time but wise enough not to try my boyish face in any liquor store. Father said the good man who owned the liquor store didn't turn the boys into the police, He knew them as boys from the orphanage so he called Father McNulty to tell him two of his charges had tried to foist fake ID cards on him. The proprietor described the boys perfectly and Father met them both as they walked in the back door of St. Francis. Father took up the fake ID cards which were Selective Service System cards they'd purchased on the street. "I may be old and my eyesight might not be as sharp as it once was,'' Father said, "but I'm like the liquor store owner. I could see the two culprits didn't weigh anywhere close to 170 and 180 pounds as the ID cards said they did. And they also don't have blue eyes." Julio weighed about 130 pounds and Tony weighed about 140. Both had dark brown eyes and were slender. About the only thing on the ID cards that matched them was the heighth. Both were about 6 feet tall. "I wonder," Father McNulty said, "what our boys were going to do with a pint bottle of a whiskey called Mellow Corn. You don't suppose they were going to give it to Father O'Casey for his birthday, do you? What an awful choice of whiskey. Father O'Casey drinks Old Bushmill, not that cheap yellow stuff our two good boys tried to buy." Father then revealed he and his fellow priests had bought Father O'Casey a fifth of Old Bushmill for his birthday then added, "That's why I had Father Kearney drive me to the liquor store. Of course, I also bought those red lights for my nose while I was there." He then proceeded to tell us about the hazards of alcohol being consumed by young people. When the young try to act out the roles of adults, they invariably do so with excesses. A boy who sneaks off to smoke will smoke 10 cigarettes and finally quit when he's turned green and sick. A boy using alcohol thinks drunkenness is to be admired and sets out to prove he can hold his liquor only to become fall down drunk, vomiting and, if he is lucky, ends up the next day with a violent hangover, unable to eat and wishing he'd never done that. The boy less fortunate, he said, may wind up in a jail cell, a hospital ward or even dead from alcohol poisoning. "The young tend to excesses, never considering there are limits even for them," he said. While his tone was serious, Father McNulty freely sprinkled his message with humor to hold the attention of his young audience. When he spoke to boys as a group, Father McNulty tickled the funny bones. "You fellows know what girls are?" he would ask. "I'm talking about those creatures of God wearing skirts." The group would break into laughter, somewhat cocky laughter. After all, no boy at 13 or 14 wants to admit he might not have all the facts at hand about girls. The priest was well aware his young male audience was a bit self conscious about the subject of girls. Matthew, a boy about 15, raised his hand and Father called on him. He stood and asked the priest, "How is it you are such an expert on girls when you took that vow of chastity?" The priest never flinched or backed down. He'd obviously heard the question from every class of boys he'd faced. He lit into a discussion of puberty and adolescence, and how it affects both boys and girls. The group fell silent, knowing this old priest, this unmarried man, really did know what our bodies were doing to us. He talked about hormones and how they work these changes in our bodies. "One morning you wake up with a long black hair, a stiff hair, growing right up there above your organ," he said. The self conscious giggles lasted less than five seconds as the priest continued. He spoke of more than just our bodies changing. "Your minds struggle with passions you have never faced before. You have sensations in your body that were never there before. What is going on in your life?" he asked then threw the question right back to Matthew. "Tell us, son. What was it going on in your body that day you suddenly had this experience called 'arousal?'" A blushing Matthew stood up, shifting his weight from leg to leg, his hands nervously digging at his pant legs. "It's sex, Father," he answered. "Now, Matthew, surely you know it is more than that," the priest said. "Don't you understand how sexual urges work in your body? Is it all that mysterious to you?" Matthew said nothiing and Father McNulty told him to be seated. "Don't feel embarassed, Matthew. Even bishops and our own Holy Father faced this matter of arousal one day when they were young boys. It is a perfectly normal, biological event in every boy's body, and it is a very strong urge and we become tempted to misuse it. You know when Pope Pius XII was 12 years-old, it is likely he knelt in the confessional and revealed to his confessor that he'd yielded to that temptation to have sex with himself," the priest said. "Of course he wasn't Pope Piux XII back then, was he? He was still Eugenio Pacelli, altar boy and student confounded by the temptations being hurled at him." The old priest, for all his stern manner, always had a way to humanize the conflicts faced by the young. We never felt alone when Father McNulty talked to us about temptations we faced. Father assured us such stalwarts as St. Peter, St. Ignatius and all the other saints of the Church also had faced such temptations. When a boy asked Father if Christ himself faced such temptations with his body, the priest answered without hesitation. "God came to earth as man, experiencing all the emotional conflicts young boys face. I would never doubt that Christ had to deal with this temptation too. It is because He experienced it that we can turn to Him and ask for His support when our bodies tempt us so strongly. That is why we priests often tell the penitential in confession to offer up their penance to the Sacred Heart of Jesus," McNulty said. "And because we priests are mere mortals, too, we always tell the repentant one to go in peace and say a prayer for us." The boyish giggles would invariably be silenced and turned into respect after one of Father McNulty's weekly sessions with us. He kept us laughing and we realized in many ways we were laughing at ourselves. It was our ability to laugh at our own flaws, he said, that helps us through the thicket of temptations. "Remember, even the saints you beseech for intercession know what you face as young boys," he would tell us. It gave me a whole different way of looking at St. Francis of Assisi to whom I often sent up pleas for intercession. As a 14 year-old I used to ask St. Francis to consider me as he did the animals he so loved and cared for. Every time I prayed to St. Francis I ended my prayer by reciting the saint's own Prayer for Peace. I knew in those teen years I was undergoing a conflict in my soul. There was a tug at my heart to consider a vocation in the priesthood, particularly to finish high school and enter the Jesuit seminary. There also was that powerful urge to be with girls and give them children. I would ask God to give me certitude but He never did. I learned later no one, not even the most holy of saints finds certitude. It is the nature of man to always be handling conflict. Chapter Five </div>v style="text-align: center;">Black Robes</div> Jesuits don't wear the traditional button-up and button-down cassock other priests wear. The Jebs have their own style, a black robe tied with a sash. No buttons. It's Current Mood: Reflective Current Music: James Galway: Meditations (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 11th, 2003
2:06 pm	Kindly Light: The Life of A Discard KINDLY LIGHT: Life as a Discard S.T. Stratton sts@thedoghousemail.com Page 1. Chapter One Life on Russell Road Maybe I ought to tell this story as some omniscent observer, a sort of spirit staring down at life. Hell, you'd call that being a fly on the wall. I don't want to be a fly on the wall. Somebody might smack me with a newspaper and I'd never finish this damn book. So let me lead you on this trip. Don't hold my hand. Just walk beside me and keep your hands off me. We're walking up long steep hill now along a sidewalk, woods on either side of the street. This is Russell Road and your breath is going to come in short pants before we reach the first house ahead of us. That's where Didi and Robin lived, two pretty girls who gave me and other boys wet dreams. Robin is dead now. She was killed in a head-on collision one night on a bridge. Her boyfriend was drunk, veered into the oncoming traffic and Robin wound up in a casket at the age of 19. Robin had dark brown hair, brown eyes and a body that stepped right out of a Playboy centerfold. She had all the assets, tits, shapely hips, beautiful legs and an ass that set fires in guys' hearts. Now Robin was seven years older than I but that didn't stop me from drooling once my hormones starting nipping at me. Didi was lean, lanky and had the misfortune of being flatchested. Guys still got off daydreaming about her. She sure wasn't ordinary but she just didn't have those assets I mentioned about Robin. Sit awhile here in front of the house where those girls lived. This is the house where Robin and Didi lived with their mothers who were sisters. I have no idea what happened to their fathers. Maybe they just took off. We never heard anybody speak of them. The girls were not sisters. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters and teachers. Like all the houses on this street, it is a white frame structure built about 1925. I wasn't around then so can't say for sure but the style is one common in that time. Big front porches with swings, metal chairs and two or three steps to climb to the porch. Everybody who walked up this hill would stop right here to sit on the wall in front of the house where Didi and Robin lived. Old Mrs. Carrick told me one day the way to stop breathing so fast from the long uphill climb was to sit here and do five fast and short breaths. It worked. The best thing about this wall is it isn't high right here and that's because of the steep grade. It's about three feet high here, just perfect for a brief rest. Let's go on up the hill now. It begins to flatten a bit now as we approach a midpoint. Look across the street at those woods full of big oaks and pines. I used to run hide in those woods to escape things I'm going to tell you about. The woods became my refuge when the old man went on a tear and stripped my pants off me to lash me with four foot long switches he'd cut for my beatings. Beating me was the old man's entertainment. So we walk past the old Gregory home then the Moyers and the Cranstons and the Smithsons. Just in case you're wondering, those are not their real names. Some of these people really were innocent and decent people so I'll protect them and not even reveal the real names of the others. Russell Road flattens right here in front of the Cranstons. Across the street, the woods end at that point and there's the house of the strangest people on the street, the Fortis family. Next to them going up the hill is the Swanson's house and then the Willmans. Then comes Mrs. Carrick's duplex and her tenant is Mrs. Stryker and her son, Hugo. Best I can tell you about Hugo is that he was one of two people I knew as a child who hated Jews. I saw Hugo bash a Jewish kid one day and it had me in tears. Now the other guy who hated Jews was the old man, the head of the house where I lived. I won't call him my father because he wasn't. He used every epithet in the books to describe Jews, blacks, Orientals, Hispanics and he had a few more epithets for everyone except his own brothers, sisters and that weird woman he called Mo-Ma. Yeah, she was his mother and lived to be 84 and if she ever smiled, I never saw it. She was as petty as he was. So was one of his brothers who owned a big business in town and so was one of his sisters. Keep that sister in mind. Her name was Lizzie and she was full of hate. Well this house right here with the long front porch, the white swing and two green metal chairs is where I lived for about 7 years. Look down the driveway and you can see the basement windows. That first set of windows is the whipping room the old man built. He kept his collection of switches there and built a platform for me to stand on while he beat hell out of me. That platform was two feet by two feet square and about eight inches high. I'd be home, listening to the radio and he'd come grab my hand and haul me down the basement steps, 13 of them. I counted them so that's why I know there were 13 steps. I'd be begging him not to beat me but it did no good. He held my wrist so tight the circulation would be cut off before reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he'd yank me to the right into that whipping room, force me onto his platform, rip off my pants and underpants and throw one arm around my neck to hold me and then came the lashes. I once counted 28. I'd catch glimpses of his face as he lashed me and what I remember most is that goddammed lascivious grin on his face depicting the joy he got out of beating me. I was six years old when those beatings started and they continued until I left that place when I was 11. I never gave him a reason to whip me. Didn't have to. It was strictly perverted entertainment for him. Was he a pervert in the true sense? Oh yeah. He was the most pornographic human I've ever known. If I didn't like certain foods like fried chard, boiled okra, stewed yellow squash and pork fat, I tried to shove it aside on my plate. The old man's fist would come flying into my face because I didn't like the food he liked and I'd go sailing out of my chair onto the floor and he'd grab my wrist and off we'd go to his whipping room. Time after time that happened in my years around that bastard. Did my mother care? Not a bit. She seemed to enjoy the beatings as much as he did. I recall several times when she'd lash out at me with slaps in the face, or she'd grab the belt off my pants and use it to blast away at me. She always made up excuses for it. Mother was a damned liar and also had that disease known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was her proxy. She used me to gain sympathy for herself. She'd make up lies about me and spread them like butter on bread and that served to get her family on her side. Her mother made no attempt to hide the fact she hated me. Neither did her brothers except for one, Charlie. But Charlie had been an outcast himself so he and I eventually became close but I was 22 by then. I had two brothers, or what is passed off as brothers. The older one loved the beatings I got and arranged several for me on days he'd get bored and wanted to hear me scream for my life. I used to swim in the river which was forbidden so he'd run tell that couple passed off to me as parents about it. What he didn't tell was that he also was swimming in the river. And big brother used to enjoy hurling insults at me. He got points for abusing me, I guess. I know they had nothing but praise for him. The younger one discovered my plight and decided he could make points by getting me in trouble too so he did. Brothers? Not really. Not to me anyway. Now my mother had a brother named Jack and that is his real name. I use it for a reason. He was a pedophile and I was his target. Twice when I was young, he tried to sodomize me. The first time I just poked him in the face with my elbow and he quit but slapped me in the face and on the side of my head. He warned me I had better not tell or he'd beat me up. He was 30 then and I was about 9. The second time he did it I was 11 and his brother, Charlie, was asleep in a room across the hall from me. Jack was drunk that night and crawled in my bed and began poking his erection at my butt. He had my hair in his hand that time but I shouted and Charlie heard it and came running. Charlie proved he was my friend that night. He grabbed Jack and the two of them went off in Charlie's car. Next morning when I saw Jack he had two black eyes, a broken nose and some missing teeth. According to the account his mother gave, Jack was beaten up by two thugs at a barbecue restaurant! I knew better. Charlie winked at me and I knew right away how that asshole brother of his got his beating. It struck me as odd two thugs would beat up a guy but not take his expensive watch, his wallet, or money from his pocket. Truth never got in my grandmother's way. It never got in the way of my mother either, or that old man she'd married. Or anybody in his family or in my mother's family. Except for Charlie. He was so candid he was hated. Charlie left home after that and moved to Seattle. I missed him and wrote him. He wrote back always in the tone of a truly caring man. Once he told me he understood my fear and wished he and his new wife, Marguerite, could adopt me. I wished they could have. Even after I left that place, that thing that was passed off as my home on Russell Road, I kept writing Charlie and Marguerite and they wrote back within a week everytime. Chapter Two St. Francis Home for Children Look at this photo of the old orphanage. It was built around 1900, a Spanish style stucco two-story building. See the two wings, one on the north end and the other on the south? Those were our dormitories. Boys lived in the North Wing and girls lived in the South Wing. Walk that long corridor between the two wings and you came to a wall. I have no idea what was on the south side of the wall. That was the girls' side of it, but over here where I lived in the boys' area the wall had a lifesize statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird. Behind him was that prayer I came to love so much and said so often while kneeling and lighting my candle. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. I was 8 years-old the first time I came to St. Francis, rescued from the violent ways of my home life on Russell Road. This old white stucco building was where I discovered peace and love for the first time. Kids under 10 slept on the first floor, boys to the north and girls to the south. On the first floor we were not separated by a wall. It was administrative offices, the refectory and the chapel that kept boys and girls apart down there. We went to school at St. Anne's School which was about a half mile southwest of the orphanage over at Mission Beach. St. Anne's almost touched the beach while St. Francis sat about eight blocks from the ocean up on the slope here. God, I loved that place and those cool Pacific breezes day and night. San Diego was a Navy town then. It still is but sailors and marines today are much better behaved. When I was at St. Francis we were never allowed to go downtown. Broadway back then was nothing but taverns, drunken servicemen and whores. Well, they did have locker clubs like the old Seven Seas for sailors and marines to buy space to change into civvies. Anytime we left the campus at St. Francis, we went on a blue and white bus and they'd haul us to the San Diego Zoo, a neighborhood movie theater to see Walt Disney films, or to a park distant from the servicemen. San Diego then and now has more parks than nearly any city in the world so we had plenty of places to go and they took us on trips every weekend. There would be four or five nuns along, a couple of priests and some of the Jesuit Brothers. They served as our guardians but they also were great guys to get into a softball game, touch football, and soccer. That's where I first learned to play soccer and that was long before it was popular in most of the United States. I loved to run and I'd get one of the brothers to tag along on a quiet jog around a park. I have no idea how far we'd run or how long either. Time and distance didn't mean a thing. It was my thinking time. Brother Phillip understood I wanted quiet when running and he seemed to enjoy the solitude as much as I did. Father Joe Kearney, a Jesuit priest, sometimes joined us while we ran. Father Joe had a girlfriend but not many people knew it. I spotted her waiting for him in the park one day when he, Brother Phillip and I were running. Father Joe veered off to catch up to this woman whose name was Anita. I won't say her middle and last names but I will tell you the initials of her three given names, including her confirmation name, came out AMDG. Why do I tell you that? Okay, I'll tell you why. Father wrote mystery stories and novels and he sold them. One of his mystery novels had a dedication in the front of the book. It read this way: "To AMDG" . Father was no dummie. He'd never have used her initials if they had been anything else. Among the Jesuits, AMDG stands for the motto of the Society of Jesus -- Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For you who don't understand Latin, in English it means For the Greater Glory of God. So Father Joe would run over with his woman friend and disappear for a little while. I have no idea where they went. Maybe they found a park bench to sit on or a concession stand out in the woods. Brother Phillip and I just kept running. I knew about Father Joe's woman friend when I was eight and she was still his friend when I made my second and final trip to St. Francis Home for Children at the age of 11. As I grew into my teen years, I began to understand even a vow of chastity has to be renewed every so often. I suspect Father Joe renewed his a little more often than some other priests. But I digress. If you don't like digression, go write your own damned novel. This is mine and I'll tell it my way. I go off on tangents just like Father Joe veered off on tangents from our running to hook up with AMDG. In geometry, if you remember your days in that dull subject, a tangent is a diversion from a course along a line, or you might go off on a tangent while you're out running and spot a cute woman. Hot pants are a known cause of tangents and AMDG was Miss Hot Pants. Get it now? My first trip to St. Francis occurred so quietly I hardly knew what was going on. I'd been taken by police to Juvenile Court and figured whatever it was the old man hated in me, the law must hate even worse. I kept looking for the gas chamber while I sat in Judge Odin's chambers. When he arrived in his black robe he looked just like a Jesuit priest and he had one of them with him. It was Father Joe. That made me sure my execution was at hand. I honestly felt that way. When your whole family keeps beating you up and telling you that you're bad, evil, and all that, you figure a courtroom is your last stop before you enter the gas chamber even if you don't know what you've done and I never did know. Judge Odin sat at his big desk, opened a folder and Father Joe sat beside me. I was in tears by then and filled with fear. Father Joe pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and had me blow my nose. Judge Odin's secretary brought me a cup of water and I waited for the death sentence to be handed down. I was amazed when the judge told me he was assigning me to St. Francis Home for Children on a temporary basis. He never said a thing about my mother or the man she married or those two weird and abusive brothers I had. Secretly, I was hoping they were going to get the gas chamber. Nobody ever did say what prompted my assignment to St. Francis but I was assured it was a place I'd enjoy and it wasn't a prison or detention home. I remember Father Joe saying it is a home for boys and girls like me. After Judge Odin signed the papers, I left with Father Joe and we got into his black Chevy and began the trip from Juvenile Court to St. Francis. I saw that two story Spanish style building for the first time that summer morning just after my eighth birthday. It had a wrought iron fence around it but there was no gate, no guard tower and no one carrying guns. I saw kids playing games, having fun on swings and slides, and there were teenagers playing ball and obviously having fun. We drove behind the building and right then I saw a place I knew I wanted to go. It was a huge swimming pool with diving board and a lifeguard stand. Father asked me if I liked to swim and for the first time I smiled. I loved to swim. There were pool hours posted and Father said I could swim everyday the weather permitted during my designated swim hours. Hey, two hours a day of swimming? Yeah. This was St. Francis showing me a welcome mat to a peaceful life. I was led into my dorm in the North Wing and shown to my bed,a comfortable looking single bed in a small but comofortable room I would share with another boy also eight years old. His name was Jerry and from the minute we met we became friends. He'd lived here a year and loved the place. I asked him if he was going to stay until he was grown up and he said he guessed so since he was up for adoption but "nobody wants me." Father Joe patted Jerry's head and told him St. Francis of Assisi always wants him as his child. I was issued clothing, comfortable clothing, I might say. There were shorts and t shirts, jeans and sport shirts, socks, two pair of tennies as we called our tennis shoes, one pair of black dress shoes, underwear, a bath towel to exhange everyday for a new one, a hand towel and wash cloth, and my own four drawer chest. On the wall behind our two beds were brass crucifixes. On my pillow was a rosary and a medal of St. Francis on a silver chain. A child's St. Joseph Missal also was on my bed. On the wall facing the foot of our beds were paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi. I was offered my choice of religious statues for my chest of drawers and I asked for St. Francis. A Jesuit Brother went down the hall and returned with my statue of St. Francis. Jerry had one of St. Robert Bellarmine on his chest of drawers. Along the wall beside the door were two small student desks. Mine was the one in the corner. Actually even Jerry had one in the corner considering the small closet we shared was next to his desk. We had dark wooden desks and dark wooden chairs. Inside my desk, I found pencils, crayons, tablets and an eraser. Nothing was elegant but everything suggested peace. I could handle that easily after the life I'd led with my mother and that bunch on Russell Road. "Jerry will show you around, Kieran,'' Father Joe said. "We don't fly by a big rulebook here. You'll have a schedule but it's nothing to be afraid of. And don't forget we are about an hour from lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, gravy, potatos and green beans today, boys." Father and the brother with him left and Jerry began telling me about life at St. Francis. He said I would like the place and the food especially. "It's okay having seconds," he said. My new friend told me there was no rule about how to dress. We were allowed to be comfortable. "So go barefoot is you want to. I do," he said. "So do most kids here." It was easy to see my new friend dressed in the manner of Huck Finn and out in the playground I'd already noticed the boys and girls both were comfortable. It looked like a real home only it had no parents. Some kids, including me, were put there by court order and only on a temporary basis while some strange thing called an inquiry took place. I hoped it was like burning sinners at the stake and my old family might be getting cooked. No such luck as time would tell. Jerry gave me the walking tour of St. Francis, first stopping at the refectory where I whiffed the aroma of roast beef being readied for the tables. We ducked into the chapel, genuflected and paused a minute or so to say our boyhood Catholic prayers we'd learned. Jerry looked at me and suggested we do one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Gloria together so we did. Later, he told me he always offered his prayers up to the Sacred Heart with the appeal some loving family would adopt him. Next to the refectory was a theater where movies were shown twice a week. They might be travel films or sometimes a Disney film and other times a religous life would be depicted in the movie. St. Francis Home for Children never failed to appeal to our religous heritage even in the case of kids like me, and I'd gotten to a point of near despair because of my life at home. St. Francis and the Jesuit priests I met there would lead me out of that wilderness. Give credit to Father Joe who discovered my love of poetry and nurtured it with the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a Jesuit priest whose works talk of lives approaching despair but never quite crumbling into it. Hopkins always finds hope and the Jesuit priests at St. Francis would eventually give me the hope my family never gave. Lawyers eventually crawled into my life like a bunch of bedbugs or rats. The two representing my family obtained a court order requiring visitations weekly with my mother, her brutal husband and the two jokers who posed as my brothers. The priests and nuns at St. Francis were appalled. So was I. But here came the so-called family trying to protect their reputations. Neighbors had been told, I learned, that I was a bad kid and placed in detention. The neighbors on Russell Road agreed with them. Why else did they beat me so much if I wasn't a bad kid, a recalcitrant little criminal. My mother and that man in her life were determined to make themselves look good at my expense. In my own mind I wondered why a court would allow parents who so blatantly lied and brutalized me to visit. Don't the police reports mean anything to the court? It was beyond my eight year old mind to understand that strange thing called justice. It's beyond my mind even now as I stare at the thick crop of once blond hair that is now gray. But I learned quickly lawyers could do anything they wanted. They are worse than an infestation of cockroaches. They are people devoid of a conscience. If my family was well practiced at lying, lawyers were true aces at it. I learned and still believe that to be a lawyer, you first have to be a sociopath. The court's order had come out of Sacramento, not from Judge Odin. A lawyer hired by my family had done some judge shopping and found the judge he needed. Now don't get all uppity about America and justice being for all. Back then, kids and criminals were allowed to have lawyers but they had to have the money to pay for them or do without. So nobody ever represented me and the police reports were never laid before that second judge. My first three months at St. Francis were the most peaceful I'd known. It was a warm place and while strict in some ways, the nuns who ran the place were never unfair, brutal or even close to being unkind to us. I've always heard tales of nuns whacking little kids on the knuckles. It never happened to me or to anyone I knew. The toughest order I ever got from a nun was to stand on the wall, meaning face the wall for 15 minutes for some misbehavior. It was fair. Like any kid, I could chatter out of place, or get angry over something or get into a scrap with another kid. Standing on the wall was the toughest punishment I ever faced with those nuns. I did get a swat on my butt one time, one swat was all and it was with a ping pong paddle. One swat and 2000 tears later, I was doing my penance which included an apology to the boy I'd pushed down in an argument over a baseball game. Breakfast at St. Francis began at 6 a.m. with prayers from the spiral stair rostrum at the front of the refectory. We stood for the prayer and took our seats about as fast as the word "Amen" dropped from the priest's lips. For those untrained in Catholic ways, that amen came at the end of the blessing -- In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. We crossed ourselves and plopped out little butts into our chairs and grabbed our juice glasses. At every meal, the food was served family style. Plates and bowls of food were sat near the head of the table where all serving began. A priest, a brother or a nun sat at the head of every table. One of the older boys or girls sat at the foot of the table. A typical breakfast included eggs with a meat except on Friday when we'd have fish even at breakfast. The breakfast also included pancakes, French toast or waffles. Big 12-ounce glasses sat before each kid's plate and pitchers of milk were in the middle of the table. We remained seated throughout the meal waiting for a priest to climb the spiral stairway again to give us the morning announcements and close our morning meal with a prayer for our safety and health. At all times, prayers concluding the three daily meals ended with the same words: "Lead us, O Heavenly Father, to learn to forgive those who have wronged us." It made sense considering most of us kids at St. Francis were discards from the rubble heap of American family life. I was about to be thrust right back into that rubble heap because of lawyers and that judge in Sacramento. After that court order, one Saturday a month the family drove to St. Francis for a visit. So that was a Saturday I missed being on the trips to the park or out to a movie or an amusement park. Any kid who had Saturday visits required by the court lost his Saturday recreation privileges as a result of decision by the fair minded judges. Now brace yourselves because I'm about to digress again. It was such things as decisions by judges, such as the one that eventually threw me right back into the pit of hell, that led me to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not for one minute believe those words "liberty and justice for all." My life was all the proof I needed for that and as I grew into my teen years, especially at the age of 16, I was to witness the absence of liberty and justice for black Americans. So you superpatriots with you goddammed hands over your hearts, keep on lying to yourselves. Some of us know better. We had to endure the pain inflicted by your stinking American justice system. Like I said before, if you don't like my digressions, go write your own novel. And don't ask me why I don't stand when you say the stupid pledge. It is a big lie. Well, the terrible and dreaded Saturday of my first family visit came. I stood at the window of the visitor center, a building apart from the main two story building where we kids lived and the nuns and priests ruled with love in their hearts. I was nervous as I watched for the family to drive through the front gate. Sister Luke stood by me and tried to reassure me she would be nearby. That nun knew this visit was wrong but she wasn't allowed to tell me that. I could sense it though. It was around 10 a.m. when I saw the red Buick come up the drive toward the visitor center. What a joke. There they stood like perfect people dressed in their finest attire. Hell, they probably bought that stuff just to make this visit so they could convince a court they really were good parents, and convince those neighbors they were very caring because they'd gone to a reform school -- that's how they presented it -- to visit me. The old man appeared sober for a change. With Sister Luke at my side, they pawed at me and spoke so lovingly in an effort to convince this wily old nun of their good hearts. I don't think Sister was fooled at all. She sat right there in the room with me until my mother said looked at her and told her the court said the visit would be private. Sister knew the rule too so she excused herself but she was wise enough to stay close at hand. About five minutes after she left, my face was swatted by the old man as he lit into me with a tirade about my comments to the police. I'd embarassed him by telling the police the truth if what that meant. As soon as my scream went up after my face was slapped, here came Sister Luke and Father Daniel O'Casey. The sister took my hand and led me out of the room and O'Casey, who was a big man with a deep voice, bellowed out "You have to leave now. Visit over." I was taken to a washroom to clean my face of the tears and then Sister led me out the back of the building, out of view of my mother and her wonderful hubby and good sons. I remember telling Sister Luke I never wanted to see them in the first place and now I'd missed my rec day with the other kids. She understood and told me about five or six other kids also had to miss the rec day and after their visits were over, Father O'Casey would open the swimming pool for those of us left behind that day. He did. God bless Father O'Casey. Justice took its usual course and refused to allow Sister Luke and Father O'Casey to file briefs on my behalf. I had no lawyer so what had happened that first visiting day would happen again at my next visiting day. Four more times it happened and the court would deny the nun and priest standing in the case even though they had acquired a volunteer attorney from the church. Are you beginning to get my point about liberty and justice in America? The court even ruled that attorney could not represent me because I was too young to choose my own legal counsel. So he appointed one for me and that guy never once visited me. He just conceded all the points made by my parents and their two lawyers. I spent 11 months at St. Francis and just before my ninth birthday, that fair minded judge up in Sacramento ordered me out of St. Francis and back into the life of my family. Two more years of hell would be spent before two eyewitnesses stepped forward in my behalf and my time at home was terminated forever. To this day I have no idea who stepped forward but I surmise it might have been the couple who moved into the vacant house right next door to my parents on Russell Road. They always seemed like nice people. The case was back in Judge Odin's hands and this time a lawyer represented me. He was not court appointed, I might add. Somebody out there had hired him and Judge Odin, the first and only fair minded judge I've known, let him represent me. It meant, I, a boy of 10 going on 11, had been given standing in the Superior Court of the State of California. It was in Judge Odin's chambers where the question came to me from the judge himself. Did I want to be placed permanently in the custody of the state as its ward housed at St. Francis and did I want the parental rights of my so-called family terminated. The judge carefully explained his question as he asked it. My own lawyer had explained to me it would be asked. He had urged me to think about it but told me not to answer it even to him. I was to answer it only when it was asked by the judge. I stood before the judge's big desk and answered "Yessir" to both questions. After the family's two lawyers made their pleas, Judge Odin read his order declaring my family unfit and making me a ward of the state. His final words remain indelible in my memory. "Kieran Patrick (name deleted), you are hereby declared a ward of the State of California to be housed at St. Francis Home for Children in San Diego; and to immediately be made eligible for adoption." At my request, Judge Odin also terminated my use of the family name. My time in Hell had ended. I was going to the only decent home I ever would have. I was never adopted and neither was Jerry who was again to be my roommate and friend at St. Francis. We were considered too old by families seeking to adopt. You might wonder why I kept my given names, Kieran Patrick. Well, I was a bastard child. My mother, a touring musician in a band, had frolicked with a cropduster pilot the December before my birth. She got pregnant, called him and begged for help. Scott was his first name and Stratton his last. Scott told her he would raise the child, boy or girl. He was 25 and in the ensuing months he decided on two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. He wanted his son to be named Kieran Patrick and if it was a girl, she would have been Kirsten Patricia. Scott had a girlfriend who agreed to accept his child so things looked good for me before my birth. But a month before I was born, Scott Stratton's little cropdusting plane burst into flames and crashed near a farm in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. His mother had suffered a stroke and his father was unable to raise a child for him. His sister was too young and still in school and his girlfriend opted out. But I had learned about Scott Stratton and I had seen his photos and letters. He would have been a terrific dad for anyone. So when my birth name was terminated by the court, a third order of the court granted me my real biological father's last name. When I was born, my mother had given me the names chosen by my biological father in hope his parents, despite their infirmities, would take me on. Life was not to be that good to me, not at the beginning anyway. But things did get better quickly once I was home again at St. Francis. I just didn't have the good sense to stay there as you will see when the train gets rolling down the tracks. Chapter Three Seal of the Confessional Meekly, we'd clasp our hands in front of us and stand like little saints waiting our turn to kneel and squeal in the confessional. It was easy to go to confession because of the seal of silence imposed on priests who hear confessions. Still, a kid might be a little uneasy sometimes as his turn in the confessional approached, Every Saturday at noon, boys walked into the chapel at St. Francis, genuflected and ducked into a back bench and knelt in silent meditation before going to confession. As we sat there, we rubbed our beads and kept our eyes on the four confessional booths each bearing the name of the priest in that confessional. For you non-Catholics, we watched the lines closely because we knew which priest we didn't want hearing our confession. No kid in his right mind wanted to confess to Father McNulty who was the Superior of this Jesuit community. McNulty dealt out penances so tough a kid might be on his knees saying the Rosary everyday for a month. He chewed ass, to put it mildly. Confessing to Father McNulty could take a long time even for a short list of bad deeds. He lectured us about our errant ways. It was not unusual to see an older teenager leave McNulty's confessional in tears. Priests counseled us during our confessions to avoid the occasion of sin. Father McNulty would spend several minutes lecturing the penitent young sinners on that subject. When I was around 13, I once thought he was about to suggest I amputate my hand to rid myself of my occasion of sin. By the time he told me to say my Act of Contrition while he pronounced the absolution, I was wiping my tearful face on my shirt sleeve. He'd ordered me to attend a novena which is nine days of prayer, say the Rosary twice daily for a week and avoid temptation by telling myself regularly my hands were meant to work for God and for not my own immoral pleasure. You could take the same sin into Father Larimore's confessional and come out in under two minutes with a penance of one Hail Mary, one Our Father and one Gloria to be offered up to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now with that description of Saturdays at confession time, I almost wager you can figure which priest's booth we all wanted to get into. Father Larimore had a line about 10 deep at all times. Father Kearney's line was also deep even if he was a little more strict than Father Larimore. Father O'Casey's confessional was one to avoid because you were so sure he could be heard through soundproof walls. You wanted to shush him when he began questioning your activities. He was lenient, but even his whispers rattled windows. There never was a line of boys at Father McNulty's confessional but one of the nuns was present to direct a waiting sinner to the next available booth and that often landed a quivering kid in Father Superior's confessional. You could grow calluses on your knees in that booth. I used to wonder if sore knees weren't as much the cause of tears on leaving his confessional as were Father McNulty's admonitions to the repentant ones. I said we squealed in the confessional. True, we did. We squealed on ourselves. We never mentioned any other kid, boy or girl, with whom we had shared some sinful enterprise. Nor would the priests ask us to identify our companions in sin. Don't get the wrong idea. Those sins committed with others weren't sexual at all but we were kids and we knew how to swipe things like bottles of Coca-Cola off the delivery truck, or candy from the back of an open van. Now I have to contradict myself. Some of our miscreant deeds were a bit risque but they didn't include sexual assault. Since we had allowances given to us weekly -- a whole half dollar at age 12 -- four or five boys might pool enough money to pay an adult to go into some store and buy us a titallating magazine. The most popular one back in my day was Sunshine and Health. It ran about a dollar and contained about 50 browntone photos of women in their lingerie but sometimes without a bra. Rearview photos without the hindrance of panties were common. The adult we'd pay to buy the magazine, which we all called our "dirty book," would receive a half dollar from five lusty boys so there was $1.50 spent on every issue. That reduced our pocket money by 30 cents, but we'd get it all back. We recovered our entire cost by loaning the dirty book to other boys for a nickel for one hour's reading time. Whichever one of us loaned it out got the nickel. None of us was ever a loser in the fine art of loaning out the dirty book, but we often were caught by the nuns, brothers or priests. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it when we were caught and whoever got caught zipped his lips and didn't rat on his pals. By the time any of us were nabbed with the dirty book, all of us who invested in it had recovered our money several times over. There were between 60 and 70 boys ages 11 to 18 in that upstairs dormitory and nearly everyone of them spent a nickel for an hour's worth of reading time. Some guys would pay more than once for the thrills in the dirty book. It depended on who caught you as to the disposition of things. If a nun nabbed the offender, she'd have him standing in the Mother Superior's office for a lecture followed by a prayer and the order to confess the sin. At least one confessional, and usually two, would be open at all daily masses and the Mother Superior specified we had to make our confession at the next daily mass. When I was nabbed, the next morning's mass gave me only one choice of confessors, Father Daniel O'Casey. I figured everybody in the church would hear his roaring voice when I fessed up to possessing the dirty book. At least he was brief, and probably suppressed a bit of laughter when he heard what I had in my hands while lying on my bed when I was caught. I was more grateful Father McNulty wasn't the confessor who heard my great sin that morning. He might have had me punch out my eyes as well as cut off my hand. You could always tell which guys had been partners in purchasing the dirty book. They were standing at the same confessional, or avoiding communion that day. All of us thought of ourselves as the first kids in history to buy a sexy magazine and use it in strengthening our wrists and fingers. We dreaded telling priests we had used some of our allowance in the buying the book and taken money from other boys in loaning it out for reading, and other pleasures. There seemed to be a conspiracy worked out among the priests when we confessed to being capitalists who had made a bit of money on a nudie book we'd bought and loaned. Invariably, the priest, regardless of who it was, asked how much money we made and we'd give the figure. I once made about 75 cents loaning out the dirty book which meant I had a net gain of 45 cents on my 30 cent share in the investment. My penance on that occasion was to forfeit two weeks allowance, and in addition I had to drop the 75 cents in loan money into the poor box. That left me penniless for three weeks. A group of boys one day pooled a bit of their allowance and went to a restoom in a nearby cafe and bought one condom for 50 cents. The condom never was meant to be used for sex. It was just for showing off and that rubber was passed around for look-see at two pennies for a few seconds. All we did was hold that darn thing in our hands and laugh. The investors in that item also made their money back and eventually one of them was nabbed showing it off. I have no idea what the priest who heard that kid's confession asked him and I don't even know if he drew Father McNulty at the next morning's mass. In the dorm, the boys did discuss whether or not the mere possession of that condom constituted a mortal sin or a venal sin. My only experience in that line was that Father Larimore decided my handing over two cents to hold it a few seconds and get some giggles amounted to a venal sin. I suspect Father McNulty might have viewed it as the occasion of sin and maybe bordering on a mortal sin. Glad I never had to find out or I might have been worrying about what to amputate to avoid that occasion of sin. Confession sometimes put a boy into the position of being humbled before someone he offended. It was one thing to apologize to a kid you'd bopped in the eye during a brawl, but it was something else to have to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and fess up and pay for stealing candy or something else. I gained some experience in fessing up and paying. Jerry had swiped two Hershey bars and shared his booty with me. He told me how he acquired the candy but I was such a chocolate candy fiend, it didn't matter. I gobbled down the chocolate bar with delight. Nobody caught us. They didn't have to. We were well educated Catholic boys and the next morning at mass we stood at Father Kearney's booth, the only one available. When I confessed to my role as receiver of stolen goods, Father said, "How many of you got in on this chocolate candy theft?" I told him it was just me and a friend and I never once mentioned Jerry by name. I didn't have to. Jerry fessed up to his deed and both of us were given the same penance. We had to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and hand the owner a nickel each to pay for the two candy bars Jerry had taken. Mr. Dodd forgave us and accepted our money. We were worried he would banish us from his store which would have hurt tremendously since it was one of only two stores close to the orphanage and we'd already been banned at the grocery store. Our banishment from the grocery came because we, along with four other boys, had stolen the Coca-Colas off the truck delivering the bottles to the store. Jerry and a boy named Andy months before that removed a whole box of candy from the back of a delivery van at that same market. Both confessed and both had to go pay the store for the candy. Neither Jerrry nor Andy was banished from market that first time. It was the next theft, the great Coca-Cola raid, that led to the banishment and Andy wasn't involved that day. I was and from that day on, Jerry and I were banished by the manager. We were terrified what might happen if the manager caught us in the store so we avoided the place. One night Father Kearney took Jerry and me out for a drive to help him load what he called "supplies" into the trunk of his car. We thought he meant school supplies. He was talking about boxes of margarine and jelly. Father pulled up in front of that market and Jerry and I stared at each other and knew we had to tell the priest we were banished at that place. Father knew about our soft drink heist but he had no idea the manager had forbidden us to enter his store again. Nonetheless he was sure he could escort us into the store, pay for the merchandise waiting to be picked up and there would be no problem. He was wrong. As soon as we walked into the market with the priest, the manager came with his finger wagging. He told Father he was welcome to come in but he had to leave us outside in the car. He didn't even want us near the front door of his store, he told Father Kearney. He referred to us as "dammed little urchins." We blushed and began walking out but the priest told us to stay. Father Kearney told the manager why we were with him and that we had done our penance, paid for the things taken and should be given another chance. We were only 12, he told the manager. The manager was insistent. Jerry and I were never to set foot in his store again. We thought that ended the dispute. Father told us to come with him and we'd go find another store to contract for services to St. Francis Home for Children. Since the orphans' home did about $30,000 a year in business with that store, the manager relented but he set conditions. We could come to the store to help load supplies but we'd have to go on the back dock to load the boxes into Father Kearney's car. We were never to be inside his store. The manager and one of his clerks escorted Jerry and me to the dock and the clerk stood with us. That was my last time in that market. It also was the last time St. Francis Home for Children spent a penny at that store. The contract went to a store in Mission Beach after that. Jesuits believe in forgiveness and when an errant youth confessed his sin to a priest then made amends to the person offended, which we had done, the priests believed forgiveness should be awarded. The unforgiving attitude of the store manager cost his store the business of the large community at St. Francis. It was declared off limits to all residents of St. Francis from that day on. I never participated in theft after that time nor did Andy. Jerry's fingers were a bit more sticky so he had to learn the hard way by losing privileges and large parts of his allowance but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was no longer lifting things from stores. A loss of privileges involved real penalties. It meant spending movie nights in the detention room with whichever nun might be in charge. His penalties also cut into his allowance. Each year, if we had good behavior, we would receive a raise in our allowance. A 15 or 16 year old got a dollar a week, a lot of money in the 1950s. Misconduct could cost a kid his annual raise in allowance. Detention didn't mean sit and study. It meant sitting on a hardwood bench in silence for an hour at a time, hands folded in your lap. An hour is a long time in a kid's life and Jerry probably held the all time record for detentions at St. Francis. I know he had around 30 of them at one time posted on the yellow sheet outside the office of the Prefect of Discipline. Detention was always served a day at a time. Any kid on detention on weekends lost the weekend trips but only spent one hour a day in the detention room. The rest of his day might be spent at ping pong, throwing a ball, or just walking around the campus. Leaving the campus would add 5 detentions and the one being served would not be credited which meant you actually had six added. Jerry was not a bad kid, not at all. He never injured anyone physically other then in defending himself and he could be ferocious in that regard. Like many of us, he'd been abused at home and it took a time to get over the effects of it. Jerry was a very gentle kid, considerate of others, a fun kid to know and be around, always willing to share his softball or his glove or bat. If another boy was injured in a game, Jerry was the first to stop the game to make sure the kid was not badly hurt. Teachers liked him and so did all the kids at St. Francis. He just had some hard times growing up and learning to trust and be trusted, but at St. Francis the patience of good leaders guided most us to productive lives. We earned points for acts of good citizenship. Points didn't earn money for you but they did get special favors such as a new mitt, a ball, a cap, a set of much desired swim trunks or tickets to be exchanged for rental of roller skates at the Rollerdrome, or a surfboard at Ocean Beach Pier. We also earned points for amusement park rides and that old Mission Beach roller coaster kept my eyes on the straight and narrow many times. Kids at St. Francis developed bonds with each other. We depended on each other and through the subtle teachings of the Jesuit priests we kept each other away from trouble. Older kids became counselors to the younger children, helping them with homework and soothing their anguished hearts. Death does not distinguish the young from the old and we learned that lesson three times during my stay at St. Francis. Twice it claimed the lives of older boys, both times from illness. Tom was 17 when he fell ill with spinal meningitis and died about three weeks later. He was the elected dormitory president and we all respected him Vince was a tall Italian boy who suffered from asthma and died one night in the infirmary while waiting for the ambulance to take him to Childrens Hospital. He also was 17. David and I were 12 when he died in an accident. We had been close friends. We were both members of the St. Francis Boy Choir and I was called on to sing the boy soprano solo part of the Sanctus at his requiem mass. My body trembled as I sang, accompanied by the organist. Somehow I got through it and then broke into tears. Even today when I hear the mournful Sanctus of Hector Berlioz, I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and my memory fills with images of David. He had straight blond hair that spilled over the sides of his head, a slender kid but about an inch or maybe two inches taller than me. He was nearsighted and wore glasses. He was a rare kid who never joined the crowd in poking fun at someone. David was the sort of kid who would stand by the victim of ridicule and befriend him. He wasn't a loudmouth. He was a leader among us. I guess it is such kids as David who are chosen by the Almighty to be called from the earth in their youth. Their dying leaves the model of a good life to remember. I have never forgotten my friend and he had an enduring impact on me. My own son carries his name today and he too has blond straight hair flopping over the side of his head, and he also wears glasses. Chapter Four Humor on top Father McNulty, the Superior of this Jesuit community, was a lean and lanky man in his sixties. His bulbous nose ended in a bright red hue which was often the subject of jokes in the dorm. His ruddy face rarely broke into a smile but when it did, the occasion would set off laughter in any room. Father seemed to reserve his Irish wit for special occasions, such as Thanksgiving dinner in the refectory, a night he chose to mounted the spiral staircase to deliver the greetings, the prayer and a brief homily. After the dinner, the priest strode up the spiral stairs, blessed us and then delivered his Thanksgiving homily which lasted about five minutes. After his prayer, he said he had a few announcements. When Father McNulty said he had announcements, all eyes turned to him. He momentarily fell silent, grimacing and gripping the podium. Not a single priest, nun or brother rose to go to his aid and we kept staring at the grimacing old man. His feet shuffled and suddenly the sound of a loud fart echoed from where he stood. Kids dropped their heads and bit their lips to restrain their laughter. "Oh, I feel so much better now," Father McNulty said with a smile creasing his craggy face. The laughter of the young orphans grew louder but we couldn't help noticing the priests, nuns and brothers all had well contained smiles as if they knew Father McNulty was up to something. The old priest leaned over and picked up the small rug on the podium and removed a whoopee cushion and held it aloft for all to see. "Whoppee!" he proclaimed. "Now who do you suppose bought this little device?" Father McNulty's eyes immediately fell on me. "Come, come, Kieran, is this perhaps yours?" I blushed and finally stood and muttered, "Yes, Father. I'm sorry, but I didn't put it up there for you to step on." He assured me he knew I hadn't placed it up there. "I placed it here, son, right beneath my feet," he said. Jerry and Andy immediately rose and admitted their complicity in the whoopee cushion. "How much did you boys pay for this?" Father asked. I told him we'd paid 49 cents for it at the magic shop. The shop was popular among the boys at St. Francis. We often bought stinky bombs there to set off in the dorm at night, or rubber snakes or spiders to place beneath the sheets of a boy's bed. The black widow spiders were more realistic than the snakes and always provoked fear when a boy's feet touched a whole colony of them under his sheet. The snakes looked real only from a distance but under the sheets they felt very icky. In my time at St. Francis, I was the victim of the snake and spider treatment at separate times. So were all the boys. The whoopee cushion was a new device at the magic shop. The older ones often didn't go off when someone sat on them because the rubber sealed tightly. But these new ones had a softer outlet pipe. The instructions told us for the more splattering sounds, use a blob of cream in the tube, and for really explosive sounds, use a touch of cream in the tube. Our intention in buying the whoopee cushion had been to place it under the thin cushion of our dorm president's wooden chair in the refectory. Thomas, the president in 1952 when this incident took place, had a great sense of humor but he could be a bossy guy and was a bit arrogant. Seniors tend to get that way as most high school kids can tell you. Since Andy, Jerry and I were assigned that day to the morning crew to set tables in the refectory, we lightly creamed the whoopee cushion and slid it beneath the cloth on his chair. It never went off, of course, and we had no idea why until the big evening meal that Thanksgiving Day. The three of us sat at our table not knowing if we about to be shamed by the Superior or counseled in public by him. He held that little red rubber cushion in his hand, wagging it back and forth as he talked. He remained serious for only a few seconds then broke into a grin. "God gave us a sense of humor so that we might have a means of overcoming the tensions of our days," Father said. Father told the whole gathering how he'd seen us sneak the little rubber bag under the cloth cushion on Thomas' chair that morning. In his finest Irish brogue, he told us he had once been a boy and enjoyed playing such jokes on schoolmates and even on his teachers. "But this is a much finer bag than the ones we had when I was a boy," he said with a grin. "In my day, those bags often just went 'Whoosh' and we were so disappointed." The kids in the refectory laughed merrily as Father McNulty continued to regale us with tales of his days in Ireland and pranks he'd played on his schoolmates and some pranks played on him. "Do you children realize even priests play pranks on each other? Yes, we do. At our morning staff meeting today, I placed Kieran's little whoopee cushion on Father Latimore's chair and he came up from his chair exclaiming the sound didn't come from him. That made it all the funnier," he said. He looked once more into my eyes and this time apologized for thwarting my little joke on Thomas. "I just couldn't resist playing that same joke on Father Latimore," he said. With that Father McNulty once more blessed the gathering and offered a benediction. When he came down the staircase, he called out to me. "Here, son, enjoy your little pranks," he said. "This harms no one and it brought laughter and joy to us all. The essence of a good sense of humor is that it never injures others and it does not subject them to ridicule. God would approve of your choice of pranks." In the days ahead, Father McNulty talked more about the humor of young people. He was never averse to using himself as the butt of a joke to make his point. Once during a homily he mentioned he'd had one of the other priests take him to a liquor store a few nights earlier. To assure he had our full attention, Father employed a joke told by the boys in the dorm. "In case you wonder why I had to go to a liquor store," he said, "I needed some new red lights for my nose." We had no idea he knew about us joking that from time to time he bought new red lights for his nose. His story that night led into the revelation the owner of the store had reported two older teens from St. Francis for trying to purchase a bottle of whiskey from him. Although Father never mentioned the names of the boys, all of us on the second floor knew he was talking about two seniors on our floor, Tony and Julio. Both were 17 and thought surely they looked 21 and for that matter, so did we. I was 14 at the time but wise enough not to try my boyish face in any liquor store. Father said the good man who owned the liquor store didn't turn the boys into the police, He knew them as boys from the orphanage so he called Father McNulty to tell him two of his charges had tried to foist fake ID cards on him. The proprietor described the boys perfectly and Father met them both as they walked in the back door of St. Francis. Father took up the fake ID cards which were Selective Service System cards they'd purchased on the street. "I may be old and my eyesight might not be as sharp as it once was,'' Father said, "but I'm like the liquor store owner. I could see the two culprits didn't weigh anywhere close to 170 and 180 pounds as the ID cards said they did. And they also don't have blue eyes." Julio weighed about 130 pounds and Tony weighed about 140. Both had dark brown eyes and were slender. About the only thing on the ID cards that matched them was the heighth. Both were about 6 feet tall. "I wonder," Father McNulty said, "what our boys were going to do with a pint bottle of a whiskey called Mellow Corn. You don't suppose they were going to give it to Father O'Casey for his birthday, do you? What an awful choice of whiskey. Father O'Casey drinks Old Bushmill, not that cheap yellow stuff our two good boys tried to buy." Father then revealed he and his fellow priests had bought Father O'Casey a fifth of Old Bushmill for his birthday then added, "That's why I had Father Kearney drive me to the liquor store. Of course, I also bought those red lights for my nose while I was there." He then proceeded to tell us about the hazards of alcohol being consumed by young people. When the young try to act out the roles of adults, they invariably do so with excesses. A boy who sneaks off to smoke will smoke 10 cigarettes and finally quit when he's turned green and sick. A boy using alcohol thinks drunkenness is to be admired and sets out to prove he can hold his liquor only to become fall down drunk, vomiting and, if he is lucky, ends up the next day with a violent hangover, unable to eat and wishing he'd never done that. The boy less fortunate, he said, may wind up in a jail cell, a hospital ward or even dead from alcohol poisoning. "The young tend to excesses, never considering there are limits even for them," he said. While his tone was serious, Father McNulty freely sprinkled his message with humor to hold the attention of his young audience. </div>v style="text-align: center;">Black Robes</div> Jesuits don't wear the traditional button-up and button-down cassock other priests wear. The Jebs have their own style and it's a black robe tied with a sash. No buttons. It's one of many things that distinguish the Jesuit priest from other priests and it goes back to origins of the Society of Jesus, back in the 16th century. Jesuits are tradition bound but non-traditional when compared to other orders of priests. As a group, Jesuits are the scholars of Catholocism. As a boy schooled by Jesuits I found myself wondering about a vocation as a priest. It's not something romantic like being a soldier of fortune or a great actor. It is a sense the boy is being summoned by God to a calling. By the time he reaches 15, the youngster begins to weigh in his mind what he is surrendering if he becomes a priest and girls are chief among those things to be given up. It's one thing for kids to play tag or hide and seek with girls, or a softball game or hit the beach for surfing or volleyball. It's quite another to decide you will forego sexual pleasures with women and to give up thoughts of fathering children. Half a boy's brainpower at 15 is spent in reveries about sleeping with a girl. Much of his time in the confessional may be devoted to how he handles that when alone. By the time he is 16, a boy's homones are like thunder and lightning. He imagines flesh and muscle of girls, thinks of the often erroneous lessons on sex he's learned from other boys and chances are, if the boy was like me, all he'd ever seen of a naked female was in that magazine he called the dirty book. Teenage boys are like male dogs, always in heat. At that age, I used to wonder how guys could surrender that to become priests. What is a priestly calling, anyway? Not even a priest can answer that one. But any kid in a Catholic school knows what it takes to become a priest. If he chooses to become a Jesuit, it was a 15 year term in the seminary back when I was a boy. It began with two years in the novitiate, a time of virtual silence for the budding young seminarian. There was a period set aside for the novices to speak, but they had to speak Latin even in casual conversations with each other. "Latine, Frater," a Jesuit seminarian would be admonished if he spoke in English to a fellow seminarian or to a priest. The two years in the novitiate were a time of contemplation, meditation, reflection and decision. To be sure there were classes. Jesuits, after all, are educators. In that two year novitiate, a young seminarian would become steeped in classics, religious studies, science and, of course, Latin. The novice immersed himself in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the mass, the prayers of the Church, and when walking the novitiate grounds, he usually looked like he was muttering to himself as he stared into some little book in his hands. Actually, he was muttering to himself. In Latin, of course. Those first two years in the Jesuit seminary compare well to life as a Benedictine monk bound by the vow of silence. If a youngster finishes the two years in the novitiate, he has a decision to make. Will he or won't he take his first vows? During the time in the novitiate, a seminarian can pack his bag and leave at will. Once he takes those first vows, called temporal vows, he is bound under a religious contract with the Almighty. The vows can be terminated and the seminarian departs but few make that move once they complete the novitiate. The next step in a young Jesuit seminarian's life is spent in the Juniorate. That's real school, full time college plus the schooling to become a priest. Language studies, math, sciences, literature, writing, art and music fill out these years. Religous studies are the main component, though. At the end of that time, the young Jesuit isn't through with school. He's then in the Philosophate for three years. After seven years of intense study, contemplation, prayer and reflection, the average Jesuit will be around 24 years-old and will have an education that is worth at least one PhD. Two things occur at this stage. First, the seminary student takes his final or perpetual vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. He is now commited for a lifetime as a Jesuit. The second thing the young seminarian encounters is his first experience in the field as a teacher. The time is known as the Regency and the young Jeb spends three years at it. He could be sent anywhere on the planet the Jesuits have a community devoted to teaching. It is common to put the new teacher in a place where his faith and commitment are truly tested, such as a mosquito infested country in the South Pacific or Central America. After Regency, the seminarian returns to his Province's university and is considered to be in the Jesuit Theosophate for four years. The focus is on complex religious issues and also involves studies of other religions. At the conclusion of this four years, the seminarian has finishe Current Mood: Reflective Current Music: James Galway: Meditations (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 9th, 2003
9:39 am	Kindly Light: The Life of A Discard KINDLY LIGHT: Life as a Discard S.T. Stratton sts@thedoghousemail.com Page 1. Chapter One Life on Russell Road Maybe I ought to tell this story as some omniscent observer, a sort of spirit staring down at life. Hell, you'd call that being a fly on the wall. I don't want to be a fly on the wall. Somebody might smack me with a newspaper and I'd never finish this damn book. So let me lead you on this trip. Don't hold my hand. Just walk beside me and keep your hands off me. We're walking up long steep hill now along a sidewalk, woods on either side of the street. This is Russell Road and your breath is going to come in short pants before we reach the first house ahead of us. That's where Didi and Robin lived, two pretty girls who gave me and other boys wet dreams. Robin is dead now. She was killed in a head-on collision one night on a bridge. Her boyfriend was drunk, veered into the oncoming traffic and Robin wound up in a casket at the age of 19. Robin had dark brown hair, brown eyes and a body that stepped right out of a Playboy centerfold. She had all the assets, tits, shapely hips, beautiful legs and an ass that set fires in guys' hearts. Now Robin was seven years older than I but that didn't stop me from drooling once my hormones starting nipping at me. Didi was lean, lanky and had the misfortune of being flatchested. Guys still got off daydreaming about her. She sure wasn't ordinary but she just didn't have those assets I mentioned about Robin. Sit awhile here in front of the house where those girls lived. This is the house where Robin and Didi lived with their mothers who were sisters. I have no idea what happened to their fathers. Maybe they just took off. We never heard anybody speak of them. The girls were not sisters. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters and teachers. Like all the houses on this street, it is a white frame structure built about 1925. I wasn't around then so can't say for sure but the style is one common in that time. Big front porches with swings, metal chairs and two or three steps to climb to the porch. Everybody who walked up this hill would stop right here to sit on the wall in front of the house where Didi and Robin lived. Old Mrs. Carrick told me one day the way to stop breathing so fast from the long uphill climb was to sit here and do five fast and short breaths. It worked. The best thing about this wall is it isn't high right here and that's because of the steep grade. It's about three feet high here, just perfect for a brief rest. Let's go on up the hill now. It begins to flatten a bit now as we approach a midpoint. Look across the street at those woods full of big oaks and pines. I used to run hide in those woods to escape things I'm going to tell you about. The woods became my refuge when the old man went on a tear and stripped my pants off me to lash me with four foot long switches he'd cut for my beatings. Beating me was the old man's entertainment. So we walk past the old Gregory home then the Moyers and the Cranstons and the Smithsons. Just in case you're wondering, those are not their real names. Some of these people really were innocent and decent people so I'll protect them and not even reveal the real names of the others. Russell Road flattens right here in front of the Cranstons. Across the street, the woods end at that point and there's the house of the strangest people on the street, the Fortis family. Next to them going up the hill is the Swanson's house and then the Willmans. Then comes Mrs. Carrick's duplex and her tenant is Mrs. Stryker and her son, Hugo. Best I can tell you about Hugo is that he was one of two people I knew as a child who hated Jews. I saw Hugo bash a Jewish kid one day and it had me in tears. Now the other guy who hated Jews was the old man, the head of the house where I lived. I won't call him my father because he wasn't. He used every epithet in the books to describe Jews, blacks, Orientals, Hispanics and he had a few more epithets for everyone except his own brothers, sisters and that weird woman he called Mo-Ma. Yeah, she was his mother and lived to be 84 and if she ever smiled, I never saw it. She was as petty as he was. So was one of his brothers who owned a big business in town and so was one of his sisters. Keep that sister in mind. Her name was Lizzie and she was full of hate. Well this house right here with the long front porch, the white swing and two green metal chairs is where I lived for about 7 years. Look down the driveway and you can see the basement windows. That first set of windows is the whipping room the old man built. He kept his collection of switches there and built a platform for me to stand on while he beat hell out of me. That platform was two feet by two feet square and about eight inches high. I'd be home, listening to the radio and he'd come grab my hand and haul me down the basement steps, 13 of them. I counted them so that's why I know there were 13 steps. I'd be begging him not to beat me but it did no good. He held my wrist so tight the circulation would be cut off before reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he'd yank me to the right into that whipping room, force me onto his platform, rip off my pants and underpants and throw one arm around my neck to hold me and then came the lashes. I once counted 28. I'd catch glimpses of his face as he lashed me and what I remember most is that goddammed lascivious grin on his face depicting the joy he got out of beating me. I was six years old when those beatings started and they continued until I left that place when I was 11. I never gave him a reason to whip me. Didn't have to. It was strictly perverted entertainment for him. Was he a pervert in the true sense? Oh yeah. He was the most pornographic human I've ever known. If I didn't like certain foods like fried chard, boiled okra, stewed yellow squash and pork fat, I tried to shove it aside on my plate. The old man's fist would come flying into my face because I didn't like the food he liked and I'd go sailing out of my chair onto the floor and he'd grab my wrist and off we'd go to his whipping room. Time after time that happened in my years around that bastard. Did my mother care? Not a bit. She seemed to enjoy the beatings as much as he did. I recall several times when she'd lash out at me with slaps in the face, or she'd grab the belt off my pants and use it to blast away at me. She always made up excuses for it. Mother was a damned liar and also had that disease known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was her proxy. She used me to gain sympathy for herself. She'd make up lies about me and spread them like butter on bread and that served to get her family on her side. Her mother made no attempt to hide the fact she hated me. Neither did her brothers except for one, Charlie. But Charlie had been an outcast himself so he and I eventually became close but I was 22 by then. I had two brothers, or what is passed off as brothers. The older one loved the beatings I got and arranged several for me on days he'd get bored and wanted to hear me scream for my life. I used to swim in the river which was forbidden so he'd run tell that couple passed off to me as parents about it. What he didn't tell was that he also was swimming in the river. And big brother used to enjoy hurling insults at me. He got points for abusing me, I guess. I know they had nothing but praise for him. The younger one discovered my plight and decided he could make points by getting me in trouble too so he did. Brothers? Not really. Not to me anyway. Now my mother had a brother named Jack and that is his real name. I use it for a reason. He was a pedophile and I was his target. Twice when I was young, he tried to sodomize me. The first time I just poked him in the face with my elbow and he quit but slapped me in the face and on the side of my head. He warned me I had better not tell or he'd beat me up. He was 30 then and I was about 9. The second time he did it I was 11 and his brother, Charlie, was asleep in a room across the hall from me. Jack was drunk that night and crawled in my bed and began poking his erection at my butt. He had my hair in his hand that time but I shouted and Charlie heard it and came running. Charlie proved he was my friend that night. He grabbed Jack and the two of them went off in Charlie's car. Next morning when I saw Jack he had two black eyes, a broken nose and some missing teeth. According to the account his mother gave, Jack was beaten up by two thugs at a barbecue restaurant! I knew better. Charlie winked at me and I knew right away how that asshole brother of his got his beating. It struck me as odd two thugs would beat up a guy but not take his expensive watch, his wallet, or money from his pocket. Truth never got in my grandmother's way. It never got in the way of my mother either, or that old man she'd married. Or anybody in his family or in my mother's family. Except for Charlie. He was so candid he was hated. Charlie left home after that and moved to Seattle. I missed him and wrote him. He wrote back always in the tone of a truly caring man. Once he told me he understood my fear and wished he and his new wife, Marguerite, could adopt me. I wished they could have. Even after I left that place, that thing that was passed off as my home on Russell Road, I kept writing Charlie and Marguerite and they wrote back within a week everytime. Chapter Two St. Francis Home for Children Look at this photo of the old orphanage. It was built around 1900, a Spanish style stucco two-story building. See the two wings, one on the north end and the other on the south? Those were our dormitories. Boys lived in the North Wing and girls lived in the South Wing. Walk that long corridor between the two wings and you came to a wall. I have no idea what was on the south side of the wall. That was the girls' side of it, but over here where I lived in the boys' area the wall had a lifesize statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird. Behind him was that prayer I came to love so much and said so often while kneeling and lighting my candle. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. I was 8 years-old the first time I came to St. Francis, rescued from the violent ways of my home life on Russell Road. This old white stucco building was where I discovered peace and love for the first time. Kids under 10 slept on the first floor, boys to the north and girls to the south. On the first floor we were not separated by a wall. It was administrative offices, the refectory and the chapel that kept boys and girls apart down there. We went to school at St. Anne's School which was about a half mile southwest of the orphanage over at Mission Beach. St. Anne's almost touched the beach while St. Francis sat about eight blocks from the ocean up on the slope here. God, I loved that place and those cool Pacific breezes day and night. San Diego was a Navy town then. It still is but sailors and marines today are much better behaved. When I was at St. Francis we were never allowed to go downtown. Broadway back then was nothing but taverns, drunken servicemen and whores. Well, they did have locker clubs like the old Seven Seas for sailors and marines to buy space to change into civvies. Anytime we left the campus at St. Francis, we went on a blue and white bus and they'd haul us to the San Diego Zoo, a neighborhood movie theater to see Walt Disney films, or to a park distant from the servicemen. San Diego then and now has more parks than nearly any city in the world so we had plenty of places to go and they took us on trips every weekend. There would be four or five nuns along, a couple of priests and some of the Jesuit Brothers. They served as our guardians but they also were great guys to get into a softball game, touch football, and soccer. That's where I first learned to play soccer and that was long before it was popular in most of the United States. I loved to run and I'd get one of the brothers to tag along on a quiet jog around a park. I have no idea how far we'd run or how long either. Time and distance didn't mean a thing. It was my thinking time. Brother Phillip understood I wanted quiet when running and he seemed to enjoy the solitude as much as I did. Father Joe Kearney, a Jesuit priest, sometimes joined us while we ran. Father Joe had a girlfriend but not many people knew it. I spotted her waiting for him in the park one day when he, Brother Phillip and I were running. Father Joe veered off to catch up to this woman whose name was Anita. I won't say her middle and last names but I will tell you the initials of her three given names, including her confirmation name, came out AMDG. Why do I tell you that? Okay, I'll tell you why. Father wrote mystery stories and novels and he sold them. One of his mystery novels had a dedication in the front of the book. It read this way: "To AMDG" . Father was no dummie. He'd never have used her initials if they had been anything else. Among the Jesuits, AMDG stands for the motto of the Society of Jesus -- Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For you who don't understand Latin, in English it means For the Greater Glory of God. So Father Joe would run over with his woman friend and disappear for a little while. I have no idea where they went. Maybe they found a park bench to sit on or a concession stand out in the woods. Brother Phillip and I just kept running. I knew about Father Joe's woman friend when I was eight and she was still his friend when I made my second and final trip to St. Francis Home for Children at the age of 11. As I grew into my teen years, I began to understand even a vow of chastity has to be renewed every so often. I suspect Father Joe renewed his a little more often than some other priests. But I digress. If you don't like digression, go write your own damned novel. This is mine and I'll tell it my way. I go off on tangents just like Father Joe veered off on tangents from our running to hook up with AMDG. In geometry, if you remember your days in that dull subject, a tangent is a diversion from a course along a line, or you might go off on a tangent while you're out running and spot a cute woman. Hot pants are a known cause of tangents and AMDG was Miss Hot Pants. Get it now? My first trip to St. Francis occurred so quietly I hardly knew what was going on. I'd been taken by police to Juvenile Court and figured whatever it was the old man hated in me, the law must hate even worse. I kept looking for the gas chamber while I sat in Judge Odin's chambers. When he arrived in his black robe he looked just like a Jesuit priest and he had one of them with him. It was Father Joe. That made me sure my execution was at hand. I honestly felt that way. When your whole family keeps beating you up and telling you that you're bad, evil, and all that, you figure a courtroom is your last stop before you enter the gas chamber even if you don't know what you've done and I never did know. Judge Odin sat at his big desk, opened a folder and Father Joe sat beside me. I was in tears by then and filled with fear. Father Joe pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and had me blow my nose. Judge Odin's secretary brought me a cup of water and I waited for the death sentence to be handed down. I was amazed when the judge told me he was assigning me to St. Francis Home for Children on a temporary basis. He never said a thing about my mother or the man she married or those two weird and abusive brothers I had. Secretly, I was hoping they were going to get the gas chamber. Nobody ever did say what prompted my assignment to St. Francis but I was assured it was a place I'd enjoy and it wasn't a prison or detention home. I remember Father Joe saying it is a home for boys and girls like me. After Judge Odin signed the papers, I left with Father Joe and we got into his black Chevy and began the trip from Juvenile Court to St. Francis. I saw that two story Spanish style building for the first time that summer morning just after my eighth birthday. It had a wrought iron fence around it but there was no gate, no guard tower and no one carrying guns. I saw kids playing games, having fun on swings and slides, and there were teenagers playing ball and obviously having fun. We drove behind the building and right then I saw a place I knew I wanted to go. It was a huge swimming pool with diving board and a lifeguard stand. Father asked me if I liked to swim and for the first time I smiled. I loved to swim. There were pool hours posted and Father said I could swim everyday the weather permitted during my designated swim hours. Hey, two hours a day of swimming? Yeah. This was St. Francis showing me a welcome mat to a peaceful life. I was led into my dorm in the North Wing and shown to my bed,a comfortable looking single bed in a small but comofortable room I would share with another boy also eight years old. His name was Jerry and from the minute we met we became friends. He'd lived here a year and loved the place. I asked him if he was going to stay until he was grown up and he said he guessed so since he was up for adoption but "nobody wants me." Father Joe patted Jerry's head and told him St. Francis of Assisi always wants him as his child. I was issued clothing, comfortable clothing, I might say. There were shorts and t shirts, jeans and sport shirts, socks, two pair of tennies as we called our tennis shoes, one pair of black dress shoes, underwear, a bath towel to exhange everyday for a new one, a hand towel and wash cloth, and my own four drawer chest. On the wall behind our two beds were brass crucifixes. On my pillow was a rosary and a medal of St. Francis on a silver chain. A child's St. Joseph Missal also was on my bed. On the wall facing the foot of our beds were paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi. I was offered my choice of religious statues for my chest of drawers and I asked for St. Francis. A Jesuit Brother went down the hall and returned with my statue of St. Francis. Jerry had one of St. Robert Bellarmine on his chest of drawers. Along the wall beside the door were two small student desks. Mine was the one in the corner. Actually even Jerry had one in the corner considering the small closet we shared was next to his desk. We had dark wooden desks and dark wooden chairs. Inside my desk, I found pencils, crayons, tablets and an eraser. Nothing was elegant but everything suggested peace. I could handle that easily after the life I'd led with my mother and that bunch on Russell Road. "Jerry will show you around, Kieran,'' Father Joe said. "We don't fly by a big rulebook here. You'll have a schedule but it's nothing to be afraid of. And don't forget we are about an hour from lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, gravy, potatos and green beans today, boys." Father and the brother with him left and Jerry began telling me about life at St. Francis. He said I would like the place and the food especially. "It's okay having seconds," he said. My new friend told me there was no rule about how to dress. We were allowed to be comfortable. "So go barefoot is you want to. I do," he said. "So do most kids here." It was easy to see my new friend dressed in the manner of Huck Finn and out in the playground I'd already noticed the boys and girls both were comfortable. It looked like a real home only it had no parents. Some kids, including me, were put there by court order and only on a temporary basis while some strange thing called an inquiry took place. I hoped it was like burning sinners at the stake and my old family might be getting cooked. No such luck as time would tell. Jerry gave me the walking tour of St. Francis, first stopping at the refectory where I whiffed the aroma of roast beef being readied for the tables. We ducked into the chapel, genuflected and paused a minute or so to say our boyhood Catholic prayers we'd learned. Jerry looked at me and suggested we do one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Gloria together so we did. Later, he told me he always offered his prayers up to the Sacred Heart with the appeal some loving family would adopt him. Next to the refectory was a theater where movies were shown twice a week. They might be travel films or sometimes a Disney film and other times a religous life would be depicted in the movie. St. Francis Home for Children never failed to appeal to our religous heritage even in the case of kids like me, and I'd gotten to a point of near despair because of my life at home. St. Francis and the Jesuit priests I met there would lead me out of that wilderness. Give credit to Father Joe who discovered my love of poetry and nurtured it with the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a Jesuit priest whose works talk of lives approaching despair but never quite crumbling into it. Hopkins always finds hope and the Jesuit priests at St. Francis would eventually give me the hope my family never gave. Lawyers eventually crawled into my life like a bunch of bedbugs or rats. The two representing my family obtained a court order requiring visitations weekly with my mother, her brutal husband and the two jokers who posed as my brothers. The priests and nuns at St. Francis were appalled. So was I. But here came the so-called family trying to protect their reputations. Neighbors had been told, I learned, that I was a bad kid and placed in detention. The neighbors on Russell Road agreed with them. Why else did they beat me so much if I wasn't a bad kid, a recalcitrant little criminal. My mother and that man in her life were determined to make themselves look good at my expense. In my own mind I wondered why a court would allow parents who so blatantly lied and brutalized me to visit. Don't the police reports mean anything to the court? It was beyond my eight year old mind to understand that strange thing called justice. It's beyond my mind even now as I stare at the thick crop of once blond hair that is now gray. But I learned quickly lawyers could do anything they wanted. They are worse than an infestation of cockroaches. They are people devoid of a conscience. If my family was well practiced at lying, lawyers were true aces at it. I learned and still believe that to be a lawyer, you first have to be a sociopath. The court's order had come out of Sacramento, not from Judge Odin. A lawyer hired by my family had done some judge shopping and found the judge he needed. Now don't get all uppity about America and justice being for all. Back then, kids and criminals were allowed to have lawyers but they had to have the money to pay for them or do without. So nobody ever represented me and the police reports were never laid before that second judge. My first three months at St. Francis were the most peaceful I'd known. It was a warm place and while strict in some ways, the nuns who ran the place were never unfair, brutal or even close to being unkind to us. I've always heard tales of nuns whacking little kids on the knuckles. It never happened to me or to anyone I knew. The toughest order I ever got from a nun was to stand on the wall, meaning face the wall for 15 minutes for some misbehavior. It was fair. Like any kid, I could chatter out of place, or get angry over something or get into a scrap with another kid. Standing on the wall was the toughest punishment I ever faced with those nuns. I did get a swat on my butt one time, one swat was all and it was with a ping pong paddle. One swat and 2000 tears later, I was doing my penance which included an apology to the boy I'd pushed down in an argument over a baseball game. Breakfast at St. Francis began at 6 a.m. with prayers from the spiral stair rostrum at the front of the refectory. We stood for the prayer and took our seats about as fast as the word "Amen" dropped from the priest's lips. For those untrained in Catholic ways, that amen came at the end of the blessing -- In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. We crossed ourselves and plopped out little butts into our chairs and grabbed our juice glasses. At every meal, the food was served family style. Plates and bowls of food were sat near the head of the table where all serving began. A priest, a brother or a nun sat at the head of every table. One of the older boys or girls sat at the foot of the table. A typical breakfast included eggs with a meat except on Friday when we'd have fish even at breakfast. The breakfast also included pancakes, French toast or waffles. Big 12-ounce glasses sat before each kid's plate and pitchers of milk were in the middle of the table. We remained seated throughout the meal waiting for a priest to climb the spiral stairway again to give us the morning announcements and close our morning meal with a prayer for our safety and health. At all times, prayers concluding the three daily meals ended with the same words: "Lead us, O Heavenly Father, to learn to forgive those who have wronged us." It made sense considering most of us kids at St. Francis were discards from the rubble heap of American family life. I was about to be thrust right back into that rubble heap because of lawyers and that judge in Sacramento. After that court order, one Saturday a month the family drove to St. Francis for a visit. So that was a Saturday I missed being on the trips to the park or out to a movie or an amusement park. Any kid who had Saturday visits required by the court lost his Saturday recreation privileges as a result of decision by the fair minded judges. Now brace yourselves because I'm about to digress again. It was such things as decisions by judges, such as the one that eventually threw me right back into the pit of hell, that led me to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not for one minute believe those words "liberty and justice for all." My life was all the proof I needed for that and as I grew into my teen years, especially at the age of 16, I was to witness the absence of liberty and justice for black Americans. So you superpatriots with you goddammed hands over your hearts, keep on lying to yourselves. Some of us know better. We had to endure the pain inflicted by your stinking American justice system. Like I said before, if you don't like my digressions, go write your own novel. And don't ask me why I don't stand when you say the stupid pledge. It is a big lie. Well, the terrible and dreaded Saturday of my first family visit came. I stood at the window of the visitor center, a building apart from the main two story building where we kids lived and the nuns and priests ruled with love in their hearts. I was nervous as I watched for the family to drive through the front gate. Sister Luke stood by me and tried to reassure me she would be nearby. That nun knew this visit was wrong but she wasn't allowed to tell me that. I could sense it though. It was around 10 a.m. when I saw the red Buick come up the drive toward the visitor center. What a joke. There they stood like perfect people dressed in their finest attire. Hell, they probably bought that stuff just to make this visit so they could convince a court they really were good parents, and convince those neighbors they were very caring because they'd gone to a reform school -- that's how they presented it -- to visit me. The old man appeared sober for a change. With Sister Luke at my side, they pawed at me and spoke so lovingly in an effort to convince this wily old nun of their good hearts. I don't think Sister was fooled at all. She sat right there in the room with me until my mother said looked at her and told her the court said the visit would be private. Sister knew the rule too so she excused herself but she was wise enough to stay close at hand. About five minutes after she left, my face was swatted by the old man as he lit into me with a tirade about my comments to the police. I'd embarassed him by telling the police the truth if what that meant. As soon as my scream went up after my face was slapped, here came Sister Luke and Father Daniel O'Casey. The sister took my hand and led me out of the room and O'Casey, who was a big man with a deep voice, bellowed out "You have to leave now. Visit over." I was taken to a washroom to clean my face of the tears and then Sister led me out the back of the building, out of view of my mother and her wonderful hubby and good sons. I remember telling Sister Luke I never wanted to see them in the first place and now I'd missed my rec day with the other kids. She understood and told me about five or six other kids also had to miss the rec day and after their visits were over, Father O'Casey would open the swimming pool for those of us left behind that day. He did. God bless Father O'Casey. Justice took its usual course and refused to allow Sister Luke and Father O'Casey to file briefs on my behalf. I had no lawyer so what had happened that first visiting day would happen again at my next visiting day. Four more times it happened and the court would deny the nun and priest standing in the case even though they had acquired a volunteer attorney from the church. Are you beginning to get my point about liberty and justice in America? The court even ruled that attorney could not represent me because I was too young to choose my own legal counsel. So he appointed one for me and that guy never once visited me. He just conceded all the points made by my parents and their two lawyers. I spent 11 months at St. Francis and just before my ninth birthday, that fair minded judge up in Sacramento ordered me out of St. Francis and back into the life of my family. Two more years of hell would be spent before two eyewitnesses stepped forward in my behalf and my time at home was terminated forever. To this day I have no idea who stepped forward but I surmise it might have been the couple who moved into the vacant house right next door to my parents on Russell Road. They always seemed like nice people. The case was back in Judge Odin's hands and this time a lawyer represented me. He was not court appointed, I might add. Somebody out there had hired him and Judge Odin, the first and only fair minded judge I've known, let him represent me. It meant, I, a boy of 10 going on 11, had been given standing in the Superior Court of the State of California. It was in Judge Odin's chambers where the question came to me from the judge himself. Did I want to be placed permanently in the custody of the state as its ward housed at St. Francis and did I want the parental rights of my so-called family terminated. The judge carefully explained his question as he asked it. My own lawyer had explained to me it would be asked. He had urged me to think about it but told me not to answer it even to him. I was to answer it only when it was asked by the judge. I stood before the judge's big desk and answered "Yessir" to both questions. After the family's two lawyers made their pleas, Judge Odin read his order declaring my family unfit and making me a ward of the state. His final words remain indelible in my memory. "Kieran Patrick (name deleted), you are hereby declared a ward of the State of California to be housed at St. Francis Home for Children in San Diego; and to immediately be made eligible for adoption." At my request, Judge Odin also terminated my use of the family name. My time in Hell had ended. I was going to the only decent home I ever would have. I was never adopted and neither was Jerry who was again to be my roommate and friend at St. Francis. We were considered too old by families seeking to adopt. You might wonder why I kept my given names, Kieran Patrick. Well, I was a bastard child. My mother, a touring musician in a band, had frolicked with a cropduster pilot the December before my birth. She got pregnant, called him and begged for help. Scott was his first name and Stratton his last. Scott told her he would raise the child, boy or girl. He was 25 and in the ensuing months he decided on two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. He wanted his son to be named Kieran Patrick and if it was a girl, she would have been Kirsten Patricia. Scott had a girlfriend who agreed to accept his child so things looked good for me before my birth. But a month before I was born, Scott Stratton's little cropdusting plane burst into flames and crashed near a farm in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. His mother had suffered a stroke and his father was unable to raise a child for him. His sister was too young and still in school and his girlfriend opted out. But I had learned about Scott Stratton and I had seen his photos and letters. He would have been a terrific dad for anyone. So when my birth name was terminated by the court, a third order of the court granted me my real biological father's last name. When I was born, my mother had given me the names chosen by my biological father in hope his parents, despite their infirmities, would take me on. Life was not to be that good to me, not at the beginning anyway. But things did get better quickly once I was home again at St. Francis. I just didn't have the good sense to stay there as you will see when the train gets rolling down the tracks. Chapter Three Seal of the Confessional Meekly, we'd clasp our hands in front of us and stand like little saints waiting our turn to kneel and squeal in the confessional. It was easy to go to confession because of the seal of silence imposed on priests who hear confessions. Still, a kid might be a little uneasy sometimes as his turn in the confessional approached, Every Saturday at noon, boys walked into the chapel at St. Francis, genuflected and ducked into a back bench and knelt in silent meditation before going to confession. As we sat there, we rubbed our beads and kept our eyes on the four confessional booths each bearing the name of the priest in that confessional. For you non-Catholics, we watched the lines closely because we knew which priest we didn't want hearing our confession. No kid in his right mind wanted to confess to Father McNulty who was the Superior of this Jesuit community. McNulty dealt out penances so tough a kid might be on his knees saying the Rosary everyday for a month. He chewed ass, to put it mildly. Confessing to Father McNulty could take a long time even for a short list of bad deeds. He lectured us about our errant ways. It was not unusual to see an older teenager leave McNulty's confessional in tears. Priests counseled us during our confessions to avoid the occasion of sin. Father McNulty would spend several minutes lecturing the penitent young sinners on that subject. When I was around 13, I once thought he was about to suggest I amputate my hand to rid myself of my occasion of sin. By the time he told me to say my Act of Contrition while he pronounced the absolution, I was wiping my tearful face on my shirt sleeve. He'd ordered me to attend a novena which is nine days of prayer, say the Rosary twice daily for a week and avoid temptation by telling myself regularly my hands were meant to work for God and for not my own immoral pleasure. You could take the same sin into Father Larimore's confessional and come out in under two minutes with a penance of one Hail Mary, one Our Father and one Gloria to be offered up to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now with that description of Saturdays at confession time, I almost wager you can figure which priest's booth we all wanted to get into. Father Larimore had a line about 10 deep at all times. Father Kearney's line was also deep even if he was a little more strict than Father Larimore. Father O'Casey's confessional was one to avoid because you were so sure he could be heard through soundproof walls. You wanted to shush him when he began questioning your activities. He was lenient, but even his whispers rattled windows. There never was a line of boys at Father McNulty's confessional but one of the nuns was present to direct a waiting sinner to the next available booth and that often landed a quivering kid in Father Superior's confessional. You could grow calluses on your knees in that booth. I used to wonder if sore knees weren't as much the cause of tears on leaving his confessional as were Father McNulty's admonitions to the repentant ones. I said we squealed in the confessional. True, we did. We squealed on ourselves. We never mentioned any other kid, boy or girl, with whom we had shared some sinful enterprise. Nor would the priests ask us to identify our companions in sin. Don't get the wrong idea. Those sins committed with others weren't sexual at all but we were kids and we knew how to swipe things like bottles of Coca-Cola off the delivery truck, or candy from the back of an open van. Now I have to contradict myself. Some of our miscreant deeds were a bit risque but they didn't include sexual assault. Since we had allowances given to us weekly -- a whole half dollar at age 12 -- four or five boys might pool enough money to pay an adult to go into some store and buy us a titallating magazine. The most popular one back in my day was Sunshine and Health. It ran about a dollar and contained about 50 browntone photos of women in their lingerie but sometimes without a bra. Rearview photos without the hindrance of panties were common. The adult we'd pay to buy the magazine, which we all called our "dirty book," would receive a half dollar from five lusty boys so there was $1.50 spent on every issue. That reduced our pocket money by 30 cents, but we'd get it all back. We recovered our entire cost by loaning the dirty book to other boys for a nickel for one hour's reading time. Whichever one of us loaned it out got the nickel. None of us was ever a loser in the fine art of loaning out the dirty book, but we often were caught by the nuns, brothers or priests. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it when we were caught and whoever got caught zipped his lips and didn't rat on his pals. By the time any of us were nabbed with the dirty book, all of us who invested in it had recovered our money several times over. There were between 60 and 70 boys ages 11 to 18 in that upstairs dormitory and nearly everyone of them spent a nickel for an hour's worth of reading time. Some guys would pay more than once for the thrills in the dirty book. It depended on who caught you as to the disposition of things. If a nun nabbed the offender, she'd have him standing in the Mother Superior's office for a lecture followed by a prayer and the order to confess the sin. At least one confessional, and usually two, would be open at all daily masses and the Mother Superior specified we had to make our confession at the next daily mass. When I was nabbed, the next morning's mass gave me only one choice of confessors, Father Daniel O'Casey. I figured everybody in the church would hear his roaring voice when I fessed up to possessing the dirty book. At least he was brief, and probably suppressed a bit of laughter when he heard what I had in my hands while lying on my bed when I was caught. I was more grateful Father McNulty wasn't the confessor who heard my great sin that morning. He might have had me punch out my eyes as well as cut off my hand. You could always tell which guys had been partners in purchasing the dirty book. They were standing at the same confessional, or avoiding communion that day. All of us thought of ourselves as the first kids in history to buy a sexy magazine and use it in strengthening our wrists and fingers. We dreaded telling priests we had used some of our allowance in the buying the book and taken money from other boys in loaning it out for reading, and other pleasures. There seemed to be a conspiracy worked out among the priests when we confessed to being capitalists who had made a bit of money on a nudie book we'd bought and loaned. Invariably, the priest, regardless of who it was, asked how much money we made and we'd give the figure. I once made about 75 cents loaning out the dirty book which meant I had a net gain of 45 cents on my 30 cent share in the investment. My penance on that occasion was to forfeit two weeks allowance, and in addition I had to drop the 75 cents in loan money into the poor box. That left me penniless for three weeks. A group of boys one day pooled a bit of their allowance and went to a restoom in a nearby cafe and bought one condom for 50 cents. The condom never was meant to be used for sex. It was just for showing off and that rubber was passed around for look-see at two pennies for a few seconds. All we did was hold that darn thing in our hands and laugh. The investors in that item also made their money back and eventually one of them was nabbed showing it off. I have no idea what the priest who heard that kid's confession asked him and I don't even know if he drew Father McNulty at the next morning's mass. In the dorm, the boys did discuss whether or not the mere possession of that condom constituted a mortal sin or a venal sin. My only experience in that line was that Father Larimore decided my handing over two cents to hold it a few seconds and get some giggles amounted to a venal sin. I suspect Father McNulty might have viewed it as the occasion of sin and maybe bordering on a mortal sin. Glad I never had to find out or I might have been worrying about what to amputate to avoid that occasion of sin. Confession sometimes put a boy into the position of being humbled before someone he offended. It was one thing to apologize to a kid you'd bopped in the eye during a brawl, but it was something else to have to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and fess up and pay for stealing candy or something else. I gained some experience in fessing up and paying. Jerry had swiped two Hershey bars and shared his booty with me. He told me how he acquired the candy but I was such a chocolate candy fiend, it didn't matter. I gobbled down the chocolate bar with delight. Nobody caught us. They didn't have to. We were well educated Catholic boys and the next morning at mass we stood at Father Kearney's booth, the only one available. When I confessed to my role as receiver of stolen goods, Father said, "How many of you got in on this chocolate candy theft?" I told him it was just me and a friend and I never once mentioned Jerry by name. I didn't have to. Jerry fessed up to his deed and both of us were given the same penance. We had to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and hand the owner a nickel each to pay for the two candy bars Jerry had taken. Mr. Dodd forgave us and accepted our money. We were worried he would banish us from his store which would have hurt tremendously since it was one of only two stores close to the orphanage and we'd already been banned at the grocery store. Our banishment from the grocery came because we, along with four other boys, had stolen the Coca-Colas off the truck delivering the bottles to the store. Jerry and a boy named Andy months before that removed a whole box of candy from the back of a delivery van at that same market. Both confessed and both had to go pay the store for the candy. Neither Jerrry nor Andy was banished from market that first time. It was the next theft, the great Coca-Cola raid, that led to the banishment and Andy wasn't involved that day. I was and from that day on, Jerry and I were banished by the manager. We were terrified what might happen if the manager caught us in the store so we avoided the place. One night Father Kearney took Jerry and me out for a drive to help him load what he called "supplies" into the trunk of his car. We thought he meant school supplies. He was talking about boxes of margarine and jelly. Father pulled up in front of that market and Jerry and I stared at each other and knew we had to tell the priest we were banished at that place. Father knew about our soft drink heist but he had no idea the manager had forbidden us to enter his store again. Nonetheless he was sure he could escort us into the store, pay for the merchandise waiting to be picked up and there would be no problem. He was wrong. As soon as we walked into the market with the priest, the manager came with his finger wagging. He told Father he was welcome to come in but he had to leave us outside in the car. He didn't even want us near the front door of his store, he told Father Kearney. He referred to us as "dammed little urchins." We blushed and began walking out but the priest told us to stay. Father Kearney told the manager why we were with him and that we had done our penance, paid for the things taken and should be given another chance. We were only 12, he told the manager. The manager was insistent. Jerry and I were never to set foot in his store again. We thought that ended the dispute. Father told us to come with him and we'd go find another store to contract for services to St. Francis Home for Children. Since the orphans' home did about $30,000 a year in business with that store, the manager relented but he set conditions. We could come to the store to help load supplies but we'd have to go on the back dock to load the boxes into Father Kearney's car. We were never to be inside his store. The manager and one of his clerks escorted Jerry and me to the dock and the clerk stood with us. That was my last time in that market. It also was the last time St. Francis Home for Children spent a penny at that store. The contract went to a store in Mission Beach after that. Jesuits believe in forgiveness and when an errant youth confessed his sin to a priest then made amends to the person offended, which we had done, the priests believed forgiveness should be awarded. The unforgiving attitude of the store manager cost his store the business of the large community at St. Francis. It was declared off limits to all residents of St. Francis from that day on. I never participated in theft after that time nor did Andy. Jerry's fingers were a bit more sticky so he had to learn the hard way by losing privileges and large parts of his allowance but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was no longer lifting things from stores. A loss of privileges involved real penalties. It meant spending movie nights in the detention room with whichever nun might be in charge. His penalties also cut into his allowance. Each year, if we had good behavior, we would receive a raise in our allowance. A 15 or 16 year old got a dollar a week, a lot of money in the 1950s. Misconduct could cost a kid his annual raise in allowance. Detention didn't mean sit and study. It meant sitting on a hardwood bench in silence for an hour at a time, hands folded in your lap. An hour is a long time in a kid's life and Jerry probably held the all time record for detentions at St. Francis. I know he had around 30 of them at one time posted on the yellow sheet outside the office of the Prefect of Discipline. Detention was always served a day at a time. Any kid on detention on weekends lost the weekend trips but only spent one hour a day in the detention room. The rest of his day might be spent at ping pong, throwing a ball, or just walking around the campus. Leaving the campus would add 5 detentions and the one being served would not be credited which meant you actually had six added. Jerry was not a bad kid, not at all. He never injured anyone physically other then in defending himself and he could be ferocious in that regard. Like many of us, he'd been abused at home and it took a time to get over the effects of it. Jerry was a very gentle kid, considerate of others, a fun kid to know and be around, always willing to share his softball or his glove or bat. If another boy was injured in a game, Jerry was the first to stop the game to make sure the kid was not badly hurt. Teachers liked him and so did all the kids at St. Francis. He just had some hard times growing up and learning to trust and be trusted, but at St. Francis the patience of good leaders guided most us to productive lives. We earned points for acts of good citizenship. Points didn't earn money for you but they did get special favors such as a new mitt, a ball, a cap, a set of much desired swim trunks or tickets to be exchanged for rental of roller skates at the Rollerdrome, or a surfboard at Ocean Beach Pier. We also earned points for amusement park rides and that old Mission Beach roller coaster kept my eyes on the straight and narrow many times. Kids at St. Francis developed bonds with each other. We depended on each other and through the subtle teachings of the Jesuit priests we kept each other away from trouble. Older kids became counselors to the younger children, helping them with homework and soothing their anguished hearts. Death does not distinguish the young from the old and we learned that lesson three times during my stay at St. Francis. Twice it claimed the lives of older boys, both times from illness. Tom was 17 when he fell ill with spinal meningitis and died about three weeks later. He was the elected dormitory president and we all respected him Vince was a tall Italian boy who suffered from asthma and died one night in the infirmary while waiting for the ambulance to take him to Childrens Hospital. He also was 17. David and I were 12 when he died in an accident. We had been close friends. We were both members of the St. Francis Boy Choir and I was called on to sing the boy soprano solo part of the Sanctus at his requiem mass. My body trembled as I sang, accompanied by the organist. Somehow I got through it and then broke into tears. Even today when I hear the mournful Sanctus of Hector Berlioz, I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and my memory fills with images of David. He had straight blond hair that spilled over the sides of his head, a slender kid but about an inch or maybe two inches taller than me. He was nearsighted and wore glasses. He was a rare kid who never joined the crowd in poking fun at someone. David was the sort of kid who would stand by the victim of ridicule and befriend him. He wasn't a loudmouth. He was a leader among us. I guess it is such kids as David who are chosen by the Almighty to be called from the earth in their youth. Their dying leaves the model of a good life to remember. I have never forgotten my friend and he had an enduring impact on me. My own son carries his name today and he too has blond straight hair flopping over the side of his head, and he also wears glasses. Chapter Four Black Robes Jesuits don't wear the traditional button-up and button-down cassock other priests wear. The Jebs have their own style and it's a black robe tied with a sash. No buttons. It's one of many things that distinguish the Jesuit priest from other priests and it goes back to origins of the Society of Jesus, back in the 16th century. Jesuits are tradition bound but non-traditional when compared to other orders of priests. As a group, Jesuits are the scholars of Catholocism. As a boy schooled by Jesuits I found myself wondering about a vocation as a priest. It's not something romantic like being a soldier of fortune or a great actor. It is a sense the boy is being summoned by God to a calling. By the time he reaches 15, the youngster begins to weigh in his mind what he is surrendering if he becomes a priest and girls are chief among those things to be given up. It's one thing for kids to play tag or hide and seek with girls, or a softball game or hit the beach for surfing or volleyball. It's quite another to decide you will forego sexual pleasures with women and to give up thoughts of fathering children. Half a boy's brainpower at 15 is spent in reveries about sleeping with a girl. Much of his time in the confessional may be devoted to how he handles that when alone. By the time he is 16, a boy's homones are like thunder and lightning. He imagines flesh and muscle of girls, thinks of the often erroneous lessons on sex he's learned from other boys and chances are, if the boy was like me, all he'd ever seen of a naked female was in that magazine he called the dirty book. Teenage boys are like male dogs, always in heat. At that age, I used to wonder how guys could surrender that to become priests. What is a priestly calling, anyway? Not even a priest can answer that one. But any kid in a Catholic school knows what it takes to become a priest. If he chooses to become a Jesuit, it was a 15 year term in the seminary back when I was a boy. It began with two years in the novitiate, a time of virtual silence for the budding young seminarian. There was a period set aside for the novices to speak, but they had to speak Latin even in casual conversations with each other. "Latine, Frater," a Jesuit seminarian would be admonished if he spoke in English to a fellow seminarian or to a priest. The two years in the novitiate were a time of contemplation, meditation, reflection and decision. To be sure there were classes. Jesuits, after all, are educators. In that two year novitiate, a young seminarian would become steeped in classics, religious studies, science and, of course, Latin. The novice immersed himself in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the mass, the prayers of the Church, and when walking the novitiate grounds, he usually looked like he was muttering to himself as he stared into some little book in his hands. Actually, he was muttering to himself. In Latin, of course. Those first two years in the Jesuit seminary compare well to life as a Benedictine monk bound by the vow of silence. If a youngster finishes the two years in the novitiate, he has a decision to make. Will he or won't he take his first vows? During the time in the novitiate, a seminarian can pack his bag and leave at will. Once he takes those first vows, called temporal vows, he is bound under a religious contract with the Almighty. The vows can be terminated and the seminarian departs but few make that move once they complete the novitiate. The next step in a young Jesuit seminarian's life is spent in the Juniorate. That's real school, full time college plus the schooling to become a priest. Language studies, math, sciences, literature, writing, art and music fill out these years. Religous studies are the main component, though. At the end of that time, the young Jesuit isn't through with school. He's then in the Philosophate for three years. After seven years of intense study, contemplation, prayer and reflection, the average Jesuit will be around 24 years-old and will have an education that is worth at least one PhD. Two things occur at this stage. First, the seminary student takes his final or perpetual vows of obedience, chastity and poverty. He is now commited for a lifetime as a Jesuit. The second thing the young seminarian encounters is his first experience in the field as a teacher. The time is known as the Regency and the young Jeb spends three years at it. He could be sent anywhere on the planet the Jesuits have a community devoted to teaching. It is common to put the new teacher in a place where his faith and commitment are truly tested, such as a mosquito infested country in the South Pacific or Central America. After Regency, the seminarian returns to his Province's university and is considered to be in the Jesuit Theosophate for four years. The focus is on complex religious issues and also involves studies of other religions. At the conclusion of this four years, the seminarian has finished 14 years of Jesuit seminary but there is another 10 months to go before ordination. This is a time of contemplation about his vocation, his calling, a time to resolve all the lingering issues in his mind about his life as a priest. It is the time to make a firm and enduring commitment. At the end of 15 years, the priest is ordained and assigned to whatever duty the Province decides. At 15, I went with six other boys considering a Jesuit vocation to spend a week at the Jesuit Novitiate at Los Gatos, Calif. We were guests, to be sure, but we lived among the novices, took our meals with them, slept in the same building and observed the same restrictions, including struggling with Latin to hold a conversation. Twice daily, a priest would meet with each of us to hear our questions. He had little to say otherwise. It was obvious nobody was trying to sell us on becoming a Jesuit. We had to inquire. I suppose most of the boys felt as I did and never mentioned this hormonal things we were fighting. So the fifth day at Los Gatos, the priest raised that issue himself. One thing about Jesuits, is they can figure out things without you saying a word. I had such an experience years later with my personally chosen spiritual adviser. I had consulted him ostensibly to discuss my calling. We talked mostly about the first seven years in seminary and the three year Regency. I was 23 at the time. Father Joseph T. McGloin, SJ, told me of spending his regency in Belize, which is known for its mean and big mosquitos. Over dinner one night at the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs, Father McGloin said when he was sent to Belize he learned his black robe, which covered everything but his hands and face, was a perfect defensive apparatus. "St. Ignatius had Belize in mind when he designed the robe,'' McGloin said. "I spent three years running from mosquitos in that place. The worst was they could find a way into your robe and you'd better have plenty of clothes on. Forget the heat and humidity. Think skeeters,'' he said. Father McGloin was about 40 when I met him and he was teaching at St. Regis High School in Denver. I was going through my sixth year of second thoughts about becoming a priest. I had two college degrees when I went to Denver for the sole purpose of talking with Father McGloin. He was an author and I'd read two of his books about his 15 years of study in the Jesuit seminary and his life as a priest. He had come from Missouri, one of several children in his family and he entered the seminary at Florissant, Mo. I asked him if he ever had doubt about his vocation. He said there never is certitude until the day of ordination and even then, for some, there remains doubt. If he'd ever experienced doubt after ordination, it didn't show and he admitted he hadn't. I told him my mind constantly roams through uncertainty about the options. I told him of the strong feeling women were my calling, not the priesthood. He chuckled and said I was about the 500th youngster who'd wondered about that while wrestling with a calling to serve the Church. I had sought out this priest because of his books and the sense I could talk to him frankly. For that matter, I already knew bluntness and candor were qualities of Jesuits. I chose McGloin more because he didn't know me, yet I sensed he knew more about me than I was telling. During my first meeting with him at Regis High, I said nothing about my life at St. Francis Home, growing up an orphan, a reject from my family. I hadn't even planned to tell him about that. A few days later, I joined him at the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs where he had arranged a national gathering of 3,000 young members of the Sodality Union. About our third night in Colorado Springs, I decided to tell Father about my past. It was difficult. It always has been and it still is. Unless you have been the outcast, the discard from your family, you can't possibly understand how it affects you. If your own parents hate you, surely the rest of humanity won't like you. You don't get over it. You do adjust to it in time as I have since learned. When I told Father McGloin about my past that night over dinner, he smiled. "I already knew it." he said. "Who told you?" I asked. "You did. Not in so many words but the gist of your life was spilling all around you the first day I met you," he said. "You never once talked about your family. You talked about things that revealed more than you realize." He cited my conversations about being among 30 and more boys in a dormitory, living near the ocean in San Diego, being among the nuns, Jesuit priests and brothers. "It wasn't a neighborhood you were talking about. It had an institutional ring to it." I didn't realize how transparent my life might be and wondered how many others realized I was a product of the orphanage. I was used to kids in school and college telling me I never mentioned my parents or siblings. In truth, none of them ever pieced together anything that revealed my childhood as just another throwaway kid, but many pried and tried. Kids at St. Francis were fiercely proud of the home. It was not unusual for us to have to defend it -- or ourselves -- from the bully boys who taunted us because we were orphans. The comments often cut deeply. We attended regular Catholic schools and there was no end of bullying through 8th grade. High school was less of a war zone and making friends was easier, but we did have one obstacle. An orphaned boy might be popular with his classmates but he would never achieve acceptance from the parents of girls. I learned that lesson in 9th grade when I asked a girl out for a Saturday afternoon movie. She accepted but by Friday afternoon she told me her parents wouldn't let her. She didn't say they wouldn't allow her to go out with me. I learned that later. I had another experience like that in 10th grade when I asked a girl to a school dance. After accepting, she backed out but that girl told me exaclty why. Her parents didn't want her to associate with an orphaned boy. The girl and I remained friendly and I did dance with her at the Senior Prom right in front of her parents. I think she got more fun out of that than I did. I was deathly afraid of her father, a big guy with a frown that must have worn out four bodies. When the girl introduced me, her father turned away but her mother acknowledged me. I'm sure she'd have preferred her daughter not to be in the company of some Oliver Twist. I was at a Jesuit run high school for boys. All the girls I met attended a Catholic school for girls and some were at a co-ed Catholic school. The girls whose families accepted me as a fellow human were all Mexican. Their brothers also became some of my closest friends. I often was invited to dinner on Fridays at their homes. The homes were modest and small, but always spotless. Miguel, who was a brother to one of the girls I dated, was a high school classmate of mine. He knew me well and told me not to dress up so fancy when I visited. His brothers and sisters enjoyed casual and Miguel knew I liked wearing shorts and t shirts and going barefoot so he laid out a "come as you are" invitation. After that, we no longer sat at the dining table to eat. We found places on the back deck to sit and fold our legs. Evening dates did present a problem, though. Rules at St. Francis required I be in for bed check on weekends by 10 p.m. after age 14. My girl friend's family knew that so they drove me home so I'd make it by bed check. I could hold hands with my date, but rules said no kissing or hugging. At St. Francis, it was the nuns who monitored our behavior when we went out for dinner or to a movie. As you might expect, younger and older boys knew the comings and goings of guys on dates. I always hated it when some guy would ask me if I gotten into the girl's pants. I cared so much for that girl I would sometimes become a bit testy when kids asked me that question. I was a virgin at 15 and would stay one until I was 16 but it wasn't a California girl who undid my virginal status. Chapter Five Becoming a Hobo Current Mood: Reflective Current Music: James Galway: Meditations (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 5th, 2003
11:55 am	Kindly Light Chapter Three Seal of the Confessional Meekly, we'd clasp our hands in front of us and stand like little saints waiting our turn to kneel and squeal in the confessional. It was easy to go to confession because of the seal of silence imposed on priests who hear confessions. Still, a kid might be a little uneasy sometimes as his turn in the confessional approached, Every Saturday at noon, boys walked into the chapel at St. Francis, genuflected and ducked into a back bench and knelt in silent meditation before going to confession. As we sat there, we rubbed our beads and kept our eyes on the four confessional booths each bearing the name of the priest in that confessional. For you non-Catholics, we watched the lines closely because we knew which priest we didn't want hearing our confession. No kid in his right mind wanted to confess to Father McNulty who was the Superior of this Jesuit community. McNulty dealt out penances so tough a kid might be on his knees saying the Rosary everyday for a month. He chewed ass, to put it mildly. Confessing to Father McNulty could take a long time even for a short list of bad deeds. He lectured us about our errant ways. It was not unusual to see an older teenager leave McNulty's confessional in tears. Priests counseled us during our confessions to avoid the occasion of sin. Father McNulty would spend several minutes lecturing the penitent young sinners on that subject. When I was around 13, I once thought he was about to suggest I amputate my hand to rid myself of my occasion of sin. By the time he told me to say my Act of Contrition while he pronounced the absolution, I was wiping my tearful face on my shirt sleeve. He'd ordered me to attend a novena which is nine days of prayer, say the Rosary twice daily for a week and avoid temptation by telling myself regularly my hands were meant to work for God and for not my own immoral pleasure. You could take the same sin into Father Larimore's confessional and come out in under two minutes with a penance of one Hail Mary, one Our Father and one Gloria to be offered up to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now with that description of Saturdays at confession time, I almost wager you can figure which priest's booth we all wanted to get into. Father Larimore had a line about 10 deep at all times. Father Kearney's line was also deep even if he was a little more strict than Father Larimore. Father O'Casey's confessional was one to avoid because you were so sure he could be heard through soundproof walls. You wanted to shush him when he began questioning your activities. He was lenient, but even his whispers rattled windows. There never was a line of boys at Father McNulty's confessional but one of the nuns was present to direct a waiting sinner to the next available booth and that often landed a quivering kid in Father Superior's confessional. You could grow calluses on your knees in that booth. I used to wonder if sore knees weren't as much the cause of tears on leaving his confessional as were Father McNulty's admonitions to the repentant ones. I said we squealed in the confessional. True, we did. We squealed on ourselves. We never mentioned any other kid, boy or girl, with whom we had shared some sinful enterprise. Nor would the priests ask us to identify our companions in sin. Don't get the wrong idea. Those sins committed with others weren't sexual at all but we were kids and we knew how to swipe things like bottles of Coca-Cola off the delivery truck, or a candy from the back of an open van. Since we had allowances given to us weekly -- a whole half dollar at age 12 -- four or five boys might pool enough money to pay an adult to go into some store and buy us a titallating magazine. The most popular one back in my day was Sunshine and Health. It ran about a dollar and contained about 50 browntone photos of women in their lingerie but sometimes without a bra. Rearview photos without the hindrance of panties were common. The adult we'd pay to buy the magazine, which we all called our "dirty book," would receive a half dollar from five lusty boys so there was $1.50 spent on every issue. That reduced our pocket money by 30 cents, but we'd get it all back. We recovered our entire cost by loaning the dirty book to other boys for a nickel for one hour's reading time. Whichever one of us loaned it out got the nickel. None of us was ever a loser in the fine art of loaning out the dirty book, but we often were caught by the nuns, brothers or priests. Nobody ever made a big deal out of it when we were caught and whoever got caught zipped his lips and didn't rat on his pals. By the time any of us were nabbed with the dirty book, all of us who invested in it had recovered our money several times over. There were between 60 and 70 boys ages 11 to 18 in that upstairs dormitory and nearly everyone of them spent a nickel for an hour's worth of reading time. Some guys would pay more than once for the thrills in the dirty book. It depended on who caught you as to the disposition of things. If a nun nabbed the offender, she'd have him standing in the Mother Superior's office for a lecture followed by a prayer and the order to confess the sin. At least one confessional, and usually two, would be open at all daily masses and the Mother Superior specified we had to make our confession at the next daily mass. When I was nabbed, the next morning's mass gave me only one choice of confessors, Father Daniel O'Casey. I figured everybody in the church would hear his roaring voice when I fessed up to possessing the dirty book. At least he was brief, and probably suppressed a bit of laughter when he heard what I had in my hands while lying on my bed when I was caught. I was more grateful Father McNulty wasn't the confessor who heard my great sin that morning. He might have had me punch out my eyes as well as cut off my hand. You could always tell which guys had been partners in purchasing the dirty book. They were standing at the same confessional, or avoiding communion that day. All of us thought of ourselves as the first kids in history to buy a sexy magazine and use it in strengthening our wrists and fingers. We dreaded telling priests we had used some of our allowance in the buying the book and taken money from other boys in loaning it out for reading, and other pleasures. There seemed to be a conspiracy worked out among the priests when we confessed to being capitalists who had made a bit of money on a nudie book we'd bought and loaned. Invariably, the priest, regardless of who it was, asked how much money we made and we'd give the figure. I once made about 75 cents loaning out the dirty book which meant I had a net gain of 45 cents on my 30 cent share in the investment. My penance on that occasion was to forfeit two weeks allowance, and in addition I had to drop the 75 cents in loan money into the poor box. That left me penniless for three weeks. A group of boys one day pooled a bit of their allowance and went to a restoom in a nearby cafe and bought one condom for 50 cents. The condom never was meant to be used for sex. It was just for showing off and that rubber was passed around for look-see at two pennies for a few seconds. All we did was hold that darn thing in our hands and laugh. The investors in that item also made their money back and eventually one of them was nabbed showing it off. I have no idea what the priest who heard that kid's confession asked him and I don't even know if he drew Father McNulty at the next morning's mass. In the dorm, the boys did discuss whether or not the mere possession of that condom constituted a mortal sin or a venal sin. My only experience in that line was that Father Larimore decided my handing over two cents to hold it a few seconds and get some giggles amounted to a venal sin. I suspect Father McNulty might have viewed it as the occasion of sin and maybe bordering on a mortal sin. Glad I never had to find out or I might have been worrying about what to amputate to avoid that occasion of sin. Confession sometimes put a boy into the position of being humbled before someone he offended. It was one thing to apologize to a kid you'd bopped in the eye during a brawl, but it was something else to have to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and fess up and pay for stealing candy or something else. I gained some experience in fessing up and paying. Jerry had swiped two Hershey bars and shared his booty with me. He told me how he acquired the candy but I was such a chocolate candy fiend, it didn't matter. I gobbled down the chocolate bar with delight. Nobody caught us. They didn't have to. We were well educated Catholic boys and the next morning at mass we stood at Father Kearney's booth, the only one available. When I confessed to my role as receiver of stolen goods, Father said, "How many of you got in on this chocolate candy theft?" I told him it was just me and a friend and I never once mentioned Jerry by name. I didn't have to. Jerry fessed up to his deed and both of us were given the same penance. We had to go to Dodd's Pharmacy and hand the owner a nickel each to pay for the two candy bars Jerry had taken. Mr. Dodd forgave us and accepted our money. We were worried he would banish us from his store which would have hurt tremendously since it was one of only two stores close to the orphanage and we'd already been banned at the grocery store. Our banishment from the grocery came because we, along with four other boys, had stolen the Coca-Colas off the truck delivering the bottles to the store. Jerry and a boy named Andy months before that removed a whole box of candy from the back of a delivery van at that same market. Both confessed and both had to go pay the store for the candy. Neither Jerrry nor Andy was banished from market that first time. It was the next theft, the great Coca-Cola raid, that led to the banishment and Andy wasn't involved that day. I was and from that day on, Jerry and I were banished by the manager. We were terrified what might happen if the manager caught us in the store so we avoided the place. One night Father Kearney took Jerry and me out for a drive to help him load what he called "supplies" into the trunk of his car. We thought he meant school supplies. He was talking about boxes of margarine and jelly. Father pulled up in front of that market and Jerry and I stared at each other and knew we had to tell the priest we were banished at that place. Father knew about our soft drink heist but he had no idea the manager had forbidden us to enter his store again. Nonetheless he was sure he could escort us into the store, pay for the merchandise waiting to be picked up and there would be no problem. He was wrong. As soon as we walked into the market with the priest, the manager came with his finger wagging. He told Father he was welcome to come in but he had to leave us outside in the car. He didn't even want us near the front door of his store, he told Father Kearney. He referred to us as "dammed little urchins." We blushed and began walking out but the priest told us to stay. Father Kearney told the manager why we were with him and that we had done our penance, paid for the things taken and should be given another chance. We were only 12, he told the manager. The manager was insistent. Jerry and I were never to set foot in his store again. We thought that ended the dispute. Father told us to come with him and we'd go find another store to contract for services to St. Francis Home for Children. Since the orphans' home did about $30,000 a year in business with that store, the manager relented but he set conditions. We could come to the store to help load supplies but we'd have to go on the back dock to load the boxes into Father Kearney's car. We were never to be inside his store. The manager and one of his clerks escorted Jerry and me to the dock and the clerk stood with us. That was my last time in that market. It also was the last time St. Francis Home for Children spent a penny at that store. The contract went to a store in Mission Beach after that. Jesuits believe in forgiveness and when an errant youth confessed his sin to a priest then made amends to the person offended, which we had done, the priests believed forgiveness should be awarded. The unforgiving attitude of the store manager cost his store the business of the large community at St. Francis. It was declared off limits to all residents of St. Francis from that day on. I never participated in theft after that time nor did Andy. Jerry's fingers were a bit more sticky so he had to learn the hard way by losing privileges and large parts of his allowance but by the time he was 13 or 14, he was no longer lifting things from stores. A loss of privileges involved real penalties. It meant spending movie nights in the detention room with whichever nun might be in charge. His penalties also cut into his allowance. Each year, if we had good behavior, we would receive a raise in our allowance. A 15 or 16 year old got a dollar a week, a lot of money in the 1950s. Misconduct could cost a kid his annual raise in allowance. Detention didn't mean sit and study. It meant sitting on a hardwood bench in silence for an hour at a time, hands folded in your lap. An hour is a long time in a kid's life and Jerry probably held the all time record for detentions at St. Francis. I know he had around 30 of them at one time posted on the yellow sheet outside the office of the Prefect of Discipline. Detention was always served a day at a time. Any kid on detention on weekends lost the weekend trips but only spent one hour a day in the detention room. The rest of his day might be spent at ping pong, throwing a ball, or just walking around the campus. Leaving the campus would add 5 detentions and the one being served would not be credited which meant you actually had six added. Jerry was not a bad kid, not at all. He never injured anyone physically other then in defending himself and he could be ferocious in that regard. Like many of us, he'd been abused at home and it took a time to get over the effects of it. Jerry was a very gentle kid, considerate of others, a fun kid to know and be around, always willing to share his softball or his glove or bat. If another boy was injured in a game, Jerry was the first to stop the game to make sure the kid was not badly hurt. Teachers liked him and so did all the kids at St. Francis. He just had some hard times growing up and learning to trust and be trusted, but at St. Francis the patience of good leaders guided most us to productive lives. We earned points for acts of good citizenship. Points didn't earn money for you but they did get special favors such as a new mitt, a ball, a cap, a set of much desired swim trunks or tickets to be exchanged for rental of roller skates at the Rollerdrome, or a surfboard at Ocean Beach Pier. We also earned points for amusement park rides and that old Mission Beach roller coaster kept my eyes on the straight and narrow many times. Kids at St. Francis developed bonds with each other. We depended on each other and through the subtle teachings of the Jesuit priests we kept each other away from trouble. Older kids became counselors to the younger children, helping them with homework and soothing their anguished hearts. Death does not distinguish the young from the old and we learned that lesson three times during my stay at St. Francis. Twice it claimed the lives of older boys, both times from illness. Tom was 17 when he fell ill with spinal meningitis and died about three weeks later. He was the elected dormitory president and we all respected him Vince was a tall Italian boy who suffered from asthma and died one night in the infirmary while waiting for the ambulance to take him to Childrens Hospital. He also was 17. David and I were 12 when he died in an accident. We had been close friends. We were both members of the St. Francis Boy Choir and I was called on to sing the boy soprano solo part of the Sanctus at his requiem mass. My body trembled as I sang, accompanied by the organist. Somehow I got through it and then broke into tears. Even today when I hear the mournful Sanctus of Hector Berlioz, I get a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes and my memory fills with images of David. He had straight blond hair that spilled over the sides of his head, a slender kid but about an inch or maybe two inches taller than me. He was nearsighted and wore glasses. He was a rare kid who never joined the crowd in poking fun at someone. David was the sort of kid who would stand by the victim of ridicule and befriend him. He wasn't a loudmouth. He was a leader among us. I guess it is such kids as David who are chosen by the Almighty to be called from the earth in their youth. Their dying leaves the model of a good life to remember. I have never forgotten my friend and he had an enduring impact on me. My own son carries his name today and he too has blond straight hair flopping over the side of his head, and he also wears glasses. (Comment on this)
Monday, November 3rd, 2003
11:13 am	KINDLY LIGHT: Life as a Discard S.T. Stratton sts@thedoghousemail.com Page 1. Chapter One Life on Russell Road Maybe I ought to tell this story as some omniscent observer, a sort of spirit staring down at life. Hell, you'd call that being a fly on the wall. I don't want to be a fly on the wall. Somebody might smack me with a newspaper and I'd never finish this damn book. So let me lead you on this trip. Don't hold my hand. Just walk beside me and keep your hands off me. We're walking up long steep hill now along a sidewalk, woods on either side of the street. This is Russell Road and your breath is going to come in short pants before we reach the first house ahead of us. That's where Didi and Robin lived, two pretty girls who gave me and other boys wet dreams. Robin is dead now. She was killed in a head-on collision one night on a bridge. Her boyfriend was drunk, veered into the oncoming traffic and Robin wound up in a casket at the age of 19. Robin had dark brown hair, brown eyes and a body that stepped right out of a Playboy centerfold. She had all the assets, tits, shapely hips, beautiful legs and an ass that set fires in guys' hearts. Now Robin was seven years older than I but that didn't stop me from drooling once my hormones starting nipping at me. Didi was lean, lanky and had the misfortune of being flatchested. Guys still got off daydreaming about her. She sure wasn't ordinary but she just didn't have those assets I mentioned about Robin. Sit awhile here in front of the house where those girls lived. This is the house where Robin and Didi lived with their mothers who were sisters. I have no idea what happened to their fathers. Maybe they just took off. We never heard anybody speak of them. The girls were not sisters. They were cousins. Their mothers were sisters and teachers. Like all the houses on this street, it is a white frame structure built about 1925. I wasn't around then so can't say for sure but the style is one common in that time. Big front porches with swings, metal chairs and two or three steps to climb to the porch. Everybody who walked up this hill would stop right here to sit on the wall in front of the house where Didi and Robin lived. Old Mrs. Carrick told me one day the way to stop breathing so fast from the long uphill climb was to sit here and do five fast and short breaths. It worked. The best thing about this wall is it isn't high right here and that's because of the steep grade. It's about three feet high here, just perfect for a brief rest. Let's go on up the hill now. It begins to flatten a bit now as we approach a midpoint. Look across the street at those woods full of big oaks and pines. I used to run hide in those woods to escape things I'm going to tell you about. The woods became my refuge when the old man went on a tear and stripped my pants off me to lash me with four foot long switches he'd cut for my beatings. Beating me was the old man's entertainment. So we walk past the old Gregory home then the Moyers and the Cranstons and the Smithsons. Just in case you're wondering, those are not their real names. Some of these people really were innocent and decent people so I'll protect them and not even reveal the real names of the others. Russell Road flattens right here in front of the Cranstons. Across the street, the woods end at that point and there's the house of the strangest people on the street, the Fortis family. Next to them going up the hill is the Swanson's house and then the Willmans. Then comes Mrs. Carrick's duplex and her tenant is Mrs. Stryker and her son, Hugo. Best I can tell you about Hugo is that he was one of two people I knew as a child who hated Jews. I saw Hugo bash a Jewish kid one day and it had me in tears. Now the other guy who hated Jews was the old man, the head of the house where I lived. I won't call him my father because he wasn't. He used every epithet in the books to describe Jews, blacks, Orientals, Hispanics and he had a few more epithets for everyone except his own brothers, sisters and that weird woman he called Mo-Ma. Yeah, she was his mother and lived to be 84 and if she ever smiled, I never saw it. She was as petty as he was. So was one of his brothers who owned a big business in town and so was one of his sisters. Keep that sister in mind. Her name was Lizzie and she was full of hate. Well this house right here with the long front porch, the white swing and two green metal chairs is where I lived for about 7 years. Look down the driveway and you can see the basement windows. That first set of windows is the whipping room the old man built. He kept his collection of switches there and built a platform for me to stand on while he beat hell out of me. That platform was two feet by two feet square and about eight inches high. I'd be home, listening to the radio and he'd come grab my hand and haul me down the basement steps, 13 of them. I counted them so that's why I know there were 13 steps. I'd be begging him not to beat me but it did no good. He held my wrist so tight the circulation would be cut off before reached the bottom of the stairs. Then he'd yank me to the right into that whipping room, force me onto his platform, rip off my pants and underpants and throw one arm around my neck to hold me and then came the lashes. I once counted 28. I'd catch glimpses of his face as he lashed me and what I remember most is that goddammed lascivious grin on his face depicting the joy he got out of beating me. I was six years old when those beatings started and they continued until I left that place when I was 11. I never gave him a reason to whip me. Didn't have to. It was strictly perverted entertainment for him. Was he a pervert in the true sense? Oh yeah. He was the most pornographic human I've ever known. If I didn't like certain foods like fried chard, boiled okra, stewed yellow squash and pork fat, I tried to shove it aside on my plate. The old man's fist would come flying into my face because I didn't like the food he liked and I'd go sailing out of my chair onto the floor and he'd grab my wrist and off we'd go to his whipping room. Time after time that happened in my years around that bastard. Did my mother care? Not a bit. She seemed to enjoy the beatings as much as he did. I recall several times when she'd lash out at me with slaps in the face, or she'd grab the belt off my pants and use it to blast away at me. She always made up excuses for it. Mother was a damned liar and also had that disease known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was her proxy. She used me to gain sympathy for herself. She'd make up lies about me and spread them like butter on bread and that served to get her family on her side. Her mother made no attempt to hide the fact she hated me. Neither did her brothers except for one, Charlie. But Charlie had been an outcast himself so he and I eventually became close but I was 22 by then. I had two brothers, or what is passed off as brothers. The older one loved the beatings I got and arranged several for me on days he'd get bored and wanted to hear me scream for my life. I used to swim in the river which was forbidden so he'd run tell that couple passed off to me as parents about it. What he didn't tell was that he also was swimming in the river. And big brother used to enjoy hurling insults at me. He got points for abusing me, I guess. I know they had nothing but praise for him. The younger one discovered my plight and decided he could make points by getting me in trouble too so he did. Brothers? Not really. Not to me anyway. Now my mother had a brother named Jack and that is his real name. I use it for a reason. He was a pedophile and I was his target. Twice when I was young, he tried to sodomize me. The first time I just poked him in the face with my elbow and he quit but slapped me in the face and on the side of my head. He warned me I had better not tell or he'd beat me up. He was 30 then and I was about 9. The second time he did it I was 11 and his brother, Charlie, was asleep in a room across the hall from me. Jack was drunk that night and crawled in my bed and began poking his erection at my butt. He had my hair in his hand that time but I shouted and Charlie heard it and came running. Charlie proved he was my friend that night. He grabbed Jack and the two of them went off in Charlie's car. Next morning when I saw Jack he had two black eyes, a broken nose and some missing teeth. According to the account his mother gave, Jack was beaten up by two thugs at a barbecue restaurant! I knew better. Charlie winked at me and I knew right away how that asshole brother of his got his beating. It struck me as odd two thugs would beat up a guy but not take his expensive watch, his wallet, or money from his pocket. Truth never got in my grandmother's way. It never got in the way of my mother either, or that old man she'd married. Or anybody in his family or in my mother's family. Except for Charlie. He was so candid he was hated. Charlie left home after that and moved to Seattle. I missed him and wrote him. He wrote back always in the tone of a truly caring man. Once he told me he understood my fear and wished he and his new wife, Marguerite, could adopt me. I wished they could have. Even after I left that place, that thing that was passed off as my home on Russell Road, I kept writing Charlie and Marguerite and they wrote back within a week everytime. Chapter 2 St. Francis Home for Children Look at this photo of the old orphanage. It was built around 1900, a Spanish style stucco two-story building. See the two wings, one on the north end and the other on the south? Those were our dormitories. Boys lived in the North Wing and girls lived in the South Wing. Walk that long corridor between the two wings and you came to a wall. I have no idea what was on the south side of the wall. That was the girls' side of it, but over here where I lived in the boys' area the wall had a lifesize statue of St. Francis of Assisi holding a bird. Behind him was that prayer I came to love so much and said so often while kneeling and lighting my candle. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. I was 8 years-old the first time I came to St. Francis, rescued from the violent ways of my home life on Russell Road. This old white stucco building was where I discovered peace and love for the first time. Kids under 10 slept on the first floor, boys to the north and girls to the south. On the first floor we were not separated by a wall. It was administrative offices, the refectory and the chapel that kept boys and girls apart down there. We went to school at St. Anne's School which was about a half mile southwest of the orphanage over at Mission Beach. St. Anne's almost touched the beach while St. Francis sat about eight blocks from the ocean up on the slope here. God, I loved that place and those cool Pacific breezes day and night. San Diego was a Navy town then. It still is but sailors and marines today are much better behaved. When I was at St. Francis we were never allowed to go downtown. Broadway back then was nothing but taverns, drunken servicemen and whores. Well, they did have locker clubs like the old Seven Seas for sailors and marines to buy space to change into civvies. Anytime we left the campus at St. Francis, we went on a blue and white bus and they'd haul us to the San Diego Zoo, a neighborhood movie theater to see Walt Disney films, or to a park distant from the servicemen. San Diego then and now has more parks than nearly any city in the world so we had plenty of places to go and they took us on trips every weekend. There would be four or five nuns along, a couple of priests and some of the Jesuit Brothers. They served as our guardians but they also were great guys to get into a softball game, touch football, and soccer. That's where I first learned to play soccer and that was long before it was popular in most of the United States. I loved to run and I'd get one of the brothers to tag along on a quiet jog around a park. I have no idea how far we'd run or how long either. Time and distance didn't mean a thing. It was my thinking time. Brother Phillip understood I wanted quiet when running and he seemed to enjoy the solitude as much as I did. Father Joe Kearney, a Jesuit priest, sometimes joined us while we ran. Father Joe had a girlfriend but not many people knew it. I spotted her waiting for him in the park one day when he, Brother Phillip and I were running. Father Joe veered off to catch up to this woman whose name was Anita. I won't say her middle and last names but I will tell you the initials of her three given names, including her confirmation name, came out AMDG. Why do I tell you that? Okay, I'll tell you why. Father wrote mystery stories and novels and he sold them. One of his mystery novels had a dedication in the front of the book. It read this way: "To AMDG" . Father was no dummie. He'd never have used her initials if they had been anything else. Among the Jesuits, AMDG stands for the motto of the Society of Jesus -- Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. For you who don't understand Latin, in English it means For the Greater Glory of God. So Father Joe would run over with his woman friend and disappear for a little while. I have no idea where they went. Maybe they found a park bench to sit on or a concession stand out in the woods. Brother Phillip and I just kept running. I knew about Father Joe's woman friend when I was eight and she was still his friend when I made my second and final trip to St. Francis Home for Children at the age of 11. As I grew into my teen years, I began to understand even a vow of chastity has to be renewed every so often. I suspect Father Joe renewed his a little more often than some other priests. But I digress. If you don't like digression, go write your own damned novel. This is mine and I'll tell it my way. I go off on tangents just like Father Joe veered off on tangents from our running to hook up with AMDG. In geometry, if you remember your days in that dull subject, a tangent is a diversion from a course along a line, or you might go off on a tangent while you're out running and spot a cute woman. Hot pants are a known cause of tangents and AMDG was Miss Hot Pants. Get it now? My first trip to St. Francis occurred so quietly I hardly knew what was going on. I'd been taken by police to Juvenile Court and figured whatever it was the old man hated in me, the law must hate even worse. I kept looking for the gas chamber while I sat in Judge Odin's chambers. When he arrived in his black robe he looked just like a Jesuit priest and he had one of them with him. It was Father Joe. That made me sure my execution was at hand. I honestly felt that way. When your whole family keeps beating you up and telling you that you're bad, evil, and all that, you figure a courtroom is your last stop before you enter the gas chamber even if you don't know what you've done and I never did know. Judge Odin sat at his big desk, opened a folder and Father Joe sat beside me. I was in tears by then and filled with fear. Father Joe pulled out his handkerchief and wiped my eyes and had me blow my nose. Judge Odin's secretary brought me a cup of water and I waited for the death sentence to be handed down. I was amazed when the judge told me he was assigning me to St. Francis Home for Children on a temporary basis. He never said a thing about my mother or the man she married or those two weird and abusive brothers I had. Secretly, I was hoping they were going to get the gas chamber. Nobody ever did say what prompted my assignment to St. Francis but I was assured it was a place I'd enjoy and it wasn't a prison or detention home. I remember Father Joe saying it is a home for boys and girls like me. After Judge Odin signed the papers, I left with Father Joe and we got into his black Chevy and began the trip from Juvenile Court to St. Francis. I saw that two story Spanish style building for the first time that summer morning just after my eighth birthday. It had a wrought iron fence around it but there was no gate, no guard tower and no one carrying guns. I saw kids playing games, having fun on swings and slides, and there were teenagers playing ball and obviously having fun. We drove behind the building and right then I saw a place I knew I wanted to go. It was a huge swimming pool with diving board and a lifeguard stand. Father asked me if I liked to swim and for the first time I smiled. I loved to swim. There were pool hours posted and Father said I could swim everyday the weather permitted during my designated swim hours. Hey, two hours a day of swimming? Yeah. This was St. Francis showing me a welcome mat to a peaceful life. I was led into my dorm in the North Wing and shown to my bed,a comfortable looking single bed in a small but comofortable room I would share with another boy also eight years old. His name was Jerry and from the minute we met we became friends. He'd lived here a year and loved the place. I asked him if he was going to stay until he was grown up and he said he guessed so since he was up for adoption but "nobody wants me." Father Joe patted Jerry's head and told him St. Francis of Assisi always wants him as his child. I was issued clothing, comfortable clothing, I might say. There were shorts and t shirts, jeans and sport shirts, socks, two pair of tennies as we called our tennis shoes, one pair of black dress shoes, underwear, a bath towel to exhange everyday for a new one, a hand towel and wash cloth, and my own four drawer chest. On the wall behind our two beds were brass crucifixes. On my pillow was a rosary and a medal of St. Francis on a silver chain. A child's St. Joseph Missal also was on my bed. On the wall facing the foot of our beds were paintings of the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Ignatius de Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi. I was offered my choice of religious statues for my chest of drawers and I asked for St. Francis. A Jesuit Brother went down the hall and returned with my statue of St. Francis. Jerry had one of St. Robert Bellarmine on his chest of drawers. Along the wall beside the door were two small student desks. Mine was the one in the corner. Actually even Jerry had one in the corner considering the small closet we shared was next to his desk. We had dark wooden desks and dark wooden chairs. Inside my desk, I found pencils, crayons, tablets and an eraser. Nothing was elegant but everything suggested peace. I could handle that easily after the life I'd led with my mother and that bunch on Russell Road. "Jerry will show you around, Kieran,'' Father Joe said. "We don't fly by a big rulebook here. You'll have a schedule but it's nothing to be afraid of. And don't forget we are about an hour from lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, gravy, potatos and green beans today, boys." Father and the brother with him left and Jerry began telling me about life at St. Francis. He said I would like the place and the food especially. "It's okay having seconds," he said. My new friend told me there was no rule about how to dress. We were allowed to be comfortable. "So go barefoot is you want to. I do," he said. "So do most kids here." It was easy to see my new friend dressed in the manner of Huck Finn and out in the playground I'd already noticed the boys and girls both were comfortable. It looked like a real home only it had no parents. Some kids, including me, were put there by court order and only on a temporary basis while some strange thing called an inquiry took place. I hoped it was like burning sinners at the stake and my old family might be getting cooked. No such luck as time would tell. Jerry gave me the walking tour of St. Francis, first stopping at the refectory where I whiffed the aroma of roast beef being readied for the tables. We ducked into the chapel, genuflected and paused a minute or so to say our boyhood Catholic prayers we'd learned. Jerry looked at me and suggested we do one Our Father, one Hail Mary and one Gloria together so we did. Later, he told me he always offered his prayers up to the Sacred Heart with the appeal some loving family would adopt him. Next to the refectory was a theater where movies were shown twice a week. They might be travel films or sometimes a Disney film and other times a religous life would be depicted in the movie. St. Francis Home for Children never failed to appeal to our religous heritage even in the case of kids like me, and I'd gotten to a point of near despair because of my life at home. St. Francis and the Jesuit priests I met there would lead me out of that wilderness. Give credit to Father Joe who discovered my love of poetry and nurtured it with the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, himself a Jesuit priest whose works talk of lives approaching despair but never quite crumbling into it. Hopkins always finds hope and the Jesuit priests at St. Francis would eventually give me the hope my family never gave. Lawyers eventually crawled into my life like a bunch of bedbugs or rats. The two representing my family obtained a court order requiring visitations weekly with my mother, her brutal husband and the two jokers who posed as my brothers. The priests and nuns at St. Francis were appalled. So was I. But here came the so-called family trying to protect their reputations. Neighbors had been told, I learned, that I was a bad kid and placed in detention. The neighbors on Russell Road agreed with them. Why else did they beat me so much if I wasn't a bad kid, a recalcitrant little criminal. My mother and that man in her life were determined to make themselves look good at my expense. In my own mind I wondered why a court would allow parents who so blatantly lied and brutalized me to visit. Don't the police reports mean anything to the court? It was beyond my eight year old mind to understand that strange thing called justice. It's beyond my mind even now as I stare at the thick crop of once blond hair that is now gray. But I learned quickly lawyers could do anything they wanted. They are worse than an infestation of cockroaches. They are people devoid of a conscience. If my family was well practiced at lying, lawyers were true aces at it. I learned and still believe that to be a lawyer, you first have to be a sociopath. The court's order had come out of Sacramento, not from Judge Odin. A lawyer hired by my family had done some judge shopping and found the judge he needed. Now don't get all uppity about America and justice being for all. Back then, kids and criminals were allowed to have lawyers but they had to have the money to pay for them or do without. So nobody ever represented me and the police reports were never laid before that second judge. My first three months at St. Francis were the most peaceful I'd known. It was a warm place and while strict in some ways, the nuns who ran the place were never unfair, brutal or even close to being unkind to us. I've always heard tales of nuns whacking little kids on the knuckles. It never happened to me or to anyone I knew. The toughest order I ever got from a nun was to stand on the wall, meaning face the wall for 15 minutes for some misbehavior. It was fair. Like any kid, I could chatter out of place, or get angry over something or get into a scrap with another kid. Standing on the wall was the toughest punishment I ever faced with those nuns. I did get a swat on my butt one time, one swat was all and it was with a ping pong paddle. One swat and 2000 tears later, I was doing my penance which included an apology to the boy I'd pushed down in an argument over a baseball game. Breakfast at St. Francis began at 6 a.m. with prayers from the spiral stair rostrum at the front of the refectory. We stood for the prayer and took our seats about as fast as the word "Amen" dropped from the priest's lips. For those untrained in Catholic ways, that amen came at the end of the blessing -- In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen. We crossed ourselves and plopped out little butts into our chairs and grabbed our juice glasses. At every meal, the food was served family style. Plates and bowls of food were sat near the head of the table where all serving began. A priest, a brother or a nun sat at the head of every table. One of the older boys or girls sat at the foot of the table. A typical breakfast included eggs with a meat except on Friday when we'd have fish even at breakfast. The breakfast also included pancakes, French toast or waffles. Big 12-ounce glasses sat before each kid's plate and pitchers of milk were in the middle of the table. We remained seated throughout the meal waiting for a priest to climb the spiral stairway again to give us the morning announcements and close our morning meal with a prayer for our safety and health. At all times, prayers concluding the three daily meals ended with the same words: "Lead us, O Heavenly Father, to learn to forgive those who have wronged us." It made sense considering most of us kids at St. Francis were discards from the rubble heap of American family life. I was about to be thrust right back into that rubble heap because of lawyers and that judge in Sacramento. After that court order, one Saturday a month the family drove to St. Francis for a visit. So that was a Saturday I missed being on the trips to the park or out to a movie or an amusement park. Any kid who had Saturday visits required by the court lost his Saturday recreation privileges as a result of decision by the fair minded judges. Now brace yourselves because I'm about to digress again. It was such things as decisions by judges, such as the one that eventually threw me right back into the pit of hell, that led me to never again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I do not for one minute believe those words "liberty and justice for all." My life was all the proof I needed for that and as I grew into my teen years, especially at the age of 16, I was to witness the absence of liberty and justice for black Americans. So you superpatriots with you goddammed hands over your hearts, keep on lying to yourselves. Some of us know better. We had to endure the pain inflicted by your stinking American justice system. Like I said before, if you don't like my digressions, go write your own novel. And don't ask me why I don't stand when you say the stupid pledge. It is a big lie. Well, the terrible and dreaded Saturday of my first family visit came. I stood at the window of the visitor center, a building apart from the main two story building where we kids lived and the nuns and priests ruled with love in their hearts. I was nervous as I watched for the family to drive through the front gate. Sister Luke stood by me and tried to reassure me she would be nearby. That nun knew this visit was wrong but she wasn't allowed to tell me that. I could sense it though. It was around 10 a.m. when I saw the red Buick come up the drive toward the visitor center. What a joke. There they stood like perfect people dressed in their finest attire. Hell, they probably bought that stuff just to make this visit so they could convince a court they really were good parents, and convince those neighbors they were very caring because they'd gone to a reform school -- that's how they presented it -- to visit me. The old man appeared sober for a change. With Sister Luke at my side, they pawed at me and spoke so lovingly in an effort to convince this wily old nun of their good hearts. I don't think Sister was fooled at all. She sat right there in the room with me until my mother said looked at her and told her the court said the visit would be private. Sister knew the rule too so she excused herself but she was wise enough to stay close at hand. About five minutes after she left, my face was swatted by the old man as he lit into me with a tirade about my comments to the police. I'd embarassed him by telling the police the truth if what that meant. As soon as my scream went up after my face was slapped, here came Sister Luke and Father Daniel O'Casey. The sister took my hand and led me out of the room and O'Casey, who was a big man with a deep voice, bellowed out "You have to leave now. Visit over." I was taken to a washroom to clean my face of the tears and then Sister led me out the back of the building, out of view of my mother and her wonderful hubby and good sons. I remember telling Sister Luke I never wanted to see them in the first place and now I'd missed my rec day with the other kids. She understood and told me about five or six other kids also had to miss the rec day and after their visits were over, Father O'Casey would open the swimming pool for those of us left behind that day. He did. God bless Father O'Casey. Justice took its usual course and refused to allow Sister Luke and Father O'Casey to file briefs on my behalf. I had no lawyer so what had happened that first visiting day would happen again at my next visiting day. Four more times it happened and the court would deny the nun and priest standing in the case even though they had acquired a volunteer attorney from the church. Are you beginning to get my point about liberty and justice in America? The court even ruled that attorney could not represent me because I was too young to choose my own legal counsel. So he appointed one for me and that guy never once visited me. He just conceded all the points made by my parents and their two lawyers. I spent 11 months at St. Francis and just before my ninth birthday, that fair minded judge up in Sacramento ordered me out of St. Francis and back into the life of my family. Two more years of hell would be spent before two eyewitnesses stepped forward in my behalf and my time at home was terminated forever. To this day I have no idea who stepped forward but I surmise it might have been the couple who moved into the vacant house right next door to my parents on Russell Road. They always seemed like nice people. The case was back in Judge Odin's hands and this time a lawyer represented me. He was not court appointed, I might add. Somebody out there had hired him and Judge Odin, the first and only fair minded judge I've known, let him represent me. It meant, I, a boy of 10 going on 11, had been given standing in the Superior Court of the State of California. It was in Judge Odin's chambers where the question came to me from the judge himself. Did I want to be placed permanently in the custody of the state as its ward housed at St. Francis and did I want the parental rights of my so-called family terminated. The judge carefully explained his question as he asked it. My own lawyer had explained to me it would be asked. He had urged me to think about it but told me not to answer it even to him. I was to answer it only when it was asked by the judge. I stood before the judge's big desk and answered "Yessir" to both questions. After the family's two lawyers made their pleas, Judge Odin read his order declaring my family unfit and making me a ward of the state. His final words remain indelible in my memory. "Kieran Patrick (name deleted), you are hereby declared a ward of the State of California to be housed at St. Francis Home for Children in San Diego; and to immediately be made eligible for adoption." At my request, Judge Odin also terminated my use of the family name. My time in Hell had ended. I was going to the only decent home I ever would have. I was never adopted and neither was Jerry who was again to be my roommate and friend at St. Francis. We were considered too old by families seeking to adopt. You might wonder why I kept my given names, Kieran Patrick. Well, I was a bastard child. My mother, a touring musician in a band, had frolicked with a cropduster pilot the December before my birth. She got pregnant, called him and begged for help. Scott was his first name and Stratton his last. Scott told her he would raise the child, boy or girl. He was 25 and in the ensuing months he decided on two names, one for a boy and one for a girl. He wanted his son to be named Kieran Patrick and if it was a girl, she would have been Kirsten Patricia. Scott had a girlfriend who agreed to accept his child so things looked good for me before my birth. But a month before I was born, Scott Stratton's little cropdusting plane burst into flames and crashed near a farm in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. His mother had suffered a stroke and his father was unable to raise a child for him. His sister was too young and still in school and his girlfriend opted out. But I had learned about Scott Stratton and I had seen his photos and letters. He would have been a terrific dad for anyone. So when my birth name was terminated by the court, a third order of the court granted me my real biological father's last name. When I was born, my mother had given me the names chosen by my biological father in hope his parents, despite their infirmities, would take me on. Life was not to be that good to me, not at the beginning anyway. But things did get better quickly once I was home again at St. Francis. I just didn't have the good sense to stay there as you will see when the train gets rolling down the tracks. Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Beethoven's 9th Symphony (Comment on this)