Man Virtues. Robert P. Lockwood

splendor, I’m not exactly a clothes hound. And the usual baubles that might appeal to your normal American male — power tools, golf clubs, and fishing gear — hold no attraction for me. Tools are a mystery, golf numbers eight on my personal list of the seven deadly sins, and fishing is about as electrifying to me as a fabric store is to an eight-year-old boy.

      But I go shopping because my wife enjoys going from time to time, and I like being with my wife. It makes for a nice afternoon together, and if I don’t pout and whine, she lets me get junk food at the end of the day. Every man has his price, and mine is a slice of greasy pepperoni pizza.

      So we were out shopping, taking a little break to watch the world go by. I commenced with the speech.

      “You know, the kids all look the same. Throw the teenage girls in a sack, and I could still describe any one of them: blonde-streaked hair, white shirt with the navel peeking out like a third eye, low-slung, hip-hugging jeans, and clunky, oversized shoes,” I harrumphed.

      “And then there are the guys: backward baseball cap, oversized pro basketball shirt, and sneakers. And those baggy short pants that go to the mid-calf — or are they long pants that are too short? — with a sag in the crotch that gives them enough room to hide a watermelon between the knees.”

      “Wait till we get home, old man,” she said.

      Once there, she pulled out a photo album that my mother had put together, documenting my life and hard times from bare-bottomed infancy to college graduation day. The wife thumbed through, stopped at a particular, and handed it to me. “Take a look,” she said.

      There I was with my old buddy Ed, in a shot taken at Cape Cod the summer of my fifteenth year. I had to admit, I was very cool. I was dressed in what we called a pea coat — a woolen navy blue jacket — with the cuffs unbuttoned, cut-off shorts that I had trimmed from old jeans, and a pair of sneakers sans socks. A shock of unruly blonde hair fell over one eye, as I looked into the camera with an insouciant grin.

      “You should have known me then,” I said with a sly chuckle.

      She said, “Take a look at your buddy.”

      Ed was dressed in a pea coat with the cuffs unbuttoned, cutoff shorts that he had trimmed from old jeans, and a pair of sneakers sans socks. A shock of unruly red hair fell over one eye, as he looked into the camera with an insouciant grin.

      So it goes.

      Life is a search for a lot of things, often contradictory. We try to understand who we are as living, breathing individuals; yet we latch on to the crowd to blend in as best we can to an amorphous definition of humanity. We proclaim the freedom of our intellects but get most of our ideas secondhand from the daily bombardment of the cultural propaganda machine.

      Pope John Paul II had it right. He viewed the status of contemporary man and saw the great cause of our fear and anxiety in the struggle to find out who we are and to define our lives. The twentieth century gave us a lot of bad answers to those fundamental questions. Among other things it offered race, sex, gender, nation, economic class, and consumerism as the answer. The Holy Father said that the answer is right in front of us. It is Christ. In him we find who we are and what our life means. We find Truth.

      Prudence is recognizing that truth and living by it. Even when we are shopping.

       And in the End

      Going to a small Catholic high school, I thought I had a shot at the basketball team. But I didn’t make the freshman team. In sophomore year, I didn’t make the cut for the junior varsity. Ditto junior year.

      But I kept honing my skills with intramural ball and my parish CYO league. Like a ballplayer in Triple-A who could never cut it in the majors, I did pretty well in these games, playing to no crowds in endless shirts-and-skins games.

      But the dreams end at some point. I had my final failure trying out for varsity senior year — thanks, but no thanks. Our high school team fared pretty well in the Catholic league that year, but I watched the games from the bleachers. Another desultory year of intramural ball, and I was done.

      Our yearbook, passed out just before graduation, included a little “biography” under each senior’s picture. I remember standing in the school hallway, getting my first read of the yearbook staff’s summation of my life. Along with a quite reasonably short listing of my academic achievements and a notice of the college I would be attending, I was described as a “successful foul shooter.” It might sound like chump change, but I appreciated it.

      The reporter who did the Dave Swallow story gave him the benefit of the doubt. He described Dave as kind of a loner, but not the kind who becomes the Tapioca Killer or a stalker of late-night talk show hosts.

      Dave had centered his life for many years around his mother. They would do almost everything together. A special treat was looking for small town eateries where they enjoyed their dinner together, a middle-aged single man with his elderly mother.

      When his mother’s health began to go in her eighties, it was Dave who took care of her. When she died, Dave mourned deeply. At some point soon after he buried her, the Y2K obsession took hold.