Blue Sky Dream (32 page)

“I
don’t think Queen of Apostles parish has changed much in thirty years,” Father Jim told me a few days later. We chatted in the study of the ranch-style rectory that sits across the street from church and school. “I think this is still a white middle-class neighborhood.”

Father Jim was well-acquainted with the history of Queen of Apostles; he celebrated Masses here in 1965 as a newly ordained priest. Even during the thirteen years he spent as a missionary in Seoul, South Korea, Father Jim maintained his ties to Queen of Apostles, returning every summer with slide shows and requests for donations. When he became pastor in 1989, he was the old friend returned home. But when Father Jim said that Queen of Apostles has remained white and middle class and therefore not much changed, he was of course wrong, because to be white and middle class in this neighborhood today means something very different than when I was growing up.

Once, this was a frontier parish on the edge of an expansive idea called California. That was when the four-bedroom houses cost twenty-five thousand dollars, no money down, and Lockheed was hiring for life. But these days those same homes sell for half a million dollars, and realtors say the neighborhood is “highly desirable” for its peaceful remove, and the good public high school that, as everyone has been told, can make or break a child’s future in the new economy. These days Lockheed is laying off and no Silicon Valley firm pretends to hire for life; just until the next “right sizing.” These days, around the perimeter of the parish, at the freeway on-ramps, homeless people hold signs saying “Will Work for Food.” The white middle-class people of Queen of Apostles are the Californians who frown as they watch the rest of California on the six o’clock news, the California of too many Crips and Bloods, too many drop-outs, too many have nots, too many “aliens.” A once expansive idea is now imagined
to be collapsing from the edges in, and Queen of Apostles has changed from a frontier parish to an enclave of worried, tenuous affluence—without room, even, for the children who grew up here. “I see a lot of kids getting married and wanting to move out of California,” Father Jim told me when I asked him what troubles he saw in his parish. “It’s almost impossible to finance a home.

“The other big negative, I find out from my parishioners, is the difficulty of maintaining a position in highly competitive companies and society. Extremely difficult. A lot of cutthroat.” Father Jim shook his head. “That does something to you. It drives them to an awareness of their faith. Their religion and their beliefs are quickly tested by the realities of life and if they don’t have that kind of a background, they despair quite easily. To be constantly competitive in order to stay financially well-off can cause one to feel
very
lonely and despairing.

“I think the challenge for me,” said the pastor, “is to get people to believe in themselves. They are not sinners, they are God’s children. They want to hear something
positive
. They want to hear something
human
. Stand
up
for yourself. The jackass boss, the troubled marriage, the autistic child, the friend dying—they need strength for those things. That’s what they’re looking for, I think. They want to know God loves them. That they’re okay. That they’re better than some people say they are. And once they begin to believe in themselves, they will open themselves to others. So I work on telling people they are good, they can be better, and there are other people who need them.”

His delivery grew more staccato as he warmed to his theme. “I tell ’em: ‘Instead of sitting on your
rear ends
and watching the problems of society unravel on the six o’clock news, what are you doing to become involved in some way? And the parish must be the hope that provides people with opportunities.
That’s
why we have the employment program here.’ ”

In a refurbished church storage room a retired realtor and other parish volunteers clip classifieds, make phone searches, and otherwise help jobless people hook up with employers. When
Father Jim started the Ascent program, he intended it mostly for ex-cons he’d meet in his jail visits, though lately a lot of out-of-work aerospace engineers had been showing up at the door. As for the homeless people at the freeway on-ramps, Father Jim had a word for them. “Crooks, most of them.”

“Crooks?” I said, startled by the word, so damning in the mouth of a priest.

“God, yeah.
Crooks
. Every one within the radius of this parish I’ve bumped into, I’ve given them a card. I say, ‘You’re fifteen minutes away from getting a job. You don’t have to do this anymore. Come. I’ll take you there right now.’ They say, ‘Well, I’ll see you later, Father.’ No one has ever come. Why should they? If they can make a hundred bucks a day from some suckers who give money to them, why should they? They’re not gonna make a hundred bucks a day in any kind of a job.” For this form of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Father Jim has no sympathy at all. “And then they give you the Vietnam crap! And they have babies sitting next to them! Most people that way are dishonest. They’ve got arms and legs. They can walk. When people call here for help, I make sure they get help. God helps us to help ourselves. Well, that’s what I want to do. Help people to help themselves.

“I’ll say to someone, ‘You’ve been coming in here the last three months for food. Have you got a job?’ ”

Father Jim mimicked the mumble of the beggar. ” ‘Well, uh, no.’

“Then get a job! And don’t come back here until you’ve got a job!”

“There are jobs to get?” I asked.

“Sure! We put fifty to sixty people to work a week.”

Tough love for the panhandlers, pep talks for the beleaguered executives, and a job program that maps and fills the cracks of the new economy, promising a place for everyone. That is Father Jim’s pastoral recipe. The anxious middle class of Queen of Apostles finds strength in the assurances of their blue-collar priest, his message that when things go wrong, nobody’s perfect
so just keep trying. The flock is appreciative of a priest who wants them to believe, above all, in themselves.

I told Father Jim that despair, the deadliest of sins, is the one I found impossible to comprehend as a child in sunny, booming California, no matter how many times the nuns tried to explain the concept to me. Do people who live here now so need to hear, over and over, his
Never Give Up!
refrain?

“The people who commit suicide,” he reminds me, “are not those less well off.”

A
fter my conversation with Father Jim, I strolled over to the little cinderblock complex where I spent grades two through eight. In the 1960s, Queen of Apostles school had the air of a mission outpost, so sparse were the facilities, so poorly paid were the lay teachers (many of them unaccredited). We endured such shortcomings because, within those cinderblock walls, Catholic doctrine was so concentrated as to be sure to permeate our souls. Why else would we not attend one of the shiny, sprawling, new public elementary schools?

Marianna Willis, who taught fourth grade when I was in eighth, had stayed all these years at Queen of Apostles and become principal. I found her in her office, her face as kindly as I remembered, her Kentucky accent still softening the edges of her words. She said, “When you were here, remember how the racks were full of bicycles every morning? Now there are maybe three. This used to be a neighborhood school. Now it really isn’t.”

The students live as much as an hour away in towns like Gilroy and Morgan Hill, where tract homes are still being built on garlic fields. The parents commute into Silicon Valley and drop their kids off before work. That is why Queen of Apostles now operates a day care from 6:30 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening. I smiled to remember my mother riding her bicycle over to school with a basket full of hot dogs for her children’s lunches, my mother with another mother placing a pink frosted cupcake
on every desk for a Valentine’s Day party, my mother and all the other mothers taking their turns as volunteer supervisors of dodge ball and jump rope games at the lunch recess. Marianna Willis recalled the same era, when Queen of Apostles children came to school on Mondays with stories of picnics and excursions taken with Mom and Dad. A few Mondays back, she asked a girl why she was excited and this is what the principal heard: “Oh, my mom got to sit down and eat dinner with us.”

Monthly tuition, once $15 for me, is now $256. There is financial aid for only ten families and “a lot of our people have lost jobs, or are single mothers,” said Marianna Willis. At that, applicants are turned away. Enrollment is highest ever and full at 301, a number that includes “a handful of blacks, some Hispanics, quite a few Asians.”

Marianna Willis told me what Queen of Apostles parents today were wanting for their money. “Academics is a big thing,” the principal explained. “Quite often a C in public school translates to a D or F from us.” Low-performing applicants were therefore screened out by an entrance exam. Another selling point was peace of mind. “When you hear about the guns and knives in the public school, you can’t help but think, ‘I don’t want my child there.’ ” The worst such scare Marianna Willis had faced was the confiscation of a rubber band gun. And unlike public schools, Queen of Apostles need not keep children with disabilities or behavior problems. “We don’t have counselors. Would it be fair to take one child who’s going to take half the teacher’s time? We have to be able to serve the community we have.”

That community of carefully culled children is not necessarily a Catholic one. Some students at Queen of Apostles are, for example, Buddhist. Still, another reason parents of various faiths send their children here is the Catholic ethos, not just the prayers and Masses, but the good deeds demanded of every pupil. Marianna Willis described for me the regimen of beneficence: the kindergartners baking cookies for the convalescent home, the first graders writing notes to the sick, the fifth graders visiting disabled children, the other grades preparing and delivering food for the
hungry. None of this went on when I attended. Our outings were to see a soft drink bottling plant or the mummies under glass in the local Egyptian museum. Once, I think, my class adopted a poor child in some lost land like Bangladesh.

“We teach the children to live a Christian life, to make religion a part of their daily experience. We teach care and concern for others. We try to teach our children they are part of a community,” said Marianna Willis. What the gremlin of irony whispered to me is that Queen of Apostles school was from the beginning a rather ruthless protectorate, a nun-run Utopia dependent upon a military contracting economy that allowed mothers to stay at home and fathers to keep jobs and children to grow up cocooned from the implications of our great luck. Today, with no nuns but tough screening tests and pricey tuition, Queen of Apostles school is at least more frank in its ruthlessness, its children, the fortunate 301, reminded of their brightly diverging prospects whenever they deliver lunch to the ever-full Emergency Family Shelter downtown.

Later that morning I sat in the back of the seventh-grade class sampling, along with the budding teenagers, another example of what Queen of Apostles had to sell that public schools did not. Father Jim was roaming the front of the room, splintering chalk against the blackboard whenever he turned to write a word like “RESPECT.”

“Here’s what I want, you little farts. (Nervous laughter.) I want some respect. If you brought a friend from a public school and you were walking around here and you threw a piece of paper on the ground, I wouldn’t call you a jackass in front of your friend. Because it would embarrass you. I’d call you over and say, ‘Hey, don’t you have respect for this property? Good, then go pick up that paper.’ You’d give that guy a bad impression and you’d give me a bad impression, but I would never do that in front of him, make you look bad. Because he’s your friend. That’s called
respect
. That’s called
respect
. I’m talkin’ about all different kinds of respect. I’m talkin’ about respect for authority. People who love you, who are older than you and work for you. I’m
talkin’ about your parents. I’m also talkin’ about respecting yourself. Get this in your
heads
when you’re
young
. So you flunk a test! No test is worth cheating for. Big
deal
. You’re not going to the electric chair. No test is worth cheating for. Look at the people I visit in San Quentin. Here’s a guy who gets mad one time because he’s drunk, comes back and shoots a kid in a gas station and kills him. He goes to jail for the rest of his life for one stupid ass thing. But that didn’t happen because of just one time, it happened because he
stole
things when he was little, he
lied
when he got older, he
cheated
, then he got into the
drug
business. That’s what I’m trying to get into your thick skulls now. Hey! When I’m talking, I want your eyes on me! No place else. Joshua! Are you deaf or are you just thick? I’m not here talking for my health. I’m interested in you because I love you and because these are the things that will keep you a decent human being and you’ll learn them
now!
Otherwise why the hell are you paying 2,500 bucks to go to school here when you can go to any other school that has good teachers and a good curriculum and much better facilities than we do?”

At this point Joshua, and the rest of us, were surely giving our full attention to Father Jim, who had known convicts in hell, who could summon a vision of a descent from the middle class into hell, a vision of damnation more tangible than any the church of my youth could have made me believe.

“D
id you know that Mary appeared in Medjugorje just before the war in Bosnia?” my mother asks me. She reminds me that Medjugorje is a village sixty miles from Sarajevo, the city where evil currently resides most vividly on the television news. “She tends to appear to people who are really discouraged. And she always appears to poor people. She appeared in Ireland before the potato famine. Did you know that Immaculate Mary is the patron saint of the United States?”