Revising my hotel wish list
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 13, 2018
- 1370
When I was growing up and my family hit the road for a summer vacation trip, it was a pretty big thrill to stay in a hotel or a motel. And my wish list was modestly short.
All I wanted was a pop machine, a swimming pool and a color TV. These three things pretty much defined luxury.
Oh, every now and again I might get the urge to splurge and add something like a balcony, like the one we had at the Holiday Inn in Gettysburg, which was cheek-to-jowl with the Jenny Wade house. Google it. You’ll understand.
But that seemed awfully greedy, and if there was one thing eight years of parochial school education had taught me, it was you didn’t mess around with the seven deadly sins. You probably know them as well as I do: greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth and pride.
For a guy growing up in the late ‘60s, this was a formidable challenge because it seemed that at least one of them lurked around every corner, well, once you got out of church that is.
And the nuns meant well. I mean it wasn’t their fault if a lot of us took the deadlies as a kind of dare, trying to add one a month between confessions, especially during the summer.
Anger and pride, boy, those were my downfalls. They’re kind of related now that I think about it.
Say I was playing Little League baseball and I struck out twice. Didn’t matter that I might have contributed a key single to the win. What angered me was I wasn’t better, and that hurt my pride.
I’m sure the priest got pretty tired of hearing me confess to the same transgressions time after time, and I wouldn’t have blamed him at all if he’d interrupted my soul-bearing soliloquy, saying something like, “OK Mike, can we just jump to your taking the Lord’s name in vain and call it a day?”
I’d have said, “Geez, thanks father. See you next month.”
Now that I think about it, I don’t even remember the last time I was in a confessional. I know it was when I was a student at Notre Dame, probably late in my freshman year because that was when temptation was starting to rear its ugly head.
I’ve always thought it’s more than a little ironic that I began to question my faith almost as soon as I set foot on the campus of what was arguably America’s pre-eminent Catholic university.
Sort of like saving for a year to make a pilgrimage to Liverpool only to discover the Beatles were just another British band. Or interviewing Hunter S. Thompson only to discover he was just a drunken idiot who couldn’t really write all that well. Not that those things could ever happen, probably.
The truth is I’m not sure what my relationship is with the church anymore. I like to tell folks I’m a “recovering Catholic,” but that’s too slick and cute and glib by half.
When you get to be on the other side of 60, as I’ve been for the last three years or so, you sometimes find yourself thinking about what is called, in one of my faith’s favorite prayers, “the hour of our death.”
I guess I’m hedging my bets. If there is a heavenly afterlife, I’d certainly like to qualify for admission, so I keep my Catholicism ready for presentation and inspection, should St. Peter require proof of membership at the Pearly Gates.
“Hmm,” he’d say, “says here you had a problem with anger and pride when you were a kid. Is that true?”
“Aw c’mon, man!” I’d reply. “Are we really going to go back to all that? I was playing baseball for goodness’ sake!”
I was reminded of my glory days last week when my wife and I traveled home for my high school reunion.
Hard to believe, but it’s been 45 years since I last walked those halls, eluding those seven deadly sins every day.
High school is to parochial school what Minor League Baseball is to The Show: nothing even close. And when you’re in the company of some of the same people who breathed the same air in the same place as you did all those years ago, you’re grateful for having made it through intact. Because high school is the ultimate zero-sum game. Earning your diploma is nice, but maintaining your dignity is even better.
I talked with a lot of friends who shared a lot of stories, and I contributed my fair share of tales to the oral history we built.
Our class numbered roughly 400 souls, and we’ve lost 50 or so over the decades, but the organizers did a very good job of making sure they were remembered, which I thought was touching.
And the music was ours, though I was kind of surprised when, over the course of that Saturday evening, we weren’t herded to the hillside there at the country club for a class picture.
Still and all, I’m glad we made the effort to drive home from the Crystal Coast and very happy to have seen as many friends as I did.
As my wife and I pulled in to the Holiday Inn Express in Princeton, West Virginia for our final night on the road, I revised my hotel wish list. All I wanted was a reliable internet connection, XM radio access and a pop machine. Some things just don’t change.
Mike Dewey can be reached at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.