Memoir

Ever since my bachelor days I’ve been a fan of Indian curries made at home for dinner. Back then, it was not unknown for me to eat tikka masala, vindaloo, or korma four or five times a week.

I’d picked up the habit after a series of priests from India had come for several summers and stayed in the rectory where I lived. At least a few were cooks and they introduced me to their native cuisine.

Now when I make curry it’s rarely from scratch but it’s also never straight from a box or jar. I use commercial curry paste but add other ingredients as well. And I almost never make it exactly the same way twice.

Lately I’ve been adding curry powder at the simmer stage. In order to boost that flavor. At the end I always add the traditional garam masala, which boosts the flavor depth. And tonight I grated a chunk of ginger and added with onions to sauté.

I love curry, as you might guess. Melanie claims I’m addicted. All I know is that on nights when I make it, the leftovers begin to call to me about 9pm and I can’t resist.

But who can blame me? I wish I could properly thank those priests who introduced me to homemade curry those summers. You might say they “curried” favor from me.

  Posted via email  from Domenico’s posterous 

There’s a new movie out about Julia Child, the famous (and some would say the best-ever) TV cook. Julia Child graced the airwaves of PBS for decades without pretentiousness, famed for her wit and easygoing style, especially in the face of culinary errors. The movie, “Julie & Julia”, is half biography of Julia child, half the story of a woman who cooks every recipe in her most famous cookbook, “Mastering The Art of French Cooking”, in one year.

I have special memories from my youth of Julia Child. My mom worked outside the home when I was in high school and as a single mom of 5 kids she would struggle to come home from work and cook a meal for us all. So the cooking duties began to devolve upon us. We’d come home from school, find a package of defrosting chicken in the sink and a note of instructions. It was during this time that my TV watching habits began to turn from typical teenage boy fare to PBS and the specifically to Julia Child. In the days before the Food Network, PBS was the place for televised cooking instruction, from Julia to “Yan Can Cook” to the Frugal Gourmet. But Julia was queen of them all.

I didn’t learn all my cooking skills from Julia—working in an Italian restaurant kitchen helped as well—but she was instrumental as inspiration. My very first cookbook was not “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which I think I found too intimidating, but another cookbook, “From Julia Child’s Kitchen”. I can’t say I cooked many recipes from it; despite being French cooking for the average American housewife, I was a teenager and our pantry was somewhat more limited than even her simplified recipes called for.

Yet there is one recipe from the book that brings back pleasant memories because it was the first major holiday dish I ever cooked for my family. I can’t say exactly what year it was, but I’d guess it was toward the end of my high school years. I’d seen an episode of Julia’s show in she made it and I told my mom that I would like to try to make it for the family. It was a roast leg of lamb— gigot d’agneau roti—and I would cook it for Easter dinner. I was determined to follow every instruction to the letter and prepare every ingredient as instructed, right down to getting the proper “whole” leg, including hip bone, main leg bone, and shank bone. Most supermarkets only sold them without the shank bone, but my mom went to the effort to find a butcher who could provide the proper lamb.

Long story, short—mainly because I don’t really remember most of the details—the lamb and its sauce were delicious. I made it every year after that until I moved to Steubenville for college and then made it a few times there for friends, but I don’t think I’ve made it more than once or twice since then. I recently picked a new hardbound copy of “From Julia Child’s Kitchen” on Bookmooch, to replace my now falling-apart original copy so it may be time to bring back that old favorite and to try some of those recipes I never had a chance to try back then.

And when I do I will lift a glass of wine in tribute to the dear lady who launched a love of food and cooking in a teenage boy those decades ago.

When I wrote back in May about Msgr. William Kerr, how I met him, and his connection to Ted Bundy and one of his victims, I never imagined it would be spread throughout the Internet. I’ve seen people claim it’s a falsehood and an urban legend. I can only respond that I do acknowledge I heard it third-hand, but that it was transmitted from Msgr. Kerr to my friend Fr. Gabriel and then to me, and I trust them implicitly.

On the other hand, I’ve seen the post lifted in its entirety with a false Associated Press dateline added to it, as if to end more credibility to the story. If you think you’re helping Our Lady and the Holy Spirit with this falsehood, don’t. God doesn’t need any lies to spread the Good News.

In any case, I’ve made a few corrections and updates to the original post. For one thing, I don’t know why I wrote that Msgr. Kerr administered last rites, as I don’t recall Fr. Gabriel telling me that. Everything else I wrote was pretty much spot-on, but I edited a bit to clean up emphases. I also added a section on Msgr. Kerr’s later contacts with Bundy and Bundy’s parents, and the forgiveness of the parents of one victim.

If I’d know how much interest there was in the story, I would have checked my facts with Fr. Gabriel first, but I’m glad he’s contacted me to reassure me on the facts I got right and to nudge me on the bits that needed nudging.

Most days you wake up and you think it’s just going to be an ordinary day. And once in a while, it just takes a left turn. Yesterday was one of those days.

I’d made an appointment with our excellent mechanic to bring in Melanie’s minivan for an oil change and state inspection sticker. About mid-morning I got a call from them, which I had expected was a notice that the work was done and they were delivering the car to my house. (Did I mention how excellent they are? Abington Sunoco. Tell them I sent you.)

Instead, the mechanic was telling me that when they went to do the inspection, the state computers came back that my registration wasn’t valid. That can’t be right, I thought. I renewed the registration this past February. It should be good until 2011. The mechanic suggested I call my insurance agent—which turned out to be excellent advice—and my agent (who is also excellent; Ahmed Insurance; tell them I sent you too) looked up my registration on the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, i.e. the DMV, computer system, which told him that my license plates had been returned on May 14 and the registration canceled!

A quick check with the mechanic confirmed that, yes, both license plates were still on the car. So what was going on? The working theory was—and still is—that some clerk at the DMV mistyped someone else’s plate number and canceled mine instead of someone else’s. All I could do was to take my plates and a verification from my insurance agent to the closest DMV office and try to hash it out. The problem is that the car was 30 minutes away in one direction in Abington and my agent was over an hour away in the other direction in Salem! But because I have such an excellent agent and mechanic, it turned out to be less of a problem. My mechanic drove the plates and registration to my office in Braintree; did I mention how excellent he is? And the agent found a local independent agent near my office to whom he could send my information so he could fill out and sign my form.

So once I had my plates in hand, I sought out the local insurance agent. This guy is not so excellent. For one thing, he charged me $20 to sign this form. I later confirmed with my agent that this was somewhat sleazy since it’s generally accepted that agents will do this sort of thing for each others’ customers as a courtesy. It took all of 5 minutes to complete the form, if that. Then this guy tried to advise me to leave my old plates in my car and go in to the DMV and just register my car from scratch, which would have cost me at least another $40. Talking to my own agent after he told, “You can do whatever you want, but my advice is to take the plates and have them fix their mistake.” In the end I followed his advice and I’m glad I did.

In the meantime, I drove to the Braintree DMV office and got in line to wait. And wait. And wait. I waited over an hour. When I finally got to the window, I put on my nicest, happiest customer face. I was pleasant and self-deprecatory and understanding and turned my puppy dog eyes to the woman. Where the baseline level of hostility at the DMV is usually around 6 out of 10, I think I managed to bring it down to about 3. She confirmed that the plates had been canceled in the Reading office, miles and miles away from my home and someplace I’ve never been, and that the system claimed that the plates had been turned in, which was obviously not true. So she quickly reinstated the plates. That’s it! No rigamarole and no additional fee. After that, I drove to Abington to drop off the plates and registration so they could finish the inspection, then back to work to try to salvage what was left of the day, and then home to pick up my sister-in-law, and then to the mechanic to pick up the car (by this time it was too late for them to drop the car off; I don’t blame them), and then home.

In the end, I was out $20 and a half-day of lost work. But I acknowledge it could have been a lot worse. If the police had pulled us over and discovered the canceled registration, they would have towed it on the spot and fined us. If it were Melanie and the kids, they could have been left standing by the road. And the fact that the cancelation happened in the same month as the inspection sticker expired was also a small miracle. If the inspection hadn’t been required now, we could have driven around for months and months on an expired registration.

As much of a hassle as this was, I am grateful that it wasn’t much, much worse. But it just goes to show how one innocuous typo in the wrong place can ruin the day of someone you never know about somewhere else.

Photo credit: Flickr.com user M.V. Jantzen. Used under a Creative Commons license.

[Update: Corrections and updates made throughout the post based on corrections from my friend, Fr. Gabriel. If I’d known this was going to get as much attention as it did, I would have contacted him first to have him vet the story. In particular, Msgr. Kerr did not administer last rites to anyone. Not sure where in my memory that came from. Nearly everything else was essentially correct.]

Monsignor William Kerr has died. Among other things, he was famous for having administered the last rites come to the spiritual aid of one of serial killer Ted Bundy’s lastvictims and then became a spiritual counselor for Bundy on death row.

I met Monsignor Kerr in 1994, I believe, when he was president of La Roche College, outside Pittsburgh. I was a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville and I’d been preparing for the Total Consecration to Mary according to St. Louis de Montfort with some of my friends. One of them was my roommate, Kevin Gillen, now Fr. Gabriel Gillen, OP, who knew the monsignor. Kevin arranged for Msgr. Kerr to lead us in the final consecration following Mass at La Roche. I don’t remember too much about the day, but I do remember Msgr. Kerr was kind and gracious to us.

Kevin told us the story Msgr. Kerr told him about that awful night in Gainesville Tallahassee, Florida, in 1978. He said Kerr got the call from the police in the middle of the night to rush out to the sorority house. When he arrived he was told that all but one of the girls in the house were dead or near death, killed by a serial killer who was later to be known to the world as Ted Bundy. After giving those last rites to the dying college girl, then-Fr. Kerr was asked by the police on the scene to talk to the girl who survived unscathed. They wanted to know how she survived the brutal attacks, because Bundy had stopped right inside the door to her room, dropped his weapon, and left without touching her. But the girl would talk to no one but a priest. [To Clarify: The girl wouldn’t speak to police without a priest present. They called Msgr. Kerr and she told her story. Interestingly, Msgr. Kerr was not on call that night, but the phone rang in his room, not the other priest’s for some reason.]

When Fr. Kerr approached the near-catatonic girl, she told him that her grandmother had made her promise before going off to college for the first time that she would pray the Rosary every night before bed for protection; even if she fell asleep praying the Rosary, which she had that night so that when Bundy came into her room with murder on his mind, the beads were still clutched in her hands.

Later, Bundy would tell Monsignor that when he entered the girl’s room, he just couldn’t go on, he dropped his weapon, and he fled. She awoke to a man standing over her with a bat. She opened her hands, Bundy looked at the rosary beads in them, and fled. Such is the power of our Mother’s protective mantle.

[ Fr. Gabriel reminded me of this part:] Several weeks/months? later, Msgr. Kerr phone rang (again when he was not on call). This time it was the warden of a prison. They had just caught Bundy and he wanted to speak to a priest. Msgr. Kerr did not offer details of the conversation but Bundy would call him on a regular basis.

Bundy called from Florida the night before he was going to be executed (Msgr. was stationed in D.C. at the time) and thanked him for all he had done. Msgr. said he would offer a Mass for him the next morning, which would be at the same time of the execution. Msgr. said it was difficult listening to the radio as he drove to the church to say Mass. Everyone was doing a countdown on the radio, excited about the execution. The Mass was intense and on the way home again it was difficult hearing everyone rejoice at the death of Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy’s mother called Msgr. (they had been in contact over the previous several years) that morning. She wanted to share something with him. She said: “I just got a call from one of the parents of Ted’s victims. They told me that ‘you’re experiencing the losd of a child today and we’ve experienced the losd of a child. We just want you to know that you are in our prayers and we love you.’”

Msgr. marvelled at the parents’ strength to let love have the last word.

Rest in peace, Msgr. Kerr, and thank you for your small part in my faith journey and for your witness.