Be Careful What You Ask For

Be careful what you ask for is an old saw that goes along with the following notion: half the choices that we make in this life will inevitably be the wrong ones, and in no case can you know for sure which is which ahead of time. It is precisely this prescription for adventure that my poor Margaret failed to take into account when she was so adamant that this old fart should share a few of the things that meander through his mind on any given day with the world at large. Now that I have taken up this bad habit (given that I can no longer indulge in most of my former ones) I try my best to reassure her that I have changed enough of the names to protect the guilty (if only by association) that she needn’t be concerned.

She tells me that isn’t the point. She says that you would think I’d have some sense of propriety at my age. I tell her she must not know too many old people, if she thinks that collection of inhibitions gets any stronger with age. She is a staunch Catholic. She didn’t get it from me. I slept through Sunday mass during her youth and stopped going altogether when my son, Sean, didn’t come home from Vietnam. That of course upset the mother superior at Sacred Heart, where I worked as a janitor, to no end. But I would ask her which is worse, my not going or the hypocrisy of my going, to which she would use her old fall back of hoping I would play that damn cornet a little softer if I felt the urge to play it at all. That was her concession to me, which I always appreciated receiving.  She was one tough woman, but was smart enough to know which lines couldn’t be crossed.

My father went to church pretty much every day of his life, but I would not have called him a staunch Catholic by any means. He applied the fifty-fifty rule about choices to the pope himself. He liked to say, Frankie, the pope is always right… except for when he’s wrong. My father believed that choices were a crap shoot and if going to church could help load the dice in your favor, than what’s the harm. My father died in 1929 at the age of 39. It was a couple of months before the onset of the depression and about a day and a half before the death of vaudeville. So in some strange way I have always believed that his church going was answered. My mother summed it up by frequently saying that life after his passing would have been the death of him, which was her way of saying that my father would not have asked for a long life compared to the life he had.

I am going to tell you something I have mentioned very few times in this long life. My Maggie’s first pregnancy ended with the doctor asking me to choose between her or the child. For me there was simply no choice to be had. I told him that if he saved my wife I would be forever in his debt. The priest was standing there and told me that what I was doing went against the teachings of the church. Unlike the mother superior, this fellah was not very bright. I told him to step aside, and that if he didn’t have anything better to do, he could stick his church where the sun didn’t shine. Maggie once asked me if she thought my decision denied the world an Einstein or a Louis Armstrong. I told her I denied the world a thing that was just a shade less precious than she was, but a shade just the same: a Houlihan.

So my poor Margaret, it’s true that I have an attitude as you say. I have often made the sorry choice  to express it in many a place over the years where it did a whole lot more harm than it will ever do here. I have learned to live with it. Someday you will too.

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