With my old friends Charlie Goodding, center, and Boyd Bates, on June 15, 2017, in Alton, Missouri (photo by Pearl, a relative of Boyd's, in front of her house). That's a long way from home, but is sort of connected to this post from last year about an icon in an Albany church of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker. I first met Charlie at the Catholic Worker farm in Tivoli, in New York state's Hudson Valley, in 1974, along with Andy Chrusciel. Two years later we moved along with Andy's girlfriend Dedie Warner to some land next to the Mark Twain National Forest, several miles northeast of Alton.
In-between, at the Catholic Worker farm in 1975, there were softball games filmed by Tom Hughes and Agra Skandijs, a compilation of which has shown up on YouTube. Tom and Agra are in the movie, along with many others such as Marijo Gosiak and Terri Antholzner, Charlie, Andy and me. I think I first appear briefly in a poncho at 3:18 in a play on first base, and later hitting in a checked shirt, joking with Andy and running backward at the end.
My trip west was mostly research for a new book (not related to the CW), but on the way back, after visiting Charlie, I stopped by the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Dorothy Day's friend Thomas Merton was a monk. I went on to visit another old friend whom I had met at the CW farm and who now lives in Charleston, WV, Johannah Turner (sister of Tom Hughes), and complained to her about the vandalistic 1960s "renovation" of this graceful old Abbey church:
And in Charleston I sang Tantum Ergo in the Basilica Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on the feast of Corpus Christi, and argued benignly with Johannah about various matters, including Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, which I admire more than she does. The week before, after walking the site of the Battle of Westport in what is now Kansas City (part of the book research, which also took me to the Asthabula Public Library in Ohio and to Linn County, Kansas, and last fall to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida), I went in to Mass at the Spanish mission-style Church of the Visitation. On the way home I stopped at a Days Inn hotel in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, picking up copies of The Citizens' Voice, which brought me back to union days of the late great Jack Wallace and his newspaper publisher joke.
My longest friendships were made at the Catholic Worker. But it was good to come home, too, to my wife of almost 33 years:
And here's a photo from 1974, I think, in Manhattan, with Johannah Turner and Kieran Dugan:
And finally, in 2012, here are Ed Turner, Bob Steed (a onetime monk at Gethsemani), Tom Hughes and me (along with Agra in the second picture) in 2012, at the Maryhouse Catholic Worker memorial service for Rita Corbin and Daniel Bliss. I last saw Andy not long before that at Rita's 80th birthday party in Vermont. Since then, he and Tom have both died. Requiescant in pace.
