Barbara started very young with the violin, and
she kept it up until she was around twenty or older. Patricia
played the cello, and I remember her hauling that big cello around
to lessons. There was no car in our family, and she had to hike
that thing onto the bus. When I was in high school around 1941
we had a family quartet: my mother on the piano, John on the clarinet,
Barbara on the violin, and Patricia on the cello. It's a treasured
memory of mine, having that little family orchestra...I got more
interested in drums when I was about thirteen years old. I eventually
got a set of drums and played drums in a dance band during high
school and the first year of college. I enjoyed that, and it provided
me with a kind of social role with people my age, a social identity.
Well, philosophy, and to a lesser extent, theology
courses-when I went beneath these pseudo-sophisticated cocktail
party chatter level of philosophy, and to some extent theology,
or even just religion, taking these questions pretty seriously-that's
when I felt that now, as distinguished from back in high school,
I was going deep. I was not relatively superficial, saying, "This
is interesting. This is nice." Instead, I felt, "Hey,
this is serious!" That was the way I felt about it then.
Well, we were taken up to the northeast, because
we were slated for Belgium, and we did go there. We were included
in the Canadian First Army in their line with three American divisions
besides us. The Canadian Army was getting rid of the enemy in
the Sheldt Estuary, which is the pathway to Antwerp. The allies
had captured Antwerp sometime in September, but they couldn't
use it yet, because there were German positions all the way along
the river from the sea to the port itself. We relieved a Polish
division. I remember, we took our positions, and now we're finally
in the real thing, but nothing happened at first. Certain memories
are clear. The enemy, though, was probably twenty or thirty miles
away by then, so at first there was no fighting. There was some
shooting from nervous guys on the front lines at night for the
first time, and I do think one American guy got killed by that.
I had a little parish that I was taking
care of while I was working at the prison. That's one of the times
in my life when I prayed hard. I said to myself, "I've had
a couple of things sort of blow up in my face here, that I thought
I wanted to do. Now maybe it's time for me to focus more on what
God might want me to do." So I did. Sure enough, within a
week I got a phone call asking me if I'd consider going up to
the reservation. I said, "OK, but this time I want to take
a look before I leap." So I came back in August of 1985 to
check that out.
