The Longest Trip Home (Review)
THE LONGEST TRIP HOME
By John Grogan
Morrow. 361 pp. $25.95
By COLMAN McCARTHY,
who directs the Center for Teaching Peace and
whose recent books include “At Rest With the
Animals” and “I’d Rather Teach Peace.”
What impulse--regret, devotion, prickliness--drives pews-full of Irish-Americans to tell the world in moans, yelps or self-therapeutic confessions about their Catholic childhoods and after-effects? Something must be in the holy water. In the Old Country, James Joyce led the impious way with “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” To cite just the short list, we’ve had Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” James Carroll’s “An American Requiem,” Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes,” Mary Gordon’s “Circling My Mother,” Daniel Berrigan’s “To Dwell in Peace,” Anna Quindlen’s “Thinking Out Loud” and Marilyn Sewell’s bulging anthology “Resurrecting Grace: Remembering Catholic Childhoods.”
Do we need one more? John Grogan thinks so. In 37 hefty chapters, in which the prose is often garnished with sentences that are lyrical and observations wry and witty, he offers a memoir of being raised by pre-Vatican II parents who were models of what Flannery O’Connor saw as the Christ-haunted. They believed stoutly that only baptized Catholics had a chance for heaven, with Protestants, Jews, Muslims and the ruck headed to outposts like limbo.
The Grogan’s parish, near Detroit in the auto belt of southern Michigan, was Our Lady of Refuge. It was the North Star by which the family navigated through secularism’s dark waters to the sacraments. At home, piety reigned. “For fun,” Grogan writes, “my siblings and I would sometimes count the Virgin Marys in the house: at one point we were up to forty-two. They filled every room, and they were not alone. Commingling with them were various likenesses of Jesus, Joseph, John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, and a wide assortment of other saints and angels. There were crucifixes everywhere you turned in our house, the anguished, dying son of God staring down at us from the cross as we ate breakfast, brushed our teeth, and watched television. There were priest-blessed candles and holy water and palm fronds. Rosaries were scattered about in ashtrays and candy bowls. It was like living in a religious supply store.” (p. 15). Gasping, young Grogan needed air. What unfolds is the classic narrative of someone distancing from hovering parents, in this case a righteous pair absolutely convinced they knew God’s will for themselves, their children and those unfortunates bound for limbo. Seventeen in 1974 , Grogan was breaking away. In high school, he put out an underground newspaper. He discovered girls, beer, pot and other liturgies in the Church of Youthful Searching. His sins were little more than drops of dust on angels’ wings. In college he learned how to put up a pious front to his parents, cozening that he remained the Mass-going, priest-obeying and rosary-praying Catholic that Mom and Dad raised him to be.
At 30, and a journalist who went from small town papers in Michigan to a large Florida daily, he kept up the double life. He was living “in sin” with his girlfriend Jenny--a non-Catholic, wouldn’t you know--but fearing the wrath of God-fearing Mom and Dad if they found out.
“Part of me struggled with wave after wave of dread,” Grogan writes. ‘All my years of filtering the truth, of little deceits and outright lies, made it all the worse….I considered myself moral, ethical, even a little boring, with nothing to be ashamed of. Yet I dreaded the news I had to break to them, and my biggest fear was that when I did, Mom and Dad would blame Jenny: “He was such a good Catholic boy until he met….that woman!’” (p. 199).
Thirty years old and still cowering before his parents brings to mind the line of Groucho Marx: “Are you a man or mouse? Squeak up.”
Now 51, married to Jenny and raising three children, Grogan went from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale to writing a local column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His 2005 book “Marley & Me” became a bestseller, a tale about a yellow Labrador who, according to the publisher, “stole America’s heart.” (Sorry, it didn’t steal mine. The last and only dog book I’ve bothered with was John Steinbeck’s 1962 “Travels With Charley.” I’m for animal rights, starting with the right to be left alone by needy authors out to humanize dogs, especially nutty ones).
Amid the weal and woe of this full-hearted memoir, one downer is the all too predictable bashing of the grammar school nuns at Our Lady of Refuge, a crew that Grogan claims “were renowned for their cruelty.” (p. 90) Not again, okay? Haven’t we had enough tales about knuckle-rapping, eraser-throwing and heartless Sister Mary Benedicts? Grogan, perhaps suffering yet from Post Traumatic Nun syndrome, couldn’t resist flogging them still again: “Nuns and abuse seemed to go hand in hand.” (p. 91)
The home to which the author made a long trip is his father’s, where he was dying in December 2004. At the funeral Mass, concelebrated by a bishop and six priests, Grogan gave the eulogy. Days before, he whispered to his semi-comatose father, a man whose religious beliefs he had long rejected: “Dad, it has been an honor to be your son. I am so honored and proud.” (p. 335).
If the elder Grogan taught his son to obey the Fifth Commandment, and certainly he did a thousand times, it appears to have been emphatically learned.