Aloysious and Me
© John McManamy
This is the third of five articles that chronicle my lifelong struggles with depression and mania:
I transferred to an all-boys Catholic school, and there, on the bus that also dropped the girls at their school, I met the girl who should have been my wife. I'd shot up some ten inches in one summer, so I was almost able to blend in. But my quality of being different sent out some invisible signal, and perhaps this is what she was responding to.
She was a cancer survivor and had the kinds of insights fifteen year olds shouldn't have, together with a beauty that ran far deeper than her amazing good looks. I would come home from dates feeling I'd been dropped onto a balance beam with my legs spread apart. I was innocent. I didn't realize she might have helped me out had I asked.
She was from a professional Catholic family - one that took their religious obligations seriously - but that wouldn't have stopped her, I am sure. Sure, there would have been a few religious technicalities to overcome, such as burning in Hell forever, but these could easily be resolved by other religious technicalities, such as getting to Confession before a truck ran either of us over while in a state of mortal sin.
Perhaps this is a good time to talk about being Catholic, for I can no more neglect this aspect of my life than a Jew can ignore growing up Jewish or an African-American forget to mention the fact of being black. This is true despite the fact that I grew up on a new shore far removed from the hard-core experiences of an earlier generation, and that I have not been inside a church in more than thirty years, except to weddings and funerals.
My grandfather on my father's side came from a large Irish family in Quebec. Like most families of this type back then, there was a designated priest-to-be while all the other kids labored to put food on the table and maybe subsidize a lucky brother or sister's upward mobility. My Grandpa Joe was not one of the lucky ones. Out into the workforce he went, a kid who loved Shakespeare chopping wood in the cold at age fourteen.
I suspect his religion came to the rescue here, for I can remember him with his weathered face and tobacco-stained hands talking about the nobility and dignity of manual labor. I suspect at an early age he dedicated his sweat and strain to the glory of God.
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