Chapter I: Pre-Ramble, part 2

And my life has been marked by sharp breaks: after I got thrown out of Sacred Heart Seminary (the rector Monsignor Donnelly told my mother it was because I was caught smoking after midnight in the Gothic Tower—with Jim van Slambrouck.), I had no further truck with the Sem. The real reason for the expelling was in retrospect more bipolar disorder—while I was Father George’s star Latin pupil, I got so bored by the slow pace of the rest of the class that I cut up, maniacally, to the Latin teacher’s eventual despair. No looking back.

I was bounced over Easter vacation--so there was little possibility of finding another Catholic high school that would take me on such short and ambiguous notice so I, faute de mieux, went to the local Edwin Denby High. A brief walk from the first house my mother bought with another teacher boarder in Northeast Detroit. It was theoretically a shock, since Denby had a rep, through no activities of mine, as the Whorehouse of Detroit. The classes I took were college prep, so my classmates were generally highly motivated achievers, like Chuck Riddle, the football center who became a Grosse Pointe gynecologist, end Ed Sohacki who became a dentist in Birmingham, and Ed LeBoeuf, a lawyer and politico in Detroit.

Because I was an excellent student when I wasn’t messing around (the bipolar cooled off in the strangeness of Denby) I graduated second in a class of 432 students. I’ve always wondered who had been a bigger grind than I! But too lazy to look up the records. In a dance club I met my first serious date, Fran Gilpin, perky daughter of a Chrysler engineer and a phys ed teacher in the public schools. When I got back from the Navy, I started dating her. And I’m embarrassed to admit that we broke up because she was a Protestant! But she was very dear, and I’ll never forget our winter meeting at the Lake, when we had both turned fifty.

She had married an engineer from Dow Chemical in Midland, MI and taught elementary school after graduating from Michigan State. She and her hunting husband Dee sired five Ph.D.’s, a record for any family I knew! Our isolated meeting on the frozen bluffs over Lake Huron was just a gesture that we were still fond of each other after all those years separate and alone. I was about to go on my three month circumambling of the Mediterranean in honor of my fiftieth birthday. It was the sweetest closure in a life without many. So. No friends from the Seminary. From Denby. From the Navy. One friend, Henry B.Maloney, from the University of Detroit, but that fizzled after 50 years when he blocked my e-mail address—for reasons unknown.

I kept loosely in touch with Steve Sweeney, a lawyer in Detroit for many years. From Graduate School, a great scholar, Stan Idzerda who dropped me when I dropped the Catholic Church!. From East Lansing High, zero. From Ford Fellowship in New York, Bill Sloan and his wife Gwenn, until I got too intimate with their daughter Jennifer. From Trenton State, none, except for Fred Kiley, a Rhode Island Mick who replaced me when I got a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn. No friends from the Annenberg, except Gilbert Seldes who was old enough to be my intellectual grandfather. And was. No friendships from my year in Honolulu. Or from twenty years at Beaver College, except for Benton Spruance, the great printmaker who died early, in 1967. So when Joseph Epstein writes an entire book on “Friendship”, I simply stand by, and sigh, enviously.

I did finally find someone to call my best friend, Jake McGoldrick (I taught his sisters at Beaver), a former Philly roofer who moved to San Francisco where he eventually became a professor at the Jesuit University there and in 1990 a City Supervisor representing the Richmond District in City Hall. I should also add my first son, Michael, a poet and filmmaker, who emails me daily as we continue our mutual father/son postgraduate education of each other.

I call him fondly, My Altered Ego. Needless to say, it’s only in retrospect that I see how utterly inept I was at starting, and especially maintaining, friendships. Even my second marriage, at age seventy four to an Ossi thirty four, was not what you would call friendship. Companionship, yes. But we rarely, if ever, share an idea. She is a non-reading librarian. She chides me for abusing books physically, and for reading too much! I tease her for not reading at all, and for saying I read too much.

Slowly we have reverted to disparate, non parallel diets, converging, say, once a year to share a ritual goose on St. Martin’s Day. It’s an experiment in cross cultural living in which very little ever crosses. She’s huggable and pretty. She is my high IQ pet! Every time we visit her relatives, which gets oftener and oftener, I realize how disparate East Germans and Midwest Americans are.

And yet I’m happy I settled down in Weimar, where I can order any book in Germany on interlibrary loan for l euro (say two dollars.) And when I read the morning papers in English and German at the great Anna Amalia Research Library every day but Sunday,when I take a bath while my wife sings in the Lutheran choir. I goof around with the librarians. But I’ve made no friends at all in Germany.

I’m just on assignment, safe from the growing anxieties of life in Philadelphia. When I get too sick, having no health insurance, I’ll return to America. But friendless is not aloneness. I’m greedy every morning at six o’clock to seine as much of the Internet as possible. Starting with Time Select, Paul Krugman, M. Dowd, and T. Friedman, I move on to DRUDGE, dredging Pat Buchanan, Richard Cohen,Joe Conason, Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, John Leo, Thomas Sowell, and George Will.

What a life the Web is. Lately, I’ve started writing for Dan Rottenberg’s website, the Broad Street Review. For ten years I wrote a weekly column, “Hazard at Large” for his alternative paper, the Welcomat. But he’s not a friend. He’s a young mentor, showing me how to edit after a life behind the teacher’s desk. I should mention in the same breath Derek Davis who was the arts editor for the Welcomat. He’s defected to the Northern Pennsylvania Woods, and is as happy as Bush cutting brush. If I ever learned how to make friends, I’d begin with him! Now after this interminably long windup, the first pitch. Holy Rosary Academy.