Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (54 page)

“
How do I become a vessel for God’s spirit here on earth?” Joe asked the priest in his office.

“
You have four options,” Father Ferraro answered. “You could become a priest and devote your life to the church. Or you could become a religious brother and devote your life to a religious order. Or you could become a professional and devote your life to a profession. Or you could become a father and devote your life to a family.”

Joe immediately ruled out the first two options; he was far too attracted to the opposite sex to take a vow of celibacy. He liked the fourth option—being a family man—but that one struck him as the most demanding of all, because it required a competing devotion to a profession. “The problem,” he told Father Ferraro, “is that most people who try to balance work and family end up serving neither really well.”

To make family his top priority and yet to serve it well, Joe went in search of a profession that would compete minimally with a family. He switched his major three times: from leisure sciences to pre-medicine to sports medicine to physical therapy. The latter seemed to offer the best combination of money and free time. Physical therapy could pay enough and yet be flexible enough for intermittent retirement with a family.

“
I considered this choice to be the most important decision of my life,” said Joe.

And then he focused his dreams of family life on a girl he had been dating since high school. Because she liked to sing, he introduced her to Father Ferraro’s folk choir. Embracing the church community, she joined the choir, attended a Bible study group with Joe, and converted to Catholicism.

As soon as Father Ferraro baptized her, Joe proposed to her. She said yes. They were 20.

They met with Mom and Dad in our living room to tell them the news. “We’re engaged,” Joe announced. “We’d like to have your blessing on our marriage.”

“
You’ll be solely responsible for your own tuition if you get married,” Dad warned Joe. “I don’t want to support a second family.”

Joe and his fiancée nodded.

“
You’ll be attending the marriage preparation classes at church, won’t you?” Dad asked.

They nodded again.

“
I was concerned about their age,” Father Ferraro said many years later. “I wouldn’t withhold marriage from them. It would’ve been my job to get them to talk about it rather than to judge them on it. I would raise the issue in terms of how much they had changed over the past few years, how much they would change over the next few years—and so why marry now? I’d raise the question mostly so that they could discuss it and reach their own conclusions.”

They concluded that they were ready.

Father Ferraro married them at Saint Lawrence Martyr Church in May 1978.

Joe was 21. She was still 20. Having just turned 16, I was the best man.

The wedding reception was a celebration of simplicity. The location: the windowless Knights of Columbus hall in Redondo Beach. The entertainment: my high school jazz quartet. The entree: six-foot-long submarine sandwiches from Giuliano’s Delicatessen, sliced into four-inch segments for easy grabbing. Help yourself to seconds. Watch out for the peppers.

The honeymoon: a camping trip in the local mountains.

To make sure the arrangement would last, Joe and his wife struck a deal. Joe would take a year off from school and work his three jobs to pay her way through radiology school. The following year, she would work as a radiology technician to help pay for his final year at Pepperdine.

He would play defense first to help her finish school. She would play defense second to help him finish school. Those were the rules.

The game lasted less than a year and a half. She finished radiology school, but then her father died. She continued to grieve long after the funeral.

Joe was not there to comfort her. He was carrying 18 units, still working three jobs, and banking on her income for the extra units. Early one morning, he was dressing in their apartment and getting ready for school.

“
Why can’t you stay here with me?” she wiped her eyes.

“
Because I’ve got a ton of things to do,” he tightened his belt.

“
But what about me? Why can’t you give me support?”

“
Now’s
my
turn!” he replied. “I just sacrificed my whole life to put you through school. You’ve got money now. And you want
me
to be here to support
you
?”

“
The marriage isn’t working,” she collapsed into a couch.

“
I can’t just quit what I’m doing and be here for you,” he gathered his books.

“
Okay, then. I need to be by myself.”

“
Okay, then,” he headed for the door. “Go!” he slammed it shut behind him.

Days later, she moved out of the apartment without telling him her new address. When he came home that night, he discovered that her things were gone. As he searched for any last remaining trace of her, he had never felt so dejected, so bereft, and so alone.

Through a mutual friend, he found out where she was living. He drove to the house in hope of regaining her confidence. But when he glanced through the front window, he saw another young man sitting on the couch. Joe trod toward the front door with a heavy heart. He had never felt so violated, so discarded, and yet so determined.

He pounded on the door. Nobody answered. “I know you’re in there. Open up!”

“
I need time by myself!” she cried.

Joe tried to turn the knob, but the door was locked. Unwilling to give her another chance to run away, he moved alongside the house and crawled through an open window.

She screamed hysterically. The other man took off, darting out the front door.

Joe glared at her: “Is this what you mean by time by yourself?”

“
It’s
your
fault for not being there! You’re not the same man I married!”

“
Okay. It’s my fault,” he refocused the issue. “You could make the decision to break this up, but I’m not making that decision. I think I’m still married to you.”

She dropped her gaze to the floor, saying nothing.

“
I’m going on with my life,” his tone became conciliatory. “You know where to reach me. If you still want to be a part of my life, the invitation is open.”

He then departed, not knowing if he would ever see her again.

Their plan had been to help one another in the short term to make life better for one another in the long term. But she couldn’t wait, and he couldn’t alter the plan.

“
It was a very humbling experience,” Joe said in retrospect. He loved her. He had given the marriage his best shot. But somehow that didn’t seem good enough.

To compensate for the earnings he lost in her absence, he took a fourth job as a handyman at a Malibu horse ranch. He built fences, fed the horses, cleaned the stables, and shoveled the shit. He slept at the ranch when he wasn’t working nights at the emergency clinic.

Near the end of his senior year, the U.S. Army accepted him into its graduate program in physical therapy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He could hardly believe that the army would pay him to attend school and to become an officer in the medical corps. The whole arrangement seemed mind-boggling in its generosity.

It was the seed of a new life plan. Chastened by his failure to build a family, he settled on devoting himself to a profession. If his wife wanted to join him, great. If not, he’d survive. It wasn’t the original plan, but maybe it was a better one.

In June 1980, Joe packed the entirety of his worldly belongings into the back of a new Datsun pickup truck bound for Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Because he had not planned to make the trip alone, he asked me to join him.

He was 23. I was 18. He had just finished college. I had just finished high school. The trip would be our first encounter with intermittent retirement.

We took the scenic route from California to Texas via the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Zion and Bryce Canyon in Utah, Grand Teton and Yellowstone in Wyoming, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, and finally a visit to the folks in Mason City, Iowa. We had no firm itinerary and no hotel reservations. When we weren’t at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, we slept beneath the shell of the pickup truck.

Occasionally, Joe sent a card to his wife. The most elaborate one displayed a glittering butterfly. It was his way of saying that he believed in second chances. That new life could spring from the cocoon of solitude. That he still loved her.

Otherwise, he spent most of his time communing with the earth. He sprinted up and down the switchbacks of the Grand Canyon—from river to rim to river—as if they were bleachers. He hopped around the orange rocks of Bryce Canyon as if they were cones on an obstacle course. He acquired a fondness for the yellow-bellied marmots that fended for themselves as they scampered about the high country of Grand Teton.

Nature gave Joe the perfect combination of exercise, beauty, and inspiration. For him, nature meant both recreational leisure and spiritual balm. “If I had a choice between sitting in church for an hour or hiking in nature for an hour,” he told me on our journey, “I’d much rather be in God’s creation than with a bunch of God’s dysfunctional people.” Sports like running, hiking, cycling, skiing, and canoeing were the means by which Joe traveled far from things manmade and reached closer to God.

He learned lessons in nature that he found to be more insightful than the ones he learned from people. In nature, especially in the mountains, he learned to think for himself. To plan for comfort as well as survival. To be aware of the world around him. To appreciate the splendor of the pristine earth. And to contemplate the things in life that endure. Nature helped Joe to place his decisions, successes, and failures in perspective and to root himself in the forces that were larger than himself.

We arrived in Mason City and stayed for a few days with Aunt Elsie. Joe then dropped me off at the airport in Des Moines and drove nonstop due south for another 1,000 miles to report for duty on July 8, 1980, in the Texas hill country.

He never dreamed his profession could be so fulfilling. He found himself surrounded by people in the army who were excited about physical therapy because of the
work
, not because of the pay or the flexibility. He met people who were committed to the profession for life and who envisioned how the career could carry them all the way up the chain of command.

“
It dawned on me,” Joe recounted, “that this could be a lifelong, challenging, rewarding adventure that might never get old.”

He earned his master’s degree in 14 months and rose in rank from second lieutenant to first lieutenant. The army assigned him to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for three years. On weekdays, he worked in the hospital on base. On weekends, he canoed through the nearby swamps.

He still took pride in living ascetically. One of his goals was to acquire no more possessions than he could fit into the back of his energy-efficient Datsun pickup truck. He was free, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He faced two crises of conscience in this regard, first when he bought a canoe and then when he bought a bike. Neither could fit inside the back of the truck and still leave him enough room to sleep. The canoe couldn’t fit inside the truck at all. Luckily, the canoe fit on top, and the bike rested on a rack on the back. Crises resolved.

Joe still believed that he was married. But Dad began to worry.

“
It’s been two years since you’ve seen your wife,” Dad reminded Joe over the phone in late 1981.

“
Yes, I’m aware of that.” It wasn’t a topic Joe enjoyed discussing.

“
Have you considered applying for an annulment?”

In Catholic doctrine, divorce is sinful, because it contradicts the biblical admonition, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” Unlike a divorce, a Catholic annulment upholds the biblical teaching while outwitting it at the same time. Both a religious and a legal procedure, a Catholic annulment certifies that God never really joined two people together in the first place; thus, there is nothing for man to put asunder, even if he tried. Therefore, the marriage is null and void. Always has been.

In practice, an annulment by a church tribunal allows a divorced Catholic to be remarried by a Catholic priest in a Catholic church. Otherwise, a divorced Catholic, like Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy immediately following his divorce in 1982, becomes a sort of second-class Catholic who can neither remarry with the blessing of the church nor partake of the other sacraments, such as Communion. Dad wanted to make sure that Joe would never be denied the blessing of the church.

According to church law, the basis for ruling in favor of an annulment could be any combination of a multitude of physical disabilities, mental impairments, psychological conditions, or personality defects that are judged to be characteristic of either the husband or the wife or both. The list of potential justifications for a Catholic annulment reads like a litany of potential marital woes: impotency, epilepsy, mental retardation, mental illness, homosexuality, gross immaturity, a troubled upbringing, a tumultuous engagement, pre-marital pregnancy, intoxication at the time of the wedding, marrying under false pretenses, marrying under conditional pretenses, a lack of intent to practice fidelity, a lack of intent to stay married permanently, a lack of intent to have children, having too many children, an unfulfilling sex life, an abnormal sex life, poor communication, poor judgment, jealousy, selfishness, self-indulgence, egotistical behavior, disrespectfulness, impatience, irresponsibility, irrationality, insensitivity, instability, inflexibility, intemperance, a drug addiction, hostility, suspiciousness, an inability to accept criticism, a lack of emotional control, ingratitude, lying, cheating, bizarre behavior, financial abuse, chronic unemployment, unwise spending, or trouble socializing with people. Depending on the annulment application forms used by different church jurisdictions, the applicants are asked questions about variations on these themes.