You can't stop me . . .

Once I left seminary, I tried to keep an interest in being a Catholic, but my heart was increasingly not in it.  All the stuff about changing from Latin to English (or, "vernacular," as the priests liked to say) happened around the time I was a junior/senior in high school.  By the time I left, even St Lawrence was on board.  Given my background and training, I was immediately drafted to be a "commentator" at one of the Sunday masses.  I suspect it was more because no one else wanted to than because I exhibited any particular closeness to God or oratory skill.

Kind of like Jerry Eyestone, Bentley Bros. Circus ringmaster used to say when reporters asked him how he got to be a ringmaster . . . "well," he'd say, "on the day I got here, all the good jobs were taken . . ."

I wasn't exactly a favorite.  My habitual late nights on Saturday left me suffering from "Chronic Sunday Fatigue Syndrome."  After falling asleep several Sundays in a row during the sermon, I got me a good talking to, and about went to hell.  But there wasn't anyone else stepping up, so I kept my position until August.

Sleeping in church, especially during the sermon, has always been kind of frowned upon.  By pretty much everyone, because most everyone else there is trying to stay awake, and seeing someone else getting away with something you'd desparately like to be doing can be irritating. Especially to priests and nuns, and really "devout" Catholics.  But sleeping during the sermon while you were the commentator?  Especially when you were up there, inside the rail, so to speak?  In full view of everyone?  That brought out a certain redness in the cheek of the aforementioned "devout."

But it also got a laugh . . .

During the days between flunking out of SCSC and August 6, 1967, I was working at Union New Haven Trust Company, George Street Branch.  It was a bank, I was a teller.  It had been my summer job, between when I graduated and went off to Altamont.  It was a lot better than my previous summer job, which was working for the city of West Haven at Painter Park.  There I had eight hours each day to put two foul lines and batters boxes on the baseball field for the evening's game.  The bank was air conditioned . . .

Because I'd been there the previous summer, and once again, because the position was unfilled, I was the "acting" head teller.  I had somewhere between $100,000 and $110,000 that I was responsible for, every day.  Once I left $27,000 in a drawer over the weekend (I forgot it was in there, and never put it in the safe).  It was still there on Monday, and I never told anyone at the bank.  But I sure didn't sleep through the sermon that Sunday.

Around July, my mom asked me when I was going to register for fall classes.  "I'm not," I said.

"And just what do you think you're going to do?" she wanted to know.

"I'm going to join the Navy!"  I answered.

"Oh no you're not!" she insisted.

And full of the same kind of bravado that my brother must have felt over the nail-polish, I replied, "Oh yes I am!  I'm over 18.  I'm a man now!  And YOU CAN"T STOP ME!"

And she didn't.