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An Old Roommate Checks In
- University of Minnesota Press
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113 An Old Roommate Checks In It’s early morning in February. Sunrise is an hour and a half off. There’s a full moon, and I’m shoveling four inches of new snow off the driveway. The thirteen-year-old, he of the strong, young back, is up there behind that dormer, sleeping the deep, rich sleep of adolescence. Somewhere out there in the dark, an owl is asking its perpetual question. Shoveling snow became a form of contemplation for me decades ago. It’s work to do while I wander the labyrinth of my existence, trying to move in God’s general direction. The Benedictines have a saying: ora et labora. Pray and work. Give me new snow and a good shovel, and I’ll buy that. It’s simple, repetitive work. You make progress with every stroke, and you’re free to tap into the holiness all around. This morning, I think of a college roommate as I shovel—a man who grew up the only child of a divorced, dedicated, devoutly Catholic mother on his grandfather’s dairy farm in Wisconsin. She wanted to give Holy Mother the Church a priest, but my roommate had other ideas. For a while, in our senior year and in the months after we’d graduated, when we were ROTC-commissioned second lieutenants waiting to go on active duty, we’d raised the kind of hell you raise when you’re young and going to war and neither you nor society particularly cares one way or the other. What were the authorities going to do? Send us to Vietnam? 114 A N OLD ROOMMATE CHECKS IN We drank. We drove fast. On Labor Day that year, we made the trip from Libertyville to Lake Street in Minneapolis—some three hundred and twenty miles through heavy traffic—in just under four hours. On another evening, up to no good, heading for the Twin Cities as fast as his car could take us, an open bottle of something in the car, we topped a hill and found a herd of Holsteins on the two-lane highway. They were too close to stop, so he steered and swerved through them. I can still see their serene faces just beyond the passenger-side window. I was in love at the time, but he womanized enough for both of us. He had an eye for farm girls with healthy libidos who’d come to town to work in factories and drink in bars until closing time or the right man came along. Sometimes he tried to draw me into his schemes. He called from a bar on the other side of the county around eleven on a very cold winter night. He was hot on some poor girl’s trail, pursuing her with the relentless ardor of Pepé Le Pew. She had a roommate—right there at the bar, a mere twenty-five miles away. Her roommate, my roommate swore, wanted to meet me. She was dying to meet me, and she was beautiful. He thought she said she was a stewardess. I did not want to go. My heart was spoken for. I’d met the girl of my dreams—the one I thought I would marry, the one with whom I would live happily ever after and make beautiful babies and take out a mortgage on a beautiful little house in the suburbs. Besides, even if I had been available, I knew his motive and didn’t trust his judgment. Stewardesses did not hang out in working-men’s bars at eleven at night when the temperature was below zero. He was persistent though, I’ll give him that. I finally said, “What the hell,” cleaned up, and drove over there. He saw me and jumped out of the booth where the three of them were sitting the moment I walked in the door. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’d wanted to make sure I didn’t have time to take in the situation and make an escape—if I’d had just half a [44.201.131.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:55 GMT) A N OLD ROOMMATE CHECKS IN 115 second longer, I would have backed out the door and left. He gave me that “hey, old buddy of mine” routine from across the room. I trudged over, trying not to roll my eyes and sigh as I went. His date was homely...