Going Home Again
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
On February 27 I could fly to Austin, Texas and be home
again. Is that really possible?
Consider that in my former home we called the
Mexican/Americans in our dorm or in our classes spicks. I was in a never-never
land in being white who spoke English (sort of like the natives but not quite
Texan) while being able to communicate in perfect Spanish. I was kind of
shunned by both camps.
The first time I returned to my former home from my home in
Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico it was after the Christmas holidays of 1957. I
was in the 9th grade. I arrived late at night and our main building
looked like Dracula’s castle. I was homesick for my mother and Nueva Rosita. I
cried. It passed. Our busy schedule made me forget and by the second year my
melancholia for home was replaced by a happy eagerness to visit my mother
during holiday breaks but nothing more.
I felt I fit in because the Brothers of Holy Cross while
being firm disciplinarians did share their warmth, understanding and
intelligence.
My four years at St. Ed’s while seeming like they only
happened yesterday recede into a corner of my memory when I walk up and down
the stairs of Old Main. I can imagine, like in those films about passing
memories and events, our shouts as we ran on the stairs. This was prohibited
and often we were stopped by the very serious (he was really a pussycat)
Brother Francis Barrett. I can imagine the voices of Amos ‘n’ Andy, a program
that was turned on the radio for us in the evening when we were in our bunk
beds with Brother Rene who was our dorm prefect. Brother Rene, a fair and
strong man was possibly the only brother any of us really feared. I cannot listen to Ravel’s Bolero without
remembering how this man educated us as we slept with music that he deemed
important for our minds and souls.
I remember how in my 11th grade our room prefect
(by then we had rooms for four with bunk beds) Brother Anton Mattingly and I
would discuss in his room (he kept the door and mosquito screen wide open. I
did not know why because I was innocently naïve about such things) the merits
of our mutual cameras a Pentacon-F. He had the F-2 Zeiss Biotar (was I
jealous!) while I had the inferior Zeiss Tessar. I took his Spanish class to
avoid the complexities of reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin. But Brother
Anton taught me the Spanish grammar I sorely needed.
I could go on with all the pleasantries that a look back
into one’s past makes rosier than it surely was. But I am not sure. What do
keep into account are the jarring differences of my world then and my world
now. Then we could go up the elevator to the top of the University of Texas Library
tower and drink beer. How could we have known that a gunman would, just a few
years later unleash terror on students walking below? The terrorism of the time
involved disgruntled men pointing guns at pilots in airplanes to force them to
fly to Cuba. The idea of a belt full of bombs was years into the future.
In our dorms and rec rooms our TV sets were permanently
tuned to the one channel available at the time. It was a CBS affiliate owned by
LBJ. If there were other radio stations of the time I do not know. The one we
listened to was also owned by LBJ and it featured the music of Elvis, Twitty
and the Ventures. Those of us who were snobs had a preference for instrumental
music like those Ventures but we may have at one time admitted liking the
Everly Brothers.
Our campus had only one black man who was a day student. The
problem of bunking with such a man never came up.
The man we most admired was Walter Cronkite. I remember
sitting under a tree reading when one of our Cuban classmates came up to me and
said, “Your Catholic president has lets us down at the Bay of Pigs. I heard
this in the news with Cronkite.” I was speechless.
If there was a war going on I was not aware of. There were
rumours that one of the McDonnell F-101 had sent a rocket up the tailpipe of
MiG somewhere by the Matsu Islands near Taiwan. The idea of Mainland China
was nonexistent. The Chinese Communists were evil, very Chinese in my Blackhawk
comic books of the time. I do believe we had a couple of test exercises for a
possible atomic war. St. Ed’s was near the Strategic Air Command’s Bergstrom Air
Force Base. Only a couple of wooden structures that I spied from the window of
my plane as it landed on what is now Austin-Bergstrom International Airport
when I returned in the late 2000s.There was not one single Boeing B-53 bomber in
sight.
There was no sushi in our cafeteria faire. We had lots of
okra and on special days parboiled steaks were served. For breakfast we had to
smother our Korean War surplus powdered scrambled eggs with ketchup to make
them palatable. When our table mates weren’t looking we would abscond their
sausages or bacon with our forks.
In my 9th grade I would spit shine the seniors’ shoes
for pocket money. I never thought the job was a demeaning one. My secret ingredient
was a Mexican tin of “grasa” called El Oso.
At the end of our halls there were public telephones. We had
long figured out how to bend a coat hanger so as not to use quarters (? or
dimes?) Women, early practitioners of phone sex would call us on Friday nights.
The most famous one called herself Marcia. These girls knew we were living in
an all-male campus so they really liked to pull our strings. None ever
committed to a face to face date.
It was in the 11th grade that I told my three
other roommates that it was time we went to a dirty movie. The one I picked
sounded dirty. It was called The Virgin Spring. How was I to know this was a
highly rated art film directed by Ingmar Bergman? What I find astounding is
that such a film was being screened in our neighbourhood movie house. the Austin Theatre on the corner of
Congress Avenue and Live Oak St.
The first time I did return to St. Ed’s I found our main building
bigger than imagined it. It felt strange to see women students walking to their
classes. Few would have known that at one time it had housed a high school. The
high school closed around 1968. The campus is now the campus of St. Edward’s
University. It is difficult to find brother (Brother of Holy Cross) anywhere.
For all intents and purposes the university is a lay university struggling to
keep the word Christian in its every day communications.
That we sang Gregorian chant in our chapel on Sunday nights
was something I had no idea. We simply sang.
In a world in which spirituality is going to a Tolkien film
or practicing yoga, the only way I can return to my real home is to return to
the idea of what our school was in those middle 50s. It was a school of men who gave us a liberal
Roman Catholic education. Time had yet to predict the death of God. All was
well with the world and young women in roller skates and bobby socks served
hamburgers to your car (I never did enjoy that experience) on The Drag by the
University of Texas. And we all knew what hooking horns meant.
I can return to that home right here in Vancouver but I will
miss all the outside barbecues, the Texan accents and the ghostly voices (some
may even by my own) walking the stairs of Old Main.
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| Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. |
Most of all I will miss all those men, Brothers of Holy Cross who are, except for a few, all gone.
Raymond Fleck
The leper at Mass
Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C.
St. Edward's High School alumni & faculty web page
Raymond Fleck
The leper at Mass
Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C.
St. Edward's High School alumni & faculty web page
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