Memoir
How a typo ruined my day
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.
How I knew the priest who ministered to Ted Bundy & his victims
Monsignor William Kerr has died. Among other things, he was famous for having administered the last rites to one of serial killer Ted Bundy’s victims 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.
When Fr. Kerr approached the near-catatonic girl, she told him that her mother 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. Such is the power of our Mother’s protective mantle.
Rest in peace, Msgr. Kerr, and thank you for your small part in my faith journey and for your witness.
The 7-year-old political operative
I remember my first political thought. I was seven years old and it was 1976. We were on the school bus, presumably taking us to 2nd grade, and for some reason we were talking the presidential election. Of course, most children that age are influenced by their parents’ choices, as overheard at home, but we made them our own. Since this was Massachusetts, more kids voiced support for Jimmy Carter than for Gerald Ford, but not me.
No, I had a clear preference that was not the Democratic presidential candidate. It’s not that I was a big Gerry Ford fan. My reasons were much more personal. I warned my classmates that if Carter was elected they would feel the difference in their lunch bags.
I was convinced that, as a peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter would see to it that peanut prices would go up and we’d all see less peanut butter in our PB&J sandwiches in the future.
Okay, so I was a muckraking ideologue back then. I’m much more subtle now.
Photo credit: Richard B. Russel Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia.
Wings of gold
The pin you see in that photo is a unique specimen. At first glance it looks like the pin a Naval Aviator wears on his uniform, but that shooting star gives us pause. This is, in fact, the official uniform pin of a US Navy officer who also happens to be an astronaut.
I’ve had this pin for about 25 years. I bought at an Army-Navy store in Stoughton, Mass. (long gone now) around my senior year in high school. At the time I was certain that I wanted to be an astronaut and would attain that goal by first becoming a Naval Aviator. So I bought the pin and affixed to a cap that I wore everywhere, as an aspirational sign to myself and everyone else.
My dream took me as far as joining Navy ROTC my freshman year in college at Boston University. I would eventually drop out after that one year because I was too immature for the responsibility of college and do the work I was supposed to do. But at one point in the year, I ran into one of the officers running the NROTC unit. He was a Marine colonel and an actual Naval Aviator and I looked up to him like a puppy dog looks to his master. When he called me aside one day, I thought he wanted to give me a pep talk or congratulate me on my military bearing.
Instead he told me that since I hadn’t earned the wings I was wearing on my cap—and since wearing insignia wings on a cap was forbidden anyway—I needed to remove them and never do it again. I pleaded ignorance—only partially true since I suspected they were authentic wings—and obeyed. He was given pause upon closer inspection, however, at the shooting star, which he didn’t recognize. I proudly explained the significance and told him of my dream. He humored me and repeated his admonition.
And so for the last 25 years, the wings have sat in a succession of desk drawers and closet-bound boxes, waiting for what I know not. Maybe for the day I can pull them out and show my sons or daughters or grandchildren about how I once wanted to be an astronaut and how they should follow their dreams even if there’s the possibility of failure. Because a fear of failure is sometimes worse than the failure itself.
Meanwhile, the wings go back in a drawer until the next time I bring them out and think about how different my life would have been. And realize that I wouldn’t trade my life now for the thrill of spaceflight or flying high-performance jets.
Preserving Scout camp for new generations
Wow, this brought back memories. The Boy Scout council where I grew up is renovating Camp Squanto, their summer camp in Plymouth, Massachusetts. They plan to spend about $3 million building a new dining hall, a welcome lodge, and other improvements.
I spent a couple of weeks over a few summers there in my youth in the early 80s. Usually, I would spend a week with my troop and then a second week with a couple of friends in the “provisional” troop, which was a catch-all group for scouts whose troop wasn’t at the camp.
I remember that my first time there, I had to take my swimming test at the beginning of the week so they would know my proficiency and where I could swim. Unfortunately, the tests took forever and I happened to be the last kid to go. Also unfortunately, they had a problem that year with eels living under the swim docks and a few boys got bit. Nothing serious, mind you, but somewhat painful. It added an air of … challenge to the swim tests. In fact, just before my turn, the boy before me was bit in the arm and had to be taken up to the aid station.
They had a problem that year with eels living under the swim docks. It added an air of … challenge to the swim tests.
The lifeguard who remained looked at me and said, “Well, you’re the last one, so you may as well try it.” Wait, what?! From his point of view, I was the last kid left so the worst that could happen is that I got nipped too. From my point of view … I could get nipped too!
As an accommodation, he allowed me to swim closer to shore and further from the dock. Gee, thanks. As a result it was the fastest swim test on record. I barely even got wet, I swam so fast. I jumped in and did the required manuevers as fast as possible: crawl, butterfly, hold my breath under water, tread water. Mark Spitz had nothing on me. And I did it the whole time with my eyes closed. I didn’t dare open them under water for fear of seeing the gaping maw of an eel coming at me. Did I mention the little buggers were just a couple of inches long? But in my imagination they were six-foot Moray eels.
Oh, I passed, by the way.
Fighting naval battles for glory and honor
Take a Street View stroll through your memories
One of the unexpected pleasures of Google’s Street View function of Maps is that it allows a nearly literal nostalgic stroll down memory lane. Google recently added more cities to its list of those where Street View works and Pittsburgh was among them. When I lived in eastern Ohio in the mid-90s, I often made trips into Pittsburgh, whether to do shopping in the famed Strip-by-the-River— where in just a few blocks you could get all kinds of Asian, Latin American, or European food ingredients as well as fresh seafood, great meat, and more—or into the college neighborhoods for great restaurants and pubs or the city’s cultural attractions of museums, symphonies, and the like.
While Google Earth and Google Maps have long allowed a top-down view, Street View puts you on the street, looking at storefronts and the people going about their daily business. It’s about as close to being there without hopping on a plane.
I took a virtual stroll through some of my old haunts and recalled places I’d frequented and new places I wish had been there 10 years ago. I could almost smell the fresh tortillas in the Latin American market or the cheese of the Italian grocery or the exotically unidentifiable scents of the Asian foods store. What fun!
Now I just need to remember the names of all my other favorite haunts and check them out once again. This could easily suck up hours of otherwise productive time.
A secret home in the mall
Some “artist”-types set up a secret apartment in an unused space of the parking garage at a mall in Providence and lived there off and on over the past four years.
Michael Townsend, 36, said he and seven other artists built the apartment in a 750-square-foot loft in the parking garage four years ago and lived there for up to three weeks at a time while documenting mall life.
The apartment included a sectional sofa and love seat, coffee and breakfast tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, paintings, a hutch filled with china, a waffle iron, TV and Sony Playstation 2 — although a burglar broke in and stole the Playstation last spring, Townsend said. The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.
Sounds similar to something I did years ago. Back in the late 80s, early 90s, after I dropped out of Boston University and before I went back to school, I worked at a factory that manufactured beverage dispensers. One of my primary workspaces was on the end of the production line where the machines were cleaned, prepped, and boxed up. In that area we had stacks and stacks of flattened cardboard boxes, thousands of them, in four-foot-square towers 30 feet high. There were many more boxes than the company would use in a year, which gives you some idea of how well-managed the company was. When we would get a new shipment of boxes, our crew would unload it, and in the midst of building up the giant stacks, someone surreptitiously would throw a spare pallet in, creating a void in the stacks. We called this “The Cave.”
The Cave was our little sanctuary, away from the prying eyes of our bosses, who were usually too busy working on their boat motors or bleeding a deer (yes, they did this once) to supervise us. We’d sneak off in shifts to take naps or just hang out and shoot the breeze. Many times, during the summer, someone would bring in some beers to stock The Cave. Once we even had a small TV and video game system.
Yes, we were overstaffed and underworked and I had much lower moral character then than I do now. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the company was bought out and everyone was laid off.
But there’s something in every boy/man that loves a secret space. If I ever build a home from scratch, it will have secret passageways. How could I not?
The bestest hottest wings I’ve known
I thought for sure I’d told this story before, but I can’t find it in the archives and it’s too good not to be recorded.
When I was a student at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio back in the mid-90s, there was one place that was famous as an off-campus destination: Drovers Inn.
Drovers was built originally in 1848 to house drivers on the wagon trail through West Virginia. Today it’s a restaurant and lodge in the hills across the Ohio River from the Steubenville area. It has a regular dining room on the main floor, but the basement has been turned into a great dark, noisy, friendly pub.
Drovers’ wings stand above them all. They are truly delicious and scrumptious.
We made regular trips to Drovers whenever possible, about 30 minutes down the river and then up into the hills. In fact, I was such a regular that the bartenders would acknowledge me by name when I came in, like Norm from “Cheers”. (Every guy should have such a place at one time or another in his life.) The bartenders also liked to joke that whenever I came I was with a group of women and never the same group twice. Now they may have been exaggerating a little, but I did enjoy hanging out with my female friends. I’m not saying I had exclusively ulterior motives, but you could say that part of it was “opposition research”.
The best chicken wings in the world
Technorati Tags: wings | spicy | West Virginia | college |
There’s a Baptist at my door
When I was still in college at Franciscan University of Steubenville, my last two years there I lived in a house with a group of great guys. One’s now a Dominican priest, another is a married father working in Catholic radio, another works for EWTN, yet another is a monk, and oh yeah, another is a Congressman.
They didn’t all live there at the same time. I nfact, in those two year, I think about eight or nine guys lived there at one time or another and almost all of us were studying theology. It was great. I remember late nights debating capital punishment or playing penny ante poker (with Irish accents required for some strange reason) or having our famous “men’s meat dinners” where the only non-meat dish allowed was beans.
We lived off-campus in a nearby neighborhood called LaBelle, which is not pronounced, as Frenchman would, “lah-bell”, but rather like an Ohioan would, “lay-bell”. Anyway, the neighborhood was full of old houses, many of which were housing students, others being home to faculty and staff and their families, and then more with just the regular folk from Steubenville.
One afternoon Kevin answered the front door. I was upstairs studying or writing a paper or, more likely, procrastinating and didn’t pay too much attention to the long time he was kept occupied until he came up to my room, looking excited.
Now, you have to know that Kevin was just rediscovering his faith. He’d been away from the Church for a while and had come back through some amazing and miraculous events. (Too long to go into now, but I blogged it in the past. At the time of that post he was a SOLT, but now he’s OP.)
The missionary
Technorati Tags: memoir | Steubenville | theology | Baptist | missionary | apologetics | Catholic |
Tales of a dishwasher in an Italian restaurant
When I was in high school, I held several different jobs, including working in the Canton (Mass.) Public Library as a book clerk. But I also worked as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant called Capriccio’s, also in my hometown of Canton.
I didn’t earn a lot of money working as a dishwasher, but I did come away with a lot.
It was a nice place, but not too upscale. You can’t be too upscale in a local mall. And working there was kind of a family tradition. My sister Francesca had worked there as a waitress and my brother John worked there later, first as a waiter and then as a line cook. He was my connection to the job.
It was quite an education in having a work ethic for a 16-year-old kid. I usually worked the weekend evening shifts. I’d come about 4 or 6 pm (one dishwasher started earlier and the second would come later), and the night would start out slow. If I was lucky, they would have me doing some prep work, slicing cases of mushrooms or opening up can after can of tomatoes for sauce or, if I was unlucky, peeling a giant stockpot full of onions. (The trick is to hold the onion under running water.)
The rhythm of the kitchen
Technorati Tags: restaurant | kitchen | dishwasher | teen job | work ethic | Italian restaurant |
