I saw the work of one sign painter everywhere in the little town of Milford, Ohio, when I was growing up in the 1960s. It was as if the whole town was his client. I don't know what happened to him. And yet, when I visit about once every other year now -- none of the family lives there anymore, and the home was sold several years ago -- I see the remnant of the unknown sign painter, amidst the growing number of antique stores, gourmet restaurants, and ... of all things, microbreweries!
I was finishing high school in 1973, when Dad took me to "Commercial Square," a side street in downtown Cincinnati with a row of old factory warehouse buildings (since razed for what is now the Procter and Gamble headquarters) to visit what he called "a dying art." There, a couple of men ran a sign-painting business. Dad knew I aspired to go to college, but he didn't believe in accumulating massive debts and living on credit. (In fact, he never owned a credit card in his entire life.) If I could find a profession that didn't require a college education, so much the better. I viewed their work with some interest, but little enthusiasm.
I went on to complete my graphic design studies at the University of Cincinnati, graduating in 1978. Looking through old magazines and art manuals, I had a brief flirtation with calligraphy and hand-painted lettering. In the early 1980s, I did calligraphy for special occasions; family, parish, that sort of thing. I left it behind completely once the computer came to our office, and "desktop publishing" was the next big thing.
I came across a 2017 article in Monocle just recently ...
... and I remembered that brief page of my history. Part of the trend may be a reaction to our slavery to technology, as if to lend credence to Newton's Law. Whatever is ancient is new again.
The total cost of my college education, culminating in 1978, has been estimated at around ten thousand dollars. I managed to recover that cost in short order.
With six or more inches of snow on the ground, a sheet of ice on every road, and federal buildings closed in the DC area, it gives a man time to think. That's when I put the regular feature for today on hold, and also when I came across this:
Yeah, that's possible, but that could also be said about damn near everybody on the Hill that's been there for more than two or three terms. They come to Washington for the first time, wanting to be the next Mister Smith. They arrive at National Airport, with that free parking spot, a ten-minute limousine drive to the office, free haircuts at the office, the ability to tear up parking tickets in an officer's face, and let's not forget that private bowling alley ...
But this isn't about that.
Unless you're rich and/or famous, divorce affects most of us financially. Go through it once, and you spend the rest of your life paying for it, especially if children are involved (which there was), and especially if the former ball-and-chain gets half of your pension upon retirement (which she won't). The way I've figured it out, the earliest I can leave is at the end of the year of Our Lord 2020, with forty years of service, when I will have just turned sixty-six. But I may stick around for four more years, in which case I would retire at seventy. Now, just saying that seems shocking. Why would anyone want to work until they're seventy?
Here's my answer: Why would the same people not ask the same thing of a public figure who is pushing ninety?
Oh, sure, there are people saying that, including this John Ratcliffe guy who wants the old man's job. But if you thought the Gentleman from Texas was one of your heroes, you'd just as soon keep him there until he turned one hundred, no questions asked. Keep fighting the good fight, pops. But we don't do that right off the bat. And we assume that everybody who retires is just like the couples in those commercials for financial companies who want to help you plan your retirement. There's a few people like that, but most would rather stay home and tend to their garden, or enjoy their grandchildren.
Me, I'll probably keep writing, or maybe play more guitar. Maybe get paid for it. Or something.
The men in my family tend to live a very long time. My father was eighty-six years old when he left us, and he had suffered from multiple sclerosis for the entire second half of those years. Hell, even the drunks in my family live into their eighties. So unless I get hit by a bus, the odds for me are pretty damn good.
Dad once told me that most men don't like what they do for a living. Dad worked at Procter and Gamble for twenty-four years before leaving on disability. His occupation at the world headquarters was "Sales Assistant." He was a detail man, essentially, for "Packaged Soap and Detergent" (or "PS&D"). His job was to keep track of the doings of sales guys in the field -- what they delivered, how much they delivered, how much arm-twisting they did to get a retailer to move so much product for so much of a price break per unit, stuff like that. Every eye was dotted, every tee was crossed, every jot and tittle accounted for. Dad didn't particularly like what he did for a living. He just happened to be very, very good at it.
After more than thirty years as a graphic designer, I decided that I had gone as far as I was going to go creating new varieties of landfill (publications). Five years of part-time studies in web design ended when there was a regime change at the office, and a subsequent refusal to let me finish, just short of the one requirement for getting the diploma, a requirement I later learned was dropped, thus screwing me out of a diploma -- thanks a lot, Art Institute -- seemed to spell out another dead end.
But even a curmudgeon-in-the-making can find a silver lining. I had worked with video cameras before, and had learned enough about animation software at the Art Institute, to transfer that skill to video editing software. So I did, and wowed the Powers That Be. I still wow them, and I'm happy for it, since it got me out of that black hole of an occupation I was in for so many years.
When you get a new lease on life in mid-career, you either go for it, or you're gone. I used to watch older people at the agency, hanging around with nothing to do, their jobs made obsolete by new developments or new technology, and the management just couldn't take them out and shoot them or force them to retire, much less fire them. So those geezers hung around, looking listless, and useless. I was determined to never be one of those guys.
And so, tomorrow, if there's any chance at all of going into work, that's what's gonna happen. God has been good. I love my job. It's the least I can do, don't you think?
One of them posted the link thereto, and I got over 500 visits today, which is about as much as I get in about four days -- weekdays, mind you. (H/T to New Advent.) C S Lewis once said he wrote the things that he wished others would write. I try to do likewise. Most writers will compose either a glowing encomium or a bitter screed. Neither would do justice to my father's story, so I simply wrote the truth. He was an imperfect man, who only reached perfection by Grace, in a life that just as easily could have turned out much differently, but for a decision made at an early age. A pedestal would have been too much even for him.
Since that time, he has passed into eternity, so here's what happened next.
That's my Dad in the picture to the right, from his days in seminary. He would have been eighteen-and-a-half in the spring of 1944. By this time, he would have already received tonsure (the ritual cutting of a lock of the hair, symbolizing admission to candidacy), allowing him the privilege of wearing the cassock outside of ceremonial duties. He would leave the seminary two years later.
Closer to the present, today's homily was about fathers and fatherhood. As master of ceremonies for the Latin Mass today, my place was near the celebrant, which included being seated near the pulpit, so if I had a problem keeping my composure, it would have been hard to miss.
Meanwhile, my son decided to post his own tribute to his dad.
… which is not quite what happened. I should explain.
My son recently graduated from the über-prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design, with a BFA in Interactive Media and Game Development, and a GPA of 3.4. Thirty-five years earlier, I graduated from an equally-über-prestigious program at the University of Cincinnati, with a BS in Graphic Design, and a GPA of 3.0. I simply pointed out that he did better than I did, which is even more remarkable when you consider that his high school GPA was … well, not so remarkable. But somehow, possibly from the after effects of an alcohol-and-drug-induced adolescence (so it's not really his fault, you see), this observation was embellished to take its present form.
So, we'll be having another one of those little talks when he gets back to DC next month. You see, you never stop being a father, especially when some punk-ass kid never stops being a little twit. But he's my little twit, and I love him for it.
Whenever I walk to Suffern
along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse
with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times,
but I always stop for a minute
And look at the house, the tragic house,
the house with nobody in it.
The place now known as Milford, Ohio, has been someone's home for thousands of years.
During the time of Christ, it was occupied by the mound builders of the Adena people. By the end of the first millennium, it was home to a settlement of the Hopewell Nation, a once-great empire that flourished along the Ohio and mid-Mississippi River valleys. By the time of the European incursion, the nations of "the Woodland period" were forgotten, and the area had already long been the hunting ground of the Miamis. By the dawn of the twentieth century, rows of corn covered the fields east of a village first settled in 1806, carved out of a parcel awarded to a Revolutionary War officer.
John Nancarrow had never personally set foot on the land ... but, that's another story.
By the mid-1950s, the rural expanse to the east of Milford would become the site of homes to families of men, most of whom were just out of the Service. With its developers only aware enough of the land's prehistory to use it as a marketing device, a development known as Indian Knolls was built on the hill overlooking the cornfield below, which had already been developed as Clertoma Village. The streets of both developments were all named for the indigenous nations of the continent long vanquished by the white man -- Choctaw Lane, Mohawk Trail, Powhatton Drive, and so on. The houses were all virtually identical cookie-cutter starter homes, distinguished by exterior finish, but all of the same floor plan, with three bedrooms, one bath, a tiny kitchen, and a separate dining area, all totaling about 850 square feet, not counting the unfinished basement. It was typical of many such communities based on the model that was Levittown, New York. But near a small town in southwestern Ohio, and for only $15,000, a piece of the American dream could belong to a man with a decent living wage, and a family on the way.
I never have seen a haunted house,
but I hear there are such things;
That they hold the talk of spirits,
their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted,
and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely
if it had a ghost or two.
In the summer of 1956, one such young couple with a toddling son, and a daughter as a babe in arms, bought a piece of that dream at 29 Winnebago Drive, and life began from there.
To those who lived in the old and established part of the town, the new development was known pejoratively as "Crackerbox Village." What manner of progress what this? Who were these upstarts, tearing down their quaint drive-in movie theater, replacing it with something called "Rink's Bargain City"? Emerging from the surroundings were not just one, but two new shopping centers, each with something called a "supermarket." It occurred to those firmly planted, that the days of the old A%P store downtown were numbered. Over time, the ancien regime came to accept the inevitable, but for years after it came, they resented this crass intrusion on the picture-postcard setting their new neighbors called home.
I can tell you my very earliest memory in detail. It was a cloudy Saturday, perhaps in the spring. I was about two or three years old. I was walking from the steps of the back porch towards the driveway. My father was washing the car, a muted lime green 1953 Ford sedan. I remember little else of that day, but my consciousness would appear to begin at that moment. I wonder where it was before. But in the months, in the years that followed, many other families with children arrived. The streets, the front yards, and the places in between were their domain. Summer days found them playing baseball in the street, Halloween nights were teeming with hundreds of them in costume, and the Christmas season was ablaze with a wonderland of multi-colored splendor. Everyone knew their neighbors, even those who went each their own way.
It was about 1964. I was playing in the yard with other kids -- so many other kids there were back then -- at a house down the street from mine. The husband and father of the house was a Southern Baptist minister. I didn't give such things very much thought, which is why I was surprised to see his name listed on the mailbox near the front door as: "Rev and Mrs Firsten Lastname." My reaction was a natural one for a precocious little boy, I suppose: "Hey, Beanie, this says your dad's a priest. I didn't know your dad was a priest. How can he be a priest if he's ..." Suddenly the front door opened, and an insistent lady of the house emerged: "He's not a priest, he's a minister, and he's just as important as your priest!" Boom! The door slammed shut, and that was that. Hey, I was nine-and-a-half years old. What the hell did I know about anything? This was the early 1960s, and the times were still relatively innocent. But tensions derived from cultural differences, and the co-existence in the face of the melting pot that was our little world, were still lurking in the dark corners. Children learned to put aside the differences that made adults uncomfortable. America elected a Catholic president, his cohorts in the faith could not be seen proselytizing through the children, and the Freemasons who lived among them could not be seen resenting these self-assured "Catlickers." Eventually these differences subsided, or at least were buried in polite company.
This house on the road to Suffern
needs a dozen panes of glass,
And somebody ought to weed the walk
and take a scythe to the grass.
It needs new paint and shingles,
and the vines should be trimmed and tied;
But what it needs the most of all
is some people living inside.
By the end of the 1960s, families grew in size, or in expectations, or both, and were leaving behind their humble abodes, with grand visions of four-bedroom split-levels, formal dining rooms, and half-acre lawns gracing the hillside out beyond the village limits. The years came and went, children came of age and sought their fortunes, older couples passed on to Florida, or passed from this life. The trees grew taller, some homes added garages, patios, and other extensions. "Crackerbox Village" was taking on a character of its own. One family, namely the Reverend and his wife and children, moved from the house down the street to the house next door. There were summer nights before the days of central air conditioning, when the windows in our bedrooms were left open to the screens and the cool breezes. My brother and I had the little room at the end of the hall. My bed was near the door. Mom and Dad would want it shut, but I wanted it open at a 45-degree angle, enough to use the full-length mirror to see the goings-on at the other end. As I drifted off to sleep, I could hear the Reverend and his family and friends, gathering around the upright piano, and singing hymns from the Old Baptist Hymnal.
Meanwhile, with each of us ending our grade school years, our parents eschewed the free education at the public high school at the edge of town, for a Catholic high school in an upper-class neighborhood closer to the city. It was a ride on a public school bus ten miles away, but it may as well have been ten thousand miles, as the kids from Milford brushed off the taunting of would-be city-bred sophisticates living near the school, about being a bunch of hicks from a small town. It got old after four years. Fortunately, it was over by then. Time went on, and the place we called home remained.
It was September of 1977. I was interning at a public television station in West Virginia when I got the call from Dad. He had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis only seven years earlier. Procter and Gamble gave him the consideration worthy of a loyal and dedicated company man, transferring him to a less stressful position away from the headquarters building, to the local district sales office. He had been working half-days for several months by now, but it only delayed the inevitable. Come that Friday, on his fifty-second birthday, he would leave on full and permanent disability. I remember Mom's first reaction, that of Dad being in the way all the time. But while Dad ruled the roost, Mom ruled the rooster, and one of the signs of a successful marriage is the ability to renegotiate what one might call "the balance of power" when fortunes change. And so, in many respects, Mom became the "man of the house," taking a more visible role in certain decisions, and being the "handy man" when things needed fixing. Growing up on a farm, pitching hay and driving a tractor by the time she was twelve, all this had prepared her for this role.
If I had a lot of money
and all my debts were paid
I'd put a gang of men to work
with brush and saw and spade.
I'd buy that place and fix it up
the way it used to be
And I'd find some people who wanted a home
and give it to them free.
By the end of 1980, I left the town where I was "bread and buttered," not for the nearest city, but for one far away. Destiny led me on a very different path from the other three siblings, as I left the city I knew, the town outside of that city, and the house we lived in, for another city. I would return once or twice a year. It seems foolish to imagine it now, but I honestly expected things to stay just as they were when I left. Life doesn't work that way, and those we leave behind are no exception. Our parents get older, our siblings move on, our friends drift away, or we make new ones upon returning. After my marriage fell apart in 1990, I would return more often. I went from annual visits to coming home three or four times a year. Making a social life of my own in Washington proved a challenge, as I found the city to be brimming with self-important people who couldn't give you the time of day without checking their schedules. Cincinnati gave me solace, an escape, the illusion that all would be well without much suffering. I would arrive at the house, and within an hour, the phone would ring, and Mom would hear a woman's voice. It was for me. It always was. I went dancing, to parties, to nightclubs. I made new friends introduced to me by old ones. It went on and on.
At the 1990s came to a close, it was clear that the house we lived in would not accommodate a man becoming increasingly disabled. Getting through the hallways on a wheelchair, going to the bathroom, taking a shower, all proved more difficult. Mom and Dad considered their options, including moving to another house that was better equipped. The chapter that was ours on Winnebago Drive would have come to an end, but not for the decision to subject the house to an extensive renovation. While they moved to a two-bedroom apartment nearby, the kitchen, dining, and back patio areas were completely transformed. A master bedroom with a wheelchair-accessible full bathroom were added. In the process, Mom got the dream kitchen she never imagined she could ever have. The wall that separated one of the bedrooms from the living room was torn down, making way for a larger "great room" which combined a living and formal dining area. After more than a year, and repeated delays, Mom and Dad moved back in.
All was reasonably well for a few years, until January of 2001, when Mom woke up one morning and had a minor stroke. As she was in the hospital, however briefly, the four of us considered what was once an unlikely possibility, that Mom could meet her demise before Dad. Being independent, and having Mom take care of Dad at home, even with some assistance from the family, was beginning to take its toll.
It was then that my own relationship with the house changed. I was coming less often. After more than twenty years away, I was finally making a life for myself back east. It was just as well. Even if I were to stay at the unaffected end of the house, with my own bed and bathroom, it was nonetheless considered likely that I would be in the way. I could no longer stay at the house we lived in. In fact, if I came to visit, I had to call ahead.
Yes, you read it right. I had to call ahead to visit my own parents.
Now, a new house standing empty,
with staring window and door,
Looks idle, perhaps, and foolish,
like a hat on its block in the store.
But there's nothing mournful about it;
it cannot be sad and lone
For the lack of something within it
that it has never known.
That took a while to sink in. My siblings were very matter-of-fact about it, of course. They lived with it every day, and could not understand how one of their own who did not, would react any differently. It's one of those things that, if you have to explain it, you can't, so I didn't. But in fairness, one or the other did open their home to me whenever I was there. Meanwhile, as a geriatric nurse, Mary could advise them on their care, and accompany them to the doctor. Steve had charge of their financial and other affairs, and eventually took over the upkeep of the house, with the assistance of the grandsons. Pat had a very promising career as an administrative assistant to the general manager of a regional transit authority, when she was discovered to have a rare form of cancer, one that only four doctors in the entire country could treat. Fortunately, one of them was in Cincinnati, and she beat the odds. But it was the catalyst for considerable soul searching, and with her husband as a successful sales representative, she gave up a career to look after Mom and Dad. At first, she would come in the morning a couple of times a week to help Mom with Dad's "activities of daily living." As the years went on, she was driving across town at least five times a week. Dad's slow deterioration was being joined by Mom's, as both were slowly falling apart, each in their own way.
Then in September of 2011, it happened. Mom started down the basement stairs, lost her balance, and fell to the bottom. Bleeding from a cut to the head, and a broken neck, she crawled up the stairs to the telephone and dialed 911, while Dad sat helpless in his Lazy-boy. She was taken to the hospital, and into intensive care, while Dad was looked after full time. Mom had to go into rehabilitation, and the family could not care for both in separate locations. A retirement community with a skilled nursing wing was found north of the city, and Mom and Dad were together again. But in the year prior to the accident, it was clear that the current arrangement was coming apart at the seams. Steve would "pop in" every evening after work, and qualified in-home care was difficult to find, and even more difficult to oversee, especially with a woman more accustomed by this time to giving orders than in taking them.
The long goodbye for our father was also coming to a head. I would be in Washington for three weeks, and hurry home for one. I stayed alone in the house we lived in. I awoke at 6 in the morning, went to gym for an hour, and occasionally visited friends. But social calls were few and far between. Most of the time, I was visiting with family. I would go to Skyline Chili for the occasional dose of "comfort food," and the fellowship among strangers that I forgot how much I missed. Old neighbors, old classmates living nearby, all provided a revisiting with my past, a time that time forgot. I would retire at nearly midnight listening to Chopin's Nocturnes, only to be up again six hours later to the sounds of Mozart.
I was also busy making preparations for a funeral Mass. I knew what Dad would have wanted, and I knew how to bring my influence to bear in getting it. Thankfully, the parish was very accommodating to our wishes. Guidelines from the parish were reviewed by the family, and an assessment was presented to the siblings as part of the proposal. In the end, as with everything, there was consensus.
But a house that has done what a house should do,
a house that has sheltered life,
That has put its loving wooden arms
around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby's laugh
and held up his stumbling feet,
Is the saddest sight, when it's left alone,
that ever your eyes could meet.
Then, in February, the call came from Steve. Dad was leaving sooner rather than later, and how quickly could I get there? Twenty-four hours, I told him. I arrived on a Tuesday. By Friday evening, Dad stopped taking water. By the evening of Monday, I got the call at the house; it was time. As all were present, and Dad was taking his last desperate breaths, I laid my hand on his forehead, and said the ancient commendation for the dying, the Proficiscere: “Go forth, O Christian soul, out of this world, in the Name of God the Father almighty, Who created you; in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, Who suffered for you; in the Name of the Holy Ghost, Who sanctified you, in the name of the holy and glorious Mary, Virgin and Mother of God; in the name of the angels, archangels, thrones and dominions, cherubim and seraphim; in the name of the patriarchs and prophets, of the holy apostles and evangelists, of the holy martyrs, confessors, monks and hermits, of the holy virgins, and of all the saints of God; may your place be this day in peace, and your abode in Holy Sion ...” There was no movement for a few minutes. I checked his pulse. While waiting for the nurse to confirm what we all knew, I continued: “Subvenite, Sancti Dei, occurrite, Angeli Domini, Suscipientes animan ejus ...”
We could not keep Mom in the house we lived in. No amount of live-in home care would endure her cantankerous nature, and the charge over her own domain. The day after Dad was laid to rest, we moved Mom from the skilled nursing wing into her new one-bedroom apartment on the other side of the complex. She cried when she walked in, seeing the furniture in what seemed as a transplanting of her own abode to another, more accessible place. There were activities during the day, three meals prepared in the dining room, and Mass on Saturday night. Pat or another family member visited her every day. As the months went by, and she awoke "with the chickens" to do her crossword puzzles in the morning paper as she had done for years, she became accustomed to her new surroundings. The question then became, what to do with the house we lived in.
In the wake of Dad's passing, friends and neighbors had come to call. One of them was the man whom we once knew in childhood as "Beanie," the preacher's son, whose father lived next door. His mother had passed away only recently, and his father was getting on in years. For the young man and his wife to live in the same house with him was becoming a challenge. As I gave them a tour of the house, especially the addition in the back, their interest was piqued. And now, several months later, they approached Steve with a proposal.
I would come to stay at the house when I was there; for Father's Day, for the sixtieth wedding anniversary in June, for Mom's first Christmas without Dad. Eventually the cable television was disconnected, and so was the wireless connection. I had to bring the latter on my own, in the form of my iPhone. There was nearly sixty years worth of memories to go through over the past year, nestled in the many corners of the house we lived in. Mom was an incurable packrat, the destination of first and last resort for any school or Scouting project. Everything was meticulously organized, to the point that belied just how much of it there really was. I have to give credit to Steve; for a guy very much "in charge" of things, he managed the process with remarkable collegiality. With a complete inventory of furniture, books, personal records, photographs, and the like, there was consensus all around, and a desire that each of us achieve our satisfaction without the expense of another.
Among other things, I got the silverware, and my paternal grandmother's old clock, now being restored to its former glory.
So whenever I go to Suffern
along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house
without stopping and looking back,
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof
and the shutters fallen apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house
is a house with a broken heart.
There were three visits to Milford in as many months; three round trips of a thousand miles each, as if to say in stages the long goodbye to the town I left behind so many years ago, but which never left me. I drive through its streets, I visit the places I frequented. My conscious mind sees them as they are now. And yet, there is a land of shadows, one in which I see them as I did growing up. Each house cannot be remembered by who lives there now, but who lived there then. It could never belong to those of the present, not in this place that I visit, a place ever present, but never to be seen again.
It was late last month, on a Saturday morning, that I gathered what I could into my 2005 Scion XB, and prepared for the nine-hour journey back to what was now the only home I could call by that name. On this date, after nearly fifty-seven years, with the deal having been signed, sealed, and delivered, the house we lived in at 29 Winnebago Drive is now the home of the Reverend Daryl Poe, pastor of New Harmony Baptist Church, and his devoted wife Jacqueline. Daryl had a long and distinguished career in law enforcement, moving from one assignment to another across the Buckeye State over the years -- a police department here, a sheriff's department there -- before answering the call to follow in his father's footsteps. And so, those who are of the Southern Baptist tradition have a new home, as does the man who serves them. But however beloved it was by those who did so before, however much it is by those who do so now, it is, at the end of the day, not really a home to either.
No, there is another ...
“Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:1-3)
Life goes on, at the house we lived in.
“The House with Nobody in It” was originally published in Trees and Other Poems, a collection of Joyce Kilmer, by the George H Doran Company, New York City, in 1914.
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In January of 1844, the relics of Saint Martura, an unidentified first-century martyr (thus her name being Latin for "martyr") were taken from her tomb in the Catacombs of Saint Priscilla in Rome. In March of that year, on the Feast of the Annunciation, the Most Reverend John Baptist Purcell, Bishop of Cincinnati, solemnly placed her bones and a vase of blood underneath the high altar at the Church of Saint Mary in Cincinnati's predominantly-German "Over-The-Rhine" district. They have remained undisturbed from that day forward.
In September of 1879, His Holiness Pope Leo XIII granted a special privilege to the altar at "Old Saint Mary's." What we call a “privileged altar” is one to which the Holy See attaches a plenary indulgence to the souls in Purgatory. Whenever a Requiem Mass is offered on such an altar in memory of one among the deceased, that soul is released from the realm of purification, and is able to enter into eternal glory.
This evening, a Solemn High Requiem Mass was offered on that altar in memory of the father of this writer, the late Paul Andrew Alexander, on the first anniversary of his passing. The sacred ministers were; Reverend Father Laurence Juarez as Celebrant, Reverend Mister Nathan Bockrath as Deacon, and Brother Adrian Hilton as Subdeacon. They were attended by Mister Ashley Paver as Master of Ceremonies, who was joined by his fellow-Knights of the Altar of Old Saint Mary’s, which for this occasion included yours truly.
The Latin Mass Community Schola of Cincinnati, under the direction of Mr John Schauble, sang the Propers of the Missa Defunctorum, including the Sequentia Dies Irae ("Day of wrath, O day of mourning, see fulfilled the prophets' warning, heaven and earth in ashes burning ...").
During the Offertory, the faithful contemplated the singing of William Byrd's famous anthem Justorum Animae ("The souls of the just are in the hands of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them ...") As they received Communion, they could hear the gentle sound of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's glorious work Sicut Cervus ("As the deer longeth for running streams, so longeth my soul for Thee, my God ...").
The organist for the occasion was Mr Sean Connelly.
Near the front of the nave of the church sat the widow of the deceased, joined by her children. No one else was in attendance, save members of the schola and choir, and the company of angels and saints. Sadly, no photographer was available to record the event, but it appeared much as another such occasion shown in the image above, by (most of) the same functionaries, and in the same venue.
In the mid-1950s, Dad sang for the schola cantorum of Old Saint Mary's, having been pressed into service along with other fellow ex-seminarians, by the then-pastor and his one-time spiritual director, Father Charles Murphy. Nearly six decades later, this is the funeral Dad would have wanted. He got his wish, with a little extra.
NOTE: If you're visiting here for the first time, especially if directed here from Standing On My Head, my father's story can be found here.
This is to request the honor of the presence of Christ's faithful, for a Solemn High Requiem Mass “In Anniversario Defunctorum” in the Traditional Roman Rite, to commemorate the passing into eternity of Paul Andrew Alexander, previously of Milford, Ohio, and the father of yours truly. The Mass is to be held on Wednesday, the 20th of February, at seven o’clock in the evening, at Old Saint Mary’s Church, 123 East Thirteenth Street, in the Over-the-Rhine district of Cincinnati.
The sacred ministers will be of the Community-in-Formation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in Cincinnati: Father Laurence Juarez, Celebrant; Father Jon-Paul Pevak, Deacon, and Brother Adrian Hilton, Subdeacon. They will be attended by Mister Ashley Paver as Master of Ceremonies, and the Inferior Ministers of Old Saint Mary’s.
The Propers of the Mass, including the rendition at Communion of Palestrina’s “Sicut Cervus” will be provided by the Latin Mass Community Schola of Cincinnati, under the direction of Mr John Schauble, with Mr Sean Connolly as organist.
Sidney is your very typical Midwestern small town. The seat of Shelby County, in west central Ohio, the clarion bells in the county courthouse still chime angelic hymns every Sunday afternoon. In its shadow are the businesses and merchants surrounding the town square, including a bank building designed by the famous American architect Louis Sullivan, and a hamburger joint simply known as "The Spot." The town is the subject of the 2009 documentary 45365, named for its zip code, and produced by two native sons, Bill and Turner Ross.
The town is a prominent landmark at one end of a five-county region known as "The Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches." By the 1840s, the area once home to the Miami Indian nation, was settled and parceled by immigrants of French and German origin, most of them Catholic. The edifices that were built as testimony to their Faith, under the guidance of missionary priests from the Society of the Precious Blood, punctuate the landscape, marking the little hamlets where their people settled. It was out of that broad, flat, agrarian land, not far from the log cabin where Annie "Get Your Gun" Oakley was born in 1860, that Leonard Alexander and Viola Barga* began their married life, settling in the town of Sidney, where the husband found work at a tool and die factory.
PHOTO: Holy Angels Church, Sidney, Ohio.
Leonard had been a teetotaler before getting into "the family business" operated by his mother, the former Ann Katherine Grilliot (Grillot), a feisty and formidable woman, who produced a byproduct of corn in the bathtub of their farmhouse, and had husband and sons on the payroll of her enterprise. But over time, and with end of Prohibition, a taste of the spirits was getting the best of him. Work at the Sidney Machine Tool Company was not always steady during the Great Depression, and Leonard was not above self-medicating, and taking his troubles out on his boys, and in particular, on his wife. The older boys grew to despise their father, and in a house without certainty, and without peace, found solace among the more "spirited" youth (as Paul would refer to them later) that roamed the streets of that town in the heartland.
But Paul was different. He found his solace in anything that could keep him out of both the house, and the sort of trouble that occupied his older brothers. The good Sisters of Charity ran the Holy Angels School. They knew the real story behind "the friendliest man in Sidney." Paul was given any number of tasks, from cleaning blackboards and hallways, to learning to play the clarinet and the french horn for the school band. He also loved to play "fast-pitch" softball, and was the best catcher and clean-up batter in Shelby County. His team, sponsored by The Sidney Dairy Company, won the county title in the summer of 1940.
PHOTO: Paul at his desk in high school, Latin textbook at the ready, Saint Gregory Minor Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, circa 1940.
Paul found companionship in a mentor, a young assistant priest named Father William Goldschmidt. The pastor wasn't the easiest man to live with either, so the young father and his spiritual protege went on hikes and other outings together. It was likely from this experience, that Paul felt a calling to the priesthood. So upon graduating from the parish school, he left home for Cincinnati, one hundred miles to the south, to Saint Gregory Seminary, the preparatory school and minor seminary components of the Athenaeum of Ohio.
In later years, he would call them "the best of years of my life outside of being married." He was an outstanding student, and the best man ever to stand at the plate staring down a pitcher during pickup games. Through classmates with families living nearby, he spent his weekends getting a taste of family life as it was meant to be, at least relative to his understanding. It was in these years that he found comfort and the sense of order and stability for which he craved. Paul completed high school, and went on to the college program. By the end of the third year, however, something changed. It has never been clear to anyone other than Paul or his spiritual director, one Father Charles Murphy, just what it was -- he told his children later that the first sign was "I stopped getting straight A's -- but there was an understanding that he did not have a calling to priestly life after all. Father Murphy helped him find work, mostly janitorial duties at various parishes in the city. He stayed at The Fenwick Club, a Catholic men's boarding house located downtown, and completed his studies at the Jesuit-run Xavier University. He majored in Latin, if only because he had more credits in that subject than anything else by then.
PHOTO: Paul in his cassock as a college student, Saint Gregory Minor Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, Spring 1944
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One of the priest-professors cared little for this non-Jesuit interloper, and appeared determined that Paul fail his final oral examination. On the appointed day, Divine Providence intervened, and the would-be antagonist came down with a fever. Paul graduated from Xavier University in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Languages. He sought work as a high school teacher in the comfortable eastern suburbs. In the fashionable district known as Mariemont, he was rejected for being a Xavier graduate, which was to say that no Catholic would ever get a job teaching children in that thoroughly Protestant enclave. His search took him across the county line -- without a car, he was not above thumbing a ride to get anywhere -- into the farmland east of the city. He eventually taught English and Latin in a wide spot in the road known as Fayetteville.
By the end of the 1940s, when he wasn't teaching school, he was driving the bus and refereeing basketball games. (He detested the latter duty, especially the catcalls over every decision he made against any player.) He loved teaching, and found himself quite good at it. Any cocky young farm boy who thought he could best his teacher, found out very quickly that Paul did not suffer fools gladly. One student said later, "There was no messing with Mr Alexander; you knew exactly where you stood with him."
PHOTO: Paul's high school faculty portrait, 1950.
In time, Paul won the respect of his students, and even had an easy rapport with one group in particular. Among them was a girl named Dorothy Ann Rosselot. She was very attractive, but not as frivolous or outgoing as the other girls. She was smart, sensible, and hard working. Paul was a man of disciplined habits, and could not imagine any intentions toward one of this students. Be that as it may, a few weeks after graduation, he called upon the young girl, and asked her out on a date. Two years later, on the 14th of June, 1952, they were married.
By this time, Paul had already signed up for reserve duty, with the 123rd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron of the Ohio Air National Guard. His seminary deferment had kept him out of the latter years of the war, but even in the years that followed, a young American man simply viewed enlistment as the continuation of duty to country. No sooner had he been married, however, than his unit was called to active duty, and the young Air Force sergeant was promoted to second lieutenant, and sent with the occupation forces in Germany as a payroll officer, leaving his new bride to live with her sister in an apartment in Cincinnati.
PHOTO: Paul on his wedding day, June 1952. He would leave for active duty with the American occupation force in Germany shortly after this picture was taken.
Upon his return, and convinced he could never support a growing family as a schoolteacher, he took some business classes at night, and got a job at Procter and Gamble, the world's largest manufacturer of consumer and household products, which was headquartered in Cincinnati. There was not position at the front office at that time, so he was sent to Cleveland. By the end of 1954, at Saint Ann's Maternity Hospital on the east side, his firstborn, yours truly came into the world at about seven in the morning.
Eventually the young husband and father found a position with P&G in Cincinnati, closer to extended family. They bought a starter home in a small yet growing hamlet on the eastern outskirts known as Milford. There they raised four children -- boy, girl, boy, girl, in that order.
Paul was a man of his time, and the changing of those times was not accepted easily. A devoted husband and father, and a devout Catholic, he had built for himself and for his own, a world where there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. His children were encouraged in their talents, each to his or her own path. He was a civic leader, an elected public official, and at one point, a Scoutmaster. His was the generation that defeated an evil bent on world domination, and there was nothing they could not do if they banded together for a common cause. But the social and political upheavals in the 1960s were a threat to that perfect balance, that common cause. If the world was going to spin out of control, he was determined that it would never touch his sphere of influence. Paul was a strict disciplinarian, but as time went on and his children grew older, he found himself losing that grip on his surroundings. The world of order and serenity he had sought his entire life, the world he believed he had finally found, was crumbling around him.
Paul was losing control -- of his career ambitions, to where others of average talent were promoted ahead of him; of his temper, to the point of uncontrollable rage; of his health, to where he would see doctors for his nerves, and they would prescribe Valium. Indeed, it was his health that was getting the best of him. One thing went wrong, then another, and later something else, without a conclusion from his doctors. This went on for several years, while his frustration grew with it, and his wife and children bore the brunt of that frustration. In the fall of 1970, shortly after his forty-fifth birthday, the doctors finally gave his affliction a name -- multiple sclerosis.
PHOTO: Downtown Milford, Ohio, as it appears today.
It was two or three years before Paul learned to accept the limitations that came with MS. His wife Dorothy summoned her courage, knowing that faithfulness to her marriage vow meant forsaking a retirement of leisure. That there was no question of her love and devotion to Paul, and to the children she bore him, did not make this any easier, and for her, the early years of that affliction were of melancholy, culminating in quiet resolution. By the time Paul left the business world on disability, on his fifty-second birthday, he and his wife reached an understanding. Over time, the "balance of power" in the household would have to accommodate a shifting of responsibilities. This was not the variety of MS that was "relapsing-remitting," for which there was often medication or treatment. It was the "progressive-degenerative" variety. Short of a complete cure, or a miracle, Paul would never get better, and Dorothy's life would never get easier.
The children came of age, each in their own way. The oldest began college in the fall of 1973. He was ordered to get a haircut "off the neck, and off the ears," the weekend before starting classes. The young man was almost nineteen. It was the last time Paul would issue such a directive. By the time the firstborn neared his twenty-sixth birthday, he had graduated, struggled to retain employment in a weak economy, and eventually left everything he knew, for a new life in another city, five hundred miles to the east. He was the only one of the four to leave Cincinnati.
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In light of the above, what can I say I learned from my Dad? The answer to that is the other side of the story.
PHOTO: The author with his mother and father at a parish Oktoberfest, October 2010.
In our lives we meet people with many gifts, some greater than our own, some of which never reach fruition. Talent can be wasted with a lack of discipline. Intelligence can be subverted by pride or bad judgment. Wealth can be squandered by mere foolishness. It is perseverance that covers a host of sins. During Dad's first years at Procter and Gamble, he was fortunate to leave Cleveland when a position opened for him in Cincinnati. He found himself reporting to a man who made his life a living hell. The man thought that if he made Dad miserable enough, Dad would go away. Eventually, he did -- to a dead-end position elsewhere in the company, anywhere but under his nemesis. It was there that he bid his time until a very promising position opened up in the main headquarters building, as a Sales Assistant in the Soap Products Division. He would be the "detail man" providing administrative support for sales representatives in the field. Dad had an incomparable eye for such detail -- no "I" would go undotted, no "T" would go uncrossed, not on his watch -- and it was in those years that his reputation among the movers and shakers of the corporation flourished. It was here that perseverance ruled.
Dad was a man of uncommon generosity. For years, he quietly offered financial and material support to a single mother of five children abandoned by Dorothy's cousin, who like his own father was an alcoholic. Dad expected no reward, and as the woman's fortunes improved, he got none. She eventually ceased any and all contact with our family. Dad would not have done anything differently. It was a corporal work of mercy, therefore the right thing to do, and that was all that mattered.
When I was in Scouting, Dad volunteered as Scoutmaster when no one else would. This was quite a challenge for a man who was not accustomed to the outdoor life. He soon won the able assistance of those who were. Dad was eventually pressured to approve the Eagle Scout award for two sons of a wealthy man. These young men did not endeavor to meet the service requirements of such an honor, and Dad held firm in his refusal. Their father proceeded to destroy Dad's reputation, to the point where the veterans' group that sponsored our unit "accepted" his resignation. Dad continued to encourage my progress toward Eagle, even as he was banned from Scouting; ironically, for the unspeakable crime of upholding its ideals.
But even these were not his greatest achievement.
To a man who considered himself obligated to control his entire universe, even to assume that he could, God bestowed what C S Lewis called "the gift of suffering." Those who do not suffer bear the illusion that all is well, that they have no need of God, thus they do not seek Him, thus they do not find Him. The hardest lesson for Dad, was to learn that it was not he, but God, who was in control. Thus pain became "a megaphone to rouse a deaf world." God spoke, and His servant listened. When my marriage was falling apart, it was the end of my world. The man who once lost his temper at the drop of a hat, became the wounded warrior, to lead the way through the pain of divorce, the occasional setbacks in my professional life, and for a time, the estrangement of my only son. He was the father I never had, when I needed him most of all.
His example has inspired an entire household. The house on the street where I grew up was transformed into a nursing home with only one client, extensively renovated to meet a special set of needs, with Mom taking care of Dad, and two daughters -- one a geriatric nurse, the other a homemaker who gave up a lucrative career -- assisting Mom. The other son manages his parents' financial and other affairs, and any one of six grandsons (not to mention a daughter-in-law) have a share in the yard work. In the heat of summer, the Alexander lawn is the greenest on the block.
Dad has been blessed with a long life. He will turn eighty-six come this September, which is better than average even for a much healthier man. In the summer of 2012, he and Mom will have been married for sixty years. His reward in the present world is that which was promised years ago, when a priest stood before him and his bride, and prayed the Nuptial Blessing.
O God, who by Thine own mighty power, didst make all things out of nothing: who, having set in order the beginnings of the world, didst appoint Woman to be an inseparable helpmeet to Man, made like unto God, so that Thou didst give to woman's body its beginnings in man's flesh, thereby teaching that what it pleased Thee to form from one substance, might never be lawfully separated ... and come to the repose of the blessed and the kingdom of heaven. May they both see their children's children to the third and fourth generation, and may they reach the old age which they desire.
There are no doubt many tributes to fathers published on Father's Day. They are written by grateful sons and daughters, who cannot say enough good things. But there are no manuals that come with newborn babes, and mothers as well as fathers are left to fend for themselves, both to learn by what they know from their past, and as they go along in the present. Their children are usually well into adulthood before they learn, that their parents are no less subject to the stumbling of human frailty than they are themselves. The best thing I can say about my Dad, is not only that he was a great father, but that he was a great father in spite of himself.
I cannot ask more of a man than that. I only hope my son expects no more of me.
UPDATE 06/16/2013: Closer to the present, click here.
[Special recognition must be given to my sister, Patricia Alexander Drybala, for compiling photos from Dad's early years. Thanks, Pat. -- DLA]
I saw the work of one sign painter everywhere in the little town of Milford, Ohio, when I was growing up in the 1960s. It was as if the whole town was his client. I don't know what happened to him. And yet, when I visit about once every other year now -- none of the family lives there anymore, and the home was sold several years ago -- I see the remnant of the unknown sign painter, amidst the growing number of antique stores, gourmet restaurants, and ... of all things, microbreweries!
I went on to complete my graphic design studies at the University of Cincinnati, graduating in 1978. Looking through old magazines and art manuals, I had a brief flirtation with calligraphy and hand-painted lettering. In the early 1980s, I did calligraphy for special occasions; family, parish, that sort of thing. I left it behind completely once the computer came to our office, and "desktop publishing" was the next big thing.
