- Laurie Hertzel
I'd like to see a show of hands. How many of you remember what Confession Fridays are? Hmm, I do not see anyone with her hand up. Surely you recall my post from June 27, 2014, Personal Prophecies And Yellow Caps, in which I wrote that on the website I frequent, Notre Dame Nation, public confessions are posted as a means of "coming clean." I then proceeded to make a confession, of which I was not proud, in that Friday blog post regarding the Personal Prophesy Game. Alas, I have not made a Friday Confession here since, but you are about to read one.
I
was reminded of Confession Fridays a few weeks ago when I read Laurie
Hertzel's column in the Star Tribune. Laurie is the Senior Books Editor
for that paper, and I make a point of checking out her thoughts which
appear most Sundays on the Books pages of the Variety section. An
excerpt from her January 22 column appears above. She described how
certain types of books lend themselves to particular seasons of the
year. For the cold Minnesota winters, she prefers "big, fat books," not
the type that you'd bring to the beach in the summer or read while
reclining on a hammock in the fall. She proceeded to suggest five fat
book titles: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; Vanity Fair by William Thackeray; Rising Up And Rising Down by William T. Vollmann; and Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville. She admitted she hadn't read the Melville book in
its entirety, but intended to do so. It was her modest admission which
triggered this post.
Before I continue I should
point out that all three of my kids think I'm anywhere from slightly to
more-than-moderately eccentric. Momma Cuan's perception of my traits
probably falls more toward the latter end of that spectrum. I'm okay
with all of that; if I weren't I would not be making this Friday
Confession. My guess is that nothing I write here will come as a
surprise to any of them.
My story begins in the
winter of 1962-63. I was in Father Art Perry's sophomore English class
at Assumption High School in Davenport. As I've noted before in my
August 25, 2012 post (Chrome Dome & The Cub Reporter), almost
every priest at Assumption had a nickname, some more cleverly bestowed
than others, some more derisive than others. Father Perry's nickname
was neither clever nor derisive; it was simply what many redheads are
called, "Red." Red Perry, among the most beloved faculty members at a
school sorely lacking in that category, was one of my two favorites at
Assumption. (The other was my junior religion teacher, Father Carlos
Leveling, who was a "late vocation.") Father Perry was the kind of
teacher who inspired his students to do their best, sometimes for no
other reason than the feeling that, like playing for an inspirational
coach, you did't want to let him down. Red was also my homeroom
teacher, and our intramural basketball team -- the last organized hoops
team of my illustrious career -- was, of course, Red's Raiders. He was a
Notre Dame grad, another plus. Some guys said he played football for
the Irish. I don't know if that was true, but it didn't take much
imagination to picture that squarely built priest with the thick neck as
a fullback.
The English class was a mixture
of grammar, vocabulary, composition and literature. Sometime during the
last week of school before Christmas vacation, Father Perry assigned Moby-Dick,
much to the chagrin of my classmates and me. The unabridged novel was
mammoth, coming in at six hundred seventy-five pages. With visions of
our two week break being ruined, we tried our best to convince the
priest to assign a more manageable tome, if indeed he felt compelled to
assign anything at all. No such luck. As if he were doing us a favor,
he pointed out to us that even though there would certainly be a test on
Moby, it would not be given until the Thursday of our first week
back in class in January. If we all didn't love the guy so much, we
would have hated him!
Moby-Dick is
comprised of several dozen relatively short chapters, and I knew I
needed to read a bunch of them every day while on vacation. Once school
restarted after New Years there would be loads of homework from my
other teachers which would make last minute binge reading of Moby
impossible. Nevertheless, I let things slide at home, always coming up
with a flimsy excuse for ignoring the book. I told myself I needed a
short mental health break before plunging into the assignment. I was
only kidding myself, because the thought of having to plow through the
gargantuan classic was always hanging over my head -- not what you'd
call a mental health break. One unproductive day slipped into another,
plus there were those pesky inconveniences called Christmas Eve and
Christmas Day. I didn't fare any better during the week between
Christmas and the resumption of class. During the two week break I
managed to read only a hundred pages or so.
I
started reading like a maniac once school resumed and I was back in
"student mode," but as I predicted, there was so much homework from my
other classes that there was no way I could finish Moby before
the Thursday morning test. Our in-class discussions covered roughly
only the first half of the book. When I sat down to take the dreaded
test, I still had a little over a hundred pages to go. I decided not to
ask my classmates how the story ended because, crazy as this sounds, I
wanted to reward myself for hours and hours of reading by arriving at
the conclusion organically.
Somehow I was able
to schlep my way through the exam with enough familiarity, based on what
I did read, that I received a B+. By now you are wondering where the
eccentric behavior manifests itself. Here is what happened on the next
school day (Friday), when the graded papers were returned and Father
Perry went over the exam. I covered my ears whenever I realized that
the class discussion was about to delve into those last hundred pages! I discovered that if I lightly rubbed my fingers over my ear canals, I could block out sound at least to the point where the voices were unintelligible. (Maybe the conversation would have proven to be unintelligible anyway, without my having to resort to those extraordinary measures.)
Naturally I was hoping I wouldn't be called on for those discourses, but
I wisely lessened the odds of that happening by volunteering some sage
comments about the first part of the book. My ruse worked!
A dutiful student would have, at least, finished the book over that next weekend, but no. I never picked up Moby again. Maybe I wanted to get a jump on the next classic, The Last Of The Mohicans, assigned by Red. It was another pretty fat book.
****
In the tradition of famed radio host Paul Harvey, here is The Rest Of The Story.
Four
years ago I was rummaging around the closet in the den at the Quentin
Estates, looking for an old book. Instead of finding what I wanted, I
discovered a copy of Moby-Dick. I was immediately enveloped in
shame, remembering that English assignment from dear old Red and how I
received an undeserved B+ for bluffing my way through his test. Not
that it would make any difference now, fifty years later, but I felt the
urge (the obligation?) to complete the mission. I still did not know
how the story ended, having managed to avoid all conversations,
articles, references and movies about the great white whale. At this
point retired with time on my hands, I started from page 1 and did not
pick up any other book or magazine until I had reached the surprising
conclusion about three weeks later.
Thanks to
Laurie Hertzel's column, I have now come clean with this post. If I
ever meet Father Red in that Big Library In The Sky, I'll have something
to talk about with him besides Notre Dame football.
****
Since
it is unlikely I will have another post about Father Perry or Father
Leveling, I would like to add this postscript. In the fall of 1965 when
I was a freshman at Notre Dame, the two of them looked me up in
Cavanaugh Hall on a Saturday morning. They had traveled to ND from
Davenport to attend a football game that afternoon. I thought that was
pretty cool of them, especially since I had left Assumption in 1964 for
North Dakota.
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