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Epilogue

I missed the 50th reunion of my Eighth-grade graduating class. Tom Corbett wrote me about it:

"We went to a parish function for former parishioners. It was well attended but kind of sad. Attendees parked in the huge lot near where we used to sled into Blakesley's Pond. We were then bused to the church while our cars were guarded by a security force. The neighborhood is like a war zone. The interior of the grand old church was falling into disrepair. Basically, St. Al's is a mission church for poor blacks."

When I was a boy the parish was not an official hunger center, though it did try to help the hungry. The sisters were always ready with a meal at lunchtime for those kids who didn't bring a lunch, and we often had food-gathering-and-distributing activities going on, usually on weekends.

The Sisters of St Joseph in Cleveland changed with the times, as Sister Jeanne Cmolik records in her history of the order.

"In the 1960s, there were changes in ministry, prayer, government structure and the concept of authority. The change in our religious habit in 1968, from the traditional widow's garb of 17th century France to dark suits and short veils, was an outward sign of all the deeper changes we were experiencing at the time.

"During the 1970s, many sisters retired from teaching. Sixty sisters left the community, and fewer new members joined. We were unable to staff all the schools where we were teaching. At the same time, we were becoming more aware of other ministry needs. When we came together, we discussed social issues such as racism, sexism, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1972 we responded to a request to serve the diocesan mission in El Salvador.

"In 1979, community members agreed to widen the scope of our service from education to any ministry where we could serve as a 'healing presence,' the special charism of a Sister of St. Joseph. Actually, this change was a return to the spirit of our first sisters in France, who divided up the city and searched for those in need in order to serve them. Since that time, our members have founded and/or served in such projects as the West Side Catholic Church and Women's Shelter, Providence House, (a crisis nursery for children), Transitional Housing for women and families, daycare for children and older adults, hospital chaplaincy,

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and a Wellness Center, as well as continuing our work in education."

All members of my extended family moved to suburbs beginning in the 1950s. Except for Lois, they remained close and continued to do things as a family. Lois broke with the family when she was in her thirties, married, with two children. It was, and remains, too complex for me to understand. She said, among other things, my parents treated Tom and me much better than her, pushing her wishes aside to make room for what the boys wanted. I saw substance in her complaint, but I believed there had to be more to her self-severance from the family than that.

She died considerably before her time. The cause was given as a form of cancer. She was in her fifties. I was still trying to figure out what happened way back when, why she turned her back on the family. Now she was lost to any search for reasons or explanations because her husband had already died and her two daughters would have nothing to do with us.

I've always regretted I didn't talk with Father Bechler about Lois. I think he might have put it in a helpful perspective.

I had a few conversations with Father Bechler after I graduated from St. Al's. The first was in 1946. I went to him for a couple of reasons. The first was a superficial matter, which he quickly saw as such. I was playing accordion in an almost-legal strip joint, lying to my parents about it, making "good money" doing it.

The second, the real, reason was my disappointing discovery I didn't have the natural talent necessary to be a quality jazz musician. I had gotten good enough to play with musicians whose talents dismayed me. I remember particularly Jim Hall, a guitarist who is generally regarded as one of America's premier jazz guitarists. I played with him at a club and came away painfully aware of the profound difference between how he and I related to music. It wasn't measurable.

Father Bechler said I was probably right in my evaluation, but he wouldn't let it go at that. He grabbed me by my sweater - it's a thing to be remembered because it was unlike him to be physical - and he said, "there's more to you than music. Put that away and look. God gave you talents, find and follow them." He let go of me and smiled. "Actually, this is a kind of blessing. You now know what it is to want something a lot and not be able to have it.

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That's suffering. You'll suffer all your life. The trick is to stay on top of it, not let it get you down."

The last confidential talk I had with Father Bechler was when I was seventeen. There was a YMCA near my high school which I joined in order to be able to swim all-year round. Catholics were admonished to stay away from Protestant Christianity in those days.

Samuel Butler wrote, "The most perfect humour and irony is generally quite unconscious." The white Anglo-Saxon leadership of Cleveland in the early twentieth century strived to put their indelible stamp on the city's future. They left cultural treasures such as the world-renowned Cleveland Symphonic Orchestra and the Cleveland Art Museum only to see the reputation of their city usurped by polka-loving eastern Europeans who lived in duplex neighborhoods with lawn flamingos.

This is not to say Hegel's conflict was won by the immigrants. There was no Marx-like workers' revolution. Even the most radical union leaders yielded to what Hegel saw as the inevitabilities of history. In the late 1940s federal laws recognized unions and their rights to strike. However, to be included in the protection of these laws union members were required to sign affidavits stating they were not members of organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government. Frank Cedervall's metal and machinery workers' union faced an obstacle in qualifying for coverage because the officers of their parent union, the IWW, refused to sign the affidavits. Cedervall took his union out of the IWW and reformed it as the independent Metal & Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 of Cleveland. He and the other officers signed the affidavits.

Immigrant workers became more like the WASPS and their children even more so. In turn, the WASPS yielded socially, culturally and economically to their inferiors.

Without Hegel's approval, I will dare to extend his dialectic to interpersonal relationships. At least to my parents.

As I grew up I saw the commitment of their bond but never any warmth, let alone romance. They never held hands or did anything as a couple. They seemed to be opposites in

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physical appearance, disposition, beliefs, interests and hobbies. They had met on an ice-skating rink, but my mother's arthritis retired her from skating at an early age, though my father skated, and was very good at it, until he died.

In their later years they appeared to have discovered one another, sharing jokes and recollections of what one or the other did, ritualistically doing most things together, each completely aware of the other's needs and ready to serve them. The change in them as a couple accompanied considerable changes in each of them.

A friend of mine who had not known them until they were in their sixties said, "It's difficult to imagine them apart."

I said in the prologue this memoir had nothing, or everything, to do with religion. I don't know if my life evolved as it did because of or despite my boyhood experiences. Parish life was one of the two best things that ever happened to me - the other was Pam - but I have no idea if the nuns and priests of St. Al's would say that my life turned out in a way that was consistent with their intentions. My gratitude, if known to them, might be welcomed with mixed emotions.

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