Closing Time by Joe Queenan

Author:Joe Queenan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780670020638
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Published: 2009-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Now it only remained to break the news to my family. This proved much less difficult than I had expected. Returning home for summer vacation, I went back to work for Len, played baseball, started a rock band, bided my time. Not until the third week in August did I work up the nerve to tell my mother that I had no plans to return to the seminary. She relayed this decision to my father. I suppressed the information that I had not actually been invited back to Clark’s Summit for my sophomore year, though I think my mother may have received some paperwork to that effect. Certainly, the uncharacteristic silence from my old recruiter friend and erstwhile career counselor, who had nurtured my dreams throughout grade school, was something of a giveaway. To all intents and purposes, without officially being expelled from the seminary, I had been cut from the team.

I expected this news to be greeted with the same shock as Edward VIII’s announcement that he was abdicating the British throne, but it was not. If my mother was at all upset to learn that my vocation had gone up in smoke, it was mainly because we would now have to go through all the rigmarole of getting me enrolled in diocesan high school, and it was already late in the summer. By this time she had gone back to work and had a completely new agenda. The dreams of her children did not loom large, if they loomed at all, as, for the first time in years, she had other fish to fry. My father, to my amazement, was indifferent to the news; the disclosure that his son would never have the opportunity to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ didn’t faze him in the least. It took me a long time to understand why, as I was still a child, and children know nothing. Then one day it came to me. The last thing my father wanted was a son in a position to upstage him, a son invested with the moral authority to chastise him, to rain down fire and brimstone from an unassailable perch atop the moral high ground. The last thing he wanted was a child who had succeeded in doing something he might have enjoyed doing himself; after all, becoming a Trappist monk had been his burning ambition as a youth. The renunciation of the only dream I’d ever had enthralled him; he could not have been more pleased. He had always known that I would fail, he had warned me since birth that I would never amount to a pimple on an elephant’s rear end, and to him my failure was neither a surprise nor a disappointment. Failure, in his estimation, was nothing to be ashamed of. It was our oldest family tradition.

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