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Storyworth: Who Was the Wisest Person You Ever Knew?

| April 25, 2022 | 0 Comments

Abbot Aiden with Danny‘ and His Fellow Graduates of St. Anselm’s Abbey School

When my son, Danny, was in sixth grade, he decided he wanted to go to St. Anselm’s Abbey School. Rita and I didn’t know much about the school and were impressed with Danny’s decision to take control of his future. The more we learned about St. Anselm’s, the more impressed we were with Danny’s decision. So, we started the process of applying to the school.

As it turned out, some of the motivations Danny had for going to the school were misguided and he began to change his mind. But, by then, Rita and I were all in for him going to the school, so we didn’t allow him to back out. It may have been the best decision about Danny’s future that we’d ever made. Much of the reason he’s the extraordinary young man he is today can be traced to St. Anselm’s.

At the abbey associated with the school, the Abbot was a man named Aiden O’Shea, more commonly known as Abbot Aiden. After Danny had been accepted to the school but before he began attending, Abbot Aiden spoke at an event at our parish, Blessed Sacrament Church. I wanted to meet him, so I attended the event. I was deeply impressed with his spirituality, humility, intelligence and charisma. I was also surprised to learn he was a fellow Bostonian, having grown up on Beacon Hill. I spoke to him after his remarks and invited him to lunch and he readily accepted. At the time, I was wrestling with issues of faith and thought he might help guide me through. I didn’t fully realize then that this “wrestling” would be a permanent state of affairs, but that’s an issue I’ve dealt with in a previous chapter.

That lunch led to a ten year plus relationship. I’d asked him to be my “spiritual advisor,” but we became close friends. It is impossible to capture Abbot Aiden, the man, or the importance he had for me in a chapter such as this. All I can do is relay a few anecdotes that come to mind when I think of him. 

He was a Benedictine monk for more than 50 years. Benedictine monks are assigned to a particular abbey and they stay there for their entire lives. He became a monk in 1958 and spent his life at St. Anselm’s. 

He went into the monastery after serving in the military. He was drafted into the 82nd Airborne. He told me one story of his military service which was not your typical war story. He once encountered an attempted homosexual rape in the shower on his base. He broke up the attack by blasting hot water on the assailant. Other than that, he acknowledged his unsuitability for military service. Nonetheless, he earned an honorable discharge and became a monk.

I’ve tried to remember some profound sayings he may have provided me, but, honestly, he mostly taught by example. Being in his presence was a balm.

I did ask him once how, in the absence of proof, he could be so confident of the existence of God that he would literally dedicate his entire life to that belief. He said that, even if he learned that God did not exist, he would have no regrets. He found the monastic life so rewarding that he wouldn’t change a thing about the life he chose.

As he got older, he began to suffer from the ravages of Parkinson’s Disease. The physical effects eventually confined him to a wheelchair. But he found the mental effects much more frustrating. Our relationship evolved from one where I came to him to receive comfort to one where I visited him to provide comfort. 

I remember the day I got a call from his caregiver, Rowena, telling me that he was entering hospice care. I dropped what I was doing and immediately went to visit him. He was in bed and not fully aware of his surroundings. Rowena whispered in his ear, “This is Bill Black here to see you.” He smiled. I will take that smile to my grave. He couldn’t really speak, but I chatted with him and his face was pleasant and peaceful. It was a very spiritual experience.

When I told my family, Rita, Danny and Bridget that Abbot Aiden was receiving hospice care, we decided to visit him that Sunday, about three days from my visit. We arrived at the abbey only to be told he had died 20 minutes before our arrival. I was both devastated and immensely grateful for the previous visit. We were allowed to visit him one more time. We were struck by the matter-of-fact way the other monks treated his passing. They clearly believed he’d “gone home.” There was no grieving. They just went about their business. At first, it bothered us that they didn’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of what had occurred. But, we concluded that their behavior simply reflected their sincere believe that Abbot Aiden was in a better place.

I sure hope that’s true.

Bill Black, April 16, 2022

Storyworth: Did anyone in the family play a part in History with a capital h?

| March 21, 2022 | 0 Comments

When I was about 10 years old, I asked my father what he did in World War II. He told me he landed at Normandy on D-Day plus 1, June 7th, 1944. He said he was a mile from the front. To my young brain, filled with TV shows, like Combat and 1950’s war movies, his answer was a disappointment. There were no movies about the guys that showed up the next day. All that mattered was what was happening on the front lines. For me, my father was a day late and a mile short.

My father, Bill Black, on the right, in his machine shop during WWII

What an idiot I was (or maybe I was just a ten-year-old boy). To my lifelong regret, I didn’t say, “Wow! That’s amazing! Tell me more.” Knowing what I know now, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to land on Omaha Beach the day after D-Day. A more recent war movie, Saving Private Ryan, was a more accurate depiction of war, specifically what happened on that day. The beach must have been littered with dead soldiers when he arrived. I suspect the surf was still red with all the blood. It must have been horrific.

A number of years ago, my cousin, Bob Black, sent me a trove of letters my father wrote to his sister, Ann, during his service in World War II. One letter refers to his arrival in France from England. Here’s what he wrote to Ann on July 22, 1944 after restrictions on letters home were lifted:

    “They have eased up on the censoring enough to so that I can say that we came to France the hard way – landed on the beach. There was no interference. It was quite a thrill tho as we approached the beachhead, to think that we were landing in another foreign country. I kept thinking about how Pete [his brother] had come to France + comparing the circumstances. As for the beach itself, at high tide, it might have been any part of the Cape. Boy, how it reminded me of it. Of course, at the Cape, you wouldn’t see a lot of destroyed barges laying about. For the next four or five days, it was kinda rough. I lived in the truck + ate K rations.”

That’s it. He was 26 years old. I’m sure his goal was to reassure his sister. I have to believe his landing was a bit more traumatic than he described.

[Interruption]

Since beginning this post, inspired by the question, I have systematically gone through all of my father’s letters to his sister during his service in World War II. There are 31 letters. The first letter was written from Aberdeen, Maryland on July 2nd, 1943. The last was exactly two years later, on July 2nd 1945. All were, of course, handwritten. Fortunately, he had pretty good handwriting and the letter’s have held up well. Some were so-called V Mails, which were like postcards that enjoyed expedited delivery, though they were short. Reading these letters was an extraordinary journey through the war experience through my father’s eyes. They are such a gift.

For the most part, they are very personal accounts of his experiences, his concerns and expectations. After getting bounced around quite a bit, he landed in the job that he truly wanted, that of a machinist. He had a girlfriend named Dottie Jayes, who was in the Coast Guard. She dumped him in January of 1945. In a letter on February 4th, 1945, he expressed anger that she also wrote to his mother, my grandmother, announcing the breakup. He was concerned that his mother would worry that “they might be sizing me up for a straight jacket” upon his hearing the news. Amazingly, I googled “Dorothy Jayes, Coast Guard” and she came right up. She died in East Yarmouth on the Cape in 2008 at age 86. She was married twice and had a career as a PR executive in NY. Incredible what you can find on the Internet.

Of course, the letters raise an infinite number of questions, most of which will likely never be answered. By their nature, they leave huge gaps in his experiences during the war. The main locations from which they were written were Aberdeen, Maryland; San Antonio, Texas; England and France. The locations in England and France were a bit vague due to wartime censorship. As noted above, he landed on the beach in Normandy as part of the Ninth Air Force. For years, I’ve tried to find some independent verification of his wartime service, particularly some documentation that he landed on Normandy the day after D Day.

Recently, I discovered a document entitled “A Condensed Analysis of the Ninth Air Force in the European Theater of Operations,” published in 1946. It describes the role of the Ninth Air Force in softening the Nazi resistance in advance of the invasion of Normandy. The Ninth Air Force dropped the paratroopers behind the lines the night before D Day. They also bombed bridges in northern France that prevented German troops and armor from getting to Normandy after the invasion started. The report quotes Herman Goering as saying about D Day, “The allies owe the success of their invasion to their air forces. They prepared the invasion; they made it possible; and they carried it through.” That was the Ninth.

As to D Day plus 1, the report says, “The first units of the [Ninth Air Force] Engineer Command landed on Utah Beach on D Day and on Omaha Beach on D Day plus 1.” My father may have been part of that landing. The Engineer Command were the people who built the air strips as soon as they secured the beaches. My father was with the Service Command, the guys that keep all the machinery operating. I could imagine that the engineers would need men from the Service Command with them when the landed. If so, Omaha Beach must have been quite a sight that day.

After his arrival in France, his letters described a number of his experiences touring the countryside. He spent some time in Paris, which he LOVED. His next three letters had multiple variations of “Did I tell you how great Paris was?” He had another weekend in Paris when his brother, Franny, which was also very special.

His final letters were particularly interesting. He wrote one on May 9th, the day after VE day. He was pretty frustrated that he was in some godforsaken base in the French countryside when the war ended. He said he would have loved to have been in Paris for the celebration. The fact that he was writing a letter the day after the war ended in Europe suggests there wasn’t much of a party where he was. In the letters after that, he was very anxious about getting home. In one letter, he’s optimistic. In the next letter, a month later, he’s worried that he would be assigned to “the occupation.” The letters stopped on July 2nd, so I don’t know when he got home.

So, my detective work continues….

Storyworth: Do You Believe in a Higher Power?

| March 13, 2022 | 0 Comments

This Storyworth thing allows you to head off questions if you get to them before they are posted. Since I fell behind in my writing, I didn’t see this one coming. I would have headed it off. This is a topic that I’ve wrestled with since I was about 14 years old. I’ll ignore the carefully worded question and just consider the question to be “Do you believe in God?”

Buckle up. This is going to be a long one.

I was raised Catholic and went to grammar school at Sacred Heart School in Roslindale. I was pretty much all in on Catholicism. I was an altar boy for the whole time I was eligible. I almost didn’t make it because I had so much trouble learning the Confiteor Dei, a long prayer in Latin. At my last recital before being washed out, I finally got it. Less than a year later, Vatican Two converted the Mass to English, so it was all for naught. By the time I retired as an altar boy, I was the longest serving altar boy in the parish.

As i approached graduation from grammar school, I was probably headed to one of two Catholic high schools, Catholic Memorial in West Roxbury or Xaverian Brothers in Westwood. Both cost a lot of money and my family had no money. But there was no way my parents were going to send me to Roslindale High the local public school, which was seen as a “thug school.” My grand uncle, Brother Jason, was the librarian at Xaverian, which I think entitled us to a break on the tuition. But it was about a 40 minute drive away. Catholic Memorial was close to home, but no tuition break. In the hope that lightening would strike, I took the notoriously difficult exam to get into Boston Latin School, Boston’s most elite public school founded in 1633. Against all odds, I was one of two boys (only boys could go there) who got admitted from Sacred Heart.

The nuns at Sacred Heart strongly urged me to go to one of the Catholic high school. But BLS was free, so that’s where I went.

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Storyworth: What were your favorite subjects in high school?

| March 8, 2022 | 0 Comments

Oddly, my favorite subject/class in high school was physics, mainly due to the teacher. I think his name was Mr. Jacobs, but I’m not sure. But I had physics classes with him in my junior and senior years. There was a lot of lab work, which I thought was really cool. I remember one lab where we calculated the diameter of a molecule. I loved the technique for doing so. You would have a dish with water in it. You‘d sprinkle some powdery substance on top of the water. Then you would take an eye dropper with a precisely measured non-soluble liquid in it. You‘d drop the liquid into the dish and the liquid would spread out on top of the water, pushing the powdery substance into a circle. You‘d assume that the spreaded liquid would be one molecule thick on top of the water. So, if you knew the volume of the liquid, you would somehow divide the circumference of the formed circle into the volume and get the diameter of the molecule. Even trying to explain this, I’m not sure I got it right. But I do remember thinking how cool it was to be able to do it.

I remember another class where Mr. Jacobs asked us to consider the possibility of inter planetary travel. Would we do it if we could? Very cool to contemplate. But all I remember from the discussion was Mr. Jacobs‘ frustration with the answers from the class. Kids kept saying that they’d have a hard time leaving friends, presumably permanently. Finally, Mr. Jacobs said, “Get over it! You’re going to spend you life leaving friends.“ I think he was looking for a more elevated discussion of space travel.

I was so inspired by Mr. Jacobs that I started college at Northeastern University as a physics major. What was I thinking??

Actually, I did OK for the first semester and kind of enjoyed it. At the beginning, the math was all differential equations and I understood them. It was in the second semester where I crashed and burned. That’s when you start having to learn calculus. It was as though the class switched from English to hieroglyphics.

That was when i decided I didn’t need a college degree and enrolled in the New England School of Photography in Kenmore Square. That didn’t work out so well either, but that‘s a story for another chapter.

Storyworth: Who were your favorite professors in college?

| February 28, 2022 | 0 Comments

This one is easy. Professor Louise Smith (English) and Professor David Hunt (History).

It took me 8 years to finish undergraduate college. This is one of the defining facts of my life. To this day, I’m not sure why I had so much trouble. But my problem was very specific. I could not get through Freshman English. And the reason I couldn’t get through Freshman English is that I had a pathological aversion to writing. It’s very ironic looking back, given the amount of writing I’ve done personally and professionally throughout my life. But there you go.

Here’s how it would go. I would get a writing assignment for the class and I would put it off and put it off. I might be able to force myself to write something and submit it and I would get a good grade. But that wouldn’t motivate me for the next one. Inevitably, I would fall hopelessly behind and end up either dropping the class or getting an incomplete. I think I felt that putting my thoughts on paper was too revealing. I was worried that something I would write would make me look stupid. And there was, of course, the laziness. Writing was, and is, hard work.

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Storyworth: Did you have a job while you were in high school?

| February 22, 2022 | 0 Comments

In Roslindale Square, there were two grocery stores when I was growing up. As you went down Corinth Street through the middle of the neighborhood shopping area, Roche Brothers was on the left and Corey‘s was on the right.

My father got friendly with the delivery guys from Roche Brothers. When I was 13 years old, he convinced them to hire me as what was called a “striker.” Generally there were two people in the car or truck delivering the groceries, the driver and the striker. The striker was the kid who would actually bring the groceries into the House while the driver waited outside in the vehicle. If the order was four bags or less, the striker would grab two bags in each hand. This is before bags had handles so you would just sort of scrunch them up and grab them in a fist. When you started doing this, you would get blisters on your knuckles from rubbing against the paper of the bags. It was a real badge of honor when, over time, those blisters would turn into calluses. While they would be unsightly it would show that you were an experienced striker. Also, after the blisters turned to calluses the pain would stop.

The crew that did this delivery work were various types of miscreants from the neighborhood. This was my first exposure to the delinquent class of Roslindale. I also learned a large number of new words.

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Storyworth: What’s the Dumbest Thing You’ve Ever Done?

| February 6, 2022 | 0 Comments

The VW on the Beach

It’s an overcast, cold day in May in the mid-70s.  I’m in my twenties, standing on Humarock Beach in Scituate, Mass.  I’m looking at my pride and joy.  A recently acquired cherry red Volkswagen Beetle in perfect condition.  Not a scratch on it….yet.  

It is completely surrounded by water, sunk in the wet sand up to its axles.  And the tide is coming in.  I’m psychologically preparing myself for the fact that it will likely be washed out to sea and trying to figure out how I’m going to explain this to the insurance company so the will pay the claim and I’ll be able to pay off the car loan I’d taken out to buy it.

This was during what I like to call my “lost decade,” because I was lost professionally, psychologically, academically, spiritually, etc., etc.  I had joined a group of neighborhood friends who rented a cottage right on the beach for the month of May.  It was about a forty minute drive from Boston, so it was easy for us to visit and stay over, without necessarily taking time off from work.  And it was technically off-season, so cheap enough that we could afford it.

On this day, there were about five of us in the cottage and it was decidedly not a beach day.  Cloudy and cool.  With nothing else to do, we decided to play a drinking game where you drink a shot a beer a minute.  That’s it.  That’s the game.  Just drink beer.  I’ll do the math for you.  60 one-ounce shots means you drink five 12-ounce cans of beer in one hour.  Utterly reckless.  Don’t try this at home.  I’m only revealing this publicly because both my kids are older now that I was then and are much, much more responsible drinkers than I was.

At some point, we ran out of beer and Jimmy and I took my new red VW bug to the liquor store to get more.  Jimmy drove.  I’d like to think that was because Jimmy was not participating in the game and that this reflected at least one example of responsible behavior.  But I don’t remember for sure and it would have been out of character for us on that day.

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Storyworth: Did you have any pets growing up?

| February 1, 2022 | 0 Comments
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Bridget with Maggie, Butch’s Successor

I was about 10 years old when my Uncle Charlie brought Butch to our house. I don’t recall agitating for a dog. I don’t think it occurred to me that we’d ever have one. Charlie was my mother’s twin brother and had brokered dogs for others in the family. But I don’t think he ever owned one himself. My mother and father discussed whether to keep the dog and decided to do so. I’m not really sure why.

Butch was a rescue dog. He was a one year old Beagle when we got him and was extremely timid. We were told that he was a hunting dog who was “shell-shocked” when a gun went off close to his ear.

Whatever the reason, his timidity was profound. When he walked along the sidewalk, he would always stay right next to walls and bushes. He seemed fearful of being exposed, walking out in the open.

The first time he barked, we’d had him for a least a year. Yes, a full year without making a sound. And the bark came under extreme duress. He actually got himself locked in a closet in our third floor attic. He was missing all day, hours and hours. We had no idea where he’d gone. Then, after about six hours, we heard a very tentative yelp coming from the third floor. And there he was, stuck in the closet.

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Storyworth: What were your grandparents like?

| January 24, 2022 | 0 Comments
Kieran and Me

This chapter will be much shorter than the previous ones. Of my four grandparents, only one was alive when I was born. My mother‘s mother was Margaret Mahoney. I knew her as “Ma.” She lived with my Aunt Theresa in the downstairs apartment from where my family lived. I remember very little about her, but I believe I was her favorite grandchild, probably due to the fact that I lived in the same house and was the first grandchild to do so. 

I have a vague memory of being shuttled off to my cousins’ house in Roxbury when she died. There seemed to be unusual concern among the adults about the impact it would have on me. Clearly, I had a special relationship with Ma. Presumably, she loved me and nurtured me. I was her favorite grandchild. And I’m sure I loved her back. But I remember very little of any personal interactions with her.

In order to gather some information for this installment, I called my Aunt Mary, widow of my mother’s twin brother, Charlie. It was her house to which I was shuttled off when Ma died. She’s the only aunt or uncle I have left. She’s 96 years old, sharp as a tack and lives independently in Boston. I was hoping to get some warm family anecdotes that would help me describe Ma for this article. I was particularly hopeful that she might fill the gap in my memories of my very special relationship with Ma.

”Meanest woman I ever met!” she said when I asked. 

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Storyworth: What Was Your Most Dangerous Adventure?

| January 17, 2022 | 0 Comments

In December, 1980, about two weeks before Christmas, Barney Frank, newly elected congressman from the 4th District of Massachusetts, offered me a job in his Washington office, starting in 3 weeks on January 3rd, 1981.  I was 27 years old and had never lived outside of Roslindale (aka Rozzie) my Boston neighborhood.  This was a big deal.  But I was utterly unprepared.  

My first problem was that I had no place to live – or even stay – in DC. A good Rozzie friend connected me with the brother of his then girlfriend, a guy named Ralph, who lived in Falls Church, VA, a suburb of DC.  He offered to put me up for a few weeks upon my arrival as I searched for an apartment.  But Ralph had something else that appealed to me strongly.  He had his own 2-seater plane.

Having never lived outside of Rozzie, I was very concerned about cutting off contact with all my friends and family while starting a new life in DC.  Having a friend with his own plane meant I could easily come back to Boston on a fairly regular basis, or so I thought.  

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