Читать книгу Navigating the Zeitgeist - Helena Sheehan - Страница 9

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Born in the USA

Born in the USA, I was a child of war, first a hot one and then a cold one. This is the first of many ironies to unfold in my story, as I have spent so much of my life protesting against wars, particularly those conducted by the nation where I was born. I was conceived on a US Army base in Georgia during the Second World War. By the time I was born in July 1944, my father was on the front lines in Europe and his letters to my mother were from Somewhere in England, Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany. After the war, he did not return immediately, as he was assigned to duty in the American sector in Berlin as the hot war turned cold. We finally met when I was eighteen months old. My parents, Eugene Sheehan and Helen Kernan, were typical of their time, place, and generation. Their lives were circumscribed by many forces, including depression and war. They were unquestioningly compliant within the system structuring their fates. They were particularly loyal to the United States of America and to the Roman Catholic Church. They did not live in an atmosphere of philosophical or political debate and saw no reason to question the prevailing orthodoxies of their time.

Going back generations, as far as I can tell, most of my ancestors lived in such a way, buffeted by forces they neither comprehended nor questioned, subjected to famine, war, and depression, then lifted by rising standards of living, all underpinned by stifling dogmas they embraced as self-evident truths. Perhaps somewhere in those generations there was some questioning, but I can find no signs of it, except for my great-grandmother’s cousin, who was an early critic of banks and railroads and the power they already wielded.

My father’s father, Thomas Sheehan, found work of one sort or another, even amid high unemployment, before settling into a job as office manager of a Teamsters Union local. He married Elizabeth Thomas and they lived in a row house in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, inhabited by a large extended family. Their oldest child was severely disabled after a nurse pushed his head back into the birth canal to delay childbirth until the doctor arrived. There were no lawsuits or social services to ameliorate this burden. My grandmother’s life was dominated by this tragedy. She went on to have other children, including my father. When her brother’s wife died in childbirth, she took her nephew and raised him as her son. She also looked after her own brothers and her sister, who never married. Despite all this, she had a sunny manner, and I remember times with her as full of fun. My mother’s father, Clarence Kernan, worked as carpenter, door-to-door salesman, and summer stock opera singer, but was often out of work. Despite their poverty, my grandmother, Margaret Moore, born in Virginia, had the air of a grand southern lady. You would think that she had been the mistress of a large plantation. She grew up on a small farm. Her father, Dr. John Moore, was a country doctor, who was murdered in 1895, when she was only a year old. Her mother was a cousin of William Jennings Bryan, populist politician, congressman, three times the Democratic Party candidate for US president, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson and prosecutor in the infamous Scopes trial. He was in the history books we studied in school. He was famous for saying “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” lambasting East Coast wealthy-class forces that advocated the gold standard against the interests of working people.

This branch of the family, that of my mother’s mother, left more traces than any other. More photos and other records have survived. When cousins on both sides went about constructing family trees, this line was the one that could be traced furthest back. They acquired property and education beyond that of my other ancestors. My grandmother’s ancestors were all Protestants until John Moore converted to Catholicism and then converted his wife, mother, siblings, and children as well. The rest of my relations were Catholic. They were peasants turned proletarians. They did not go to university, and they left few photos, records, or writings. They came mostly from Ireland as victims of famine. My great-greatgrandfather, Richard Sheehan, left Kill, County Waterford, with his two brothers, and arrived in Philadelphia in 1848. The Kernans too came from Ireland to Philadelphia, via Canada.

Census records from 1880, 1910, and 1920 list the occupations of my male relations as laborer, cooper, smith, printer, clerk, box maker, brewer, electrician, wagon builder, gager, soldier, mailman, packer, druggist, tester, watchman, lineman, milkman, bookkeeper, salesman, office manager. The occupation fields for my female ancestors list saleslady, shoe paster, paper bag maker, and dressmaker. The others registered as widows or housewives. The causes of death specified on death certificates are myocarditis, nephrosclerosois, intestinal nephritis, circhios hepatio, carcinoma, apoplexy. Looking at these documents, it is striking how many of the children died soon after birth. In one case, both the first and last child of James Kernan and Catherine Furey were named Leo. The names of dead children were often passed to their siblings.

The lives of these dead generations are shadowy to me. Aside from William Jennings Bryan, they left no texts. They left so few traces. As were the majority of those who lived for centuries, they were silent on the stage of history. The few traces extant have been gathered by cousins, who have dug out census records and death certificates and street directories, have only deepened their obscurity to me. I find it hard to reconstruct their lives and imagine them as individuals. Yet in a wider sense, I have a strong sense of emerging from this silence to a time and place where I can write, even a duty to those who did not write, even though I believe that they would not approve of what I write.

I went to Kill in County Waterford with my son to see where our ancestors struggled to survive famine before emigrating to America, never to return. The parish priest came to speak to us as we searched the graveyard. He said the locals didn’t like to speak about those who died or emigrated, because they themselves were descended from those who survived. Some even prospered and accumulated property from the abandoned farms. My sense of this time comes from works of academic history or historical novels more than anything passed directly to me through my own ancestors. Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea are haunting accounts. One of the saddest fragments revealed to me from my direct line is that my great-grandfather Richard Sheehan joined the US Army and fought the Apaches in Arizona. Why did he feel justified in fighting the Apaches? It was the story of all wars: the oppressed are the foot soldiers against other oppressed people. Buffy Sainte Marie’s song “Universal Soldier” evokes the lives of those who fought from below at the behest of those who ruled from above.

Like many others, my ancestors eventually came up in the world, but not exactly according to the rags-to-riches storyline. By the 1930s, they owned the modest roofs over their heads. However, both Sheehans and Kernans lost their houses during the Depression—not because they were not paying their mortgages, but because the banks had called in the entire value of their mortgages as single balloon payments. As home prices plummeted, the houses became negative equity and worth far less than the mortgages. After the New Deal, the banks were prohibited from changing the terms of mortgages and repossessing homes in this way, but back then they could do so with impunity. The Sheehans then bought another house at a lower price. As my grandfather’s credit rating was destroyed, he bought the new house in the name of his wife’s sister, who lived with them. The Kernans could not afford to buy another house, even at depressed prices. The family then moved to my grandmother’s family farm in Virginia. My mother, going to school in both North and South, learned about the Civil War from both sides. She was told in the North that it was about slavery and in the South that it was about states’ rights. She spoke of the Civil War as if there were equal merit on both sides. After they moved back to Pennsylvania, my mother and her sisters attended public school rather than Catholic school, because they could not afford the uniforms. Nevertheless, my parents and all my aunts and uncles graduated from high school, except for my disabled uncle, who never attended school at all. None of them went to university. Both families lived frugally during the years of my parents’ youth, but they were little different from everyone else they knew. Many endured even harder times.

When I look at photos of my parents in their teens and twenties, they do not look poor. Quite the opposite: some show them promenading on the Atlantic City boardwalk in their Easter outfits, the men in suits and fedoras, the women in tailored suits or dresses, elaborate hats, and high heels. Except for the shoes, my mother made everything herself. Another striking feature is the formality of their dress, making them look not only much more prosperous, but also much older than they were.

The Depression was ended by the war, but these were even harder times. In their world, that of the working class, almost all men went into the armed forces and women went to work in industries supporting the war effort, such as munitions factories. Like most of their contemporaries, my parents spent most of the time during the early years of their marriage apart from each other. When babies were born, our fathers were absent and there was always the possibility that they would not return home at all. My mother sent a constant stream of photos of their newborn daughter to the battlefields of Europe, to be shown proudly to the other young fathers with their own similar photographs. If they ever got mixed up, it would have been hard to tell the difference.

My mother and I lived with her parents in Upper Darby until my father returned. For a time, he too lived in this tiny house, along with my mother’s parents, sisters, brother, and aunt, until he found it intolerable and we went to live in Atlantic City in a small summer house a mile from the ocean, owned by his parents. He commuted every day between there and Philadelphia to his job as a draughtsman at Philadelphia Electric Company. Later we moved to rented accommodations in Philadelphia.

Eventually they saved enough to buy a house with the help of the GI Bill, and we moved to Roslyn, Pennsylvania, in 1949. By this time, there were five of us, as two brothers had arrived in the intervening years. (In all, my parents had nine children, although the youngest died as a baby. I had six brothers and two sisters.) For a while, my father worked as a construction detailer by day and a real estate agent by night. Since before I was born, my mother never worked outside the home. I didn’t know any mothers who did otherwise in those years.

We began a suburban life. There were many places like Roslyn and many families like us. The fathers had fought in the war and went to work every day, primarily in Philadelphia. The mothers stayed home and kept their dream houses with their new laborsaving gadgets and looked after their ever-expanding broods of children. The neighborhood kids bonded by playing games in the yards and in the woods. Our strongest relationships were with those who were Catholic. Everyone was either Catholic or Protestant. Suburban routines became established. Every day there were deliveries by the paperboy, the breadman, the milkman, and the mailman. There were periodic visits from the Avon Lady, the insurance man, and many door-to-door salesmen. A photographer came to the door with a pony and left a photo of me sitting on it dressed as a cowgirl, incongruously in front of the suburban picture window. Every year we had our pictures taken with the department store Santa Claus. The mothers read magazines such as Life and Better Homes and Gardens and read books by Emily Post, Benjamin Spock, and Norman Vincent Peale to learn the correct ways to live in this new setting. This was all part of a consolidating national culture that was overriding various subcultures based on class, ethnicity, locality, religion. There was much popular psychology in the air, with concepts such as “inferiority complexes” and being “well adjusted” entering everyday speech. It seemed to many that this was the best of all possible worlds, and that there must be something seriously wrong with anyone who was ill-adjusted or malcontent in it. After years of depression and war, my parents and their generation did have a sense of moving with a rising tide of increasing prosperity. As a child, I accepted their version of the world and was blissfully happy in it—for a while.

Life was full of nursery rhymes and fairy tales and toys delivered by Santa Claus and baskets of jelly beans and chocolate eggs left by the Easter Bunny. There was always something new and fun to fill our play: hula hoops, comic books, trading cards, coonskin caps, Mouseketeer ears. There were swings and sliding boards in the playgrounds and merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels and bumping-cars in amusement parks. There were circuses and carnivals. Every story ended with everyone good living “happily ever after.” We ate sugary cereals, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips, pretzels, hot dogs, hamburgers, cookies, and popsicles. Occasionally, we had more nutritious food, especially when we stopped to buy fresh tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob and watermelons sold along the road in New Jersey on our way home from the shore. My mother bottle-fed us all, thinking it both more modern and more modest. I saw my aunt, her sister, breastfeeding once and sensed my mother’s disapproval.

I spent summers in Atlantic City with my grandparents, aunt, and uncles. We spent all day at the beach and most evenings on the boardwalk. I was spoiled there and ate far more candy than my parents would have allowed. I got caught up in the Miss America pageants and my aunt’s movie magazines. Hollywood was a source of many wonders. The spectacle of Grace Kelly, a native of our hometown, marrying a prince from a faraway land was a modern-day fairy tale. I accepted it all at face value. My aunt, the one who introduced me to movie magazines and often took me shopping, seemed as glamorous as Grace Kelly to me. She married a medical student and made me a flower girl at their wedding and I saw it as our own fairy tale. He may have been a poor Italian immigrant, whose mother scrubbed floors, who worked his way through medical school, but he was soon a doctor. They bought a beautiful split-level house with a swimming pool in Rose Tree. I baby-sat for them, as the babies arrived one after another. One night I overheard my uncle speak about a baby he had just delivered, who was neither male nor female. I couldn’t really understand that, but couldn’t ask, because I wasn’t supposed to know.

Going to the movies was a great thrill. The smell of the popcorn, the darkened social space, the grainy newsreels, the trailers for forthcoming films—all built up anticipation for the feature films. Many of these were set in the past. Hollywood possibly did more to form our sense of history than any other medium. We understood the ancient world in terms of Land of the Pharaohs, Quo Vadis, and The Robe, the Middle Ages in Knights of the Round Table and Ivanhoe, the nineteenth-century West through Broken Arrow and High Noon. When drive-ins arrived, we piled into the station wagon, already in our pajamas, supplied with drinks and snacks, ready for a new adventure. In time, we were allowed to go on the trolley with our friends to the matinees. We thrilled to every technical innovation, especially 3-D and Cinerama. Across all genres—westerns, musicals, mysteries, romances, comedies—we entered with utter credulity into fictional worlds as they formed our sense of our real world, not only in the past, but in the present.

Another medium, however, was on the rise. In the early 1950s, television came to everyday America in a big way. Suddenly, the small-screen box seemed to dominate every house, and our eyes were glued to the wonders of Howdy Doody, Frontier Playhouse. TV dinners were piled into supermarket shopping baskets. Daily and weekly routines were reorganized around television schedules. New rituals clustered around the new presence. We excitedly returned greetings from presenters and breathlessly shouted warnings to characters in trouble. We identified with cowboys—Roy Rogers, Matt Dillon, the Lone Ranger—as they brought law and order to the frontiers of the American way as it expanded westward, and we gloried in their victories over bandits, cattle rustlers, and Indians. The crime series brought the same motifs into a more contemporary and urban setting. How secure we felt in a world in which Joe Friday, Mike Barnett, and Perry Mason were standard bearers in the inevitable triumph of good over evil. The adventure series chronicled the same struggle in mountain and sea rescues, exotic jungles, and military maneuvers. All was set to rights by Sky King, Ramar of the Jungle, Superman, Fury, Lassie, and Rin Tin Tin. Women usually came into the picture more as the rescued than the rescuers. The spy series in their turn showed good versus evil in terms of the forces of religion and democracy locked in deadly combat with those of atheism and tyranny. Capitalism was the “free world,” as a bulwark against communism, the dark, sinister world behind the “Iron Curtain.” Agents of foreign powers constituted the enemy within. What cold, alien, menacing creatures they were in I Led Three Lives, the story of Herbert Philbrick, who infiltrated the Communist Party for the FBI. Across these genres, there prevailed an iron confidence that good would be rewarded and evil punished. Whatever terrors came into play, we could be sure that by the end of each episode, all loose ends would be tied up in a comforting happy ending. We knew, too, that the resolution would come through acts of individual heroism. Whether embodied by the Lone Ranger, Joe Friday, or Superman, perfect righteousness unfailingly foiled the demonic designs of the villain of the week. We knew the formulae of every show, yet we thrilled again and again to the ritual.

Another prominent prime-time television genre was family drama for family viewing. All of these, whether serious or sitcom, unfolded in a world in which the nuclear family was the secure and stable base of all human interaction. The ups and downs of domestic life were all tidily sorted out in the virtuous glow of the world of I Remember Mama and Father Knows Best. There were other dramatic genres not meant for children. These were the daytime soap operas scheduled during school hours and the anthology plays scheduled for when we were supposedly in bed. However, many of us saw as many of these as school holidays and parental indulgence would allow. These dealt with more problematic areas, although within clearly defined and very restricted boundaries. Whatever the problems and pitfalls encountered by these characters in their pursuit of the American dream, they never ceased to believe in it. It was later at night in the anthology drama series that the outer limits of what television could do in this period were explored. These dealt with the lives of people very much like their audience: people who didn’t look like Hollywood stars, people who didn’t carry guns, people like Marty, a simple Bronx grocer trying to cope with loneliness and a need for love in Paddy Chayevsky’s “marvelous world of the ordinary.” They registered social change in their own way. The pull of tradition against the push of modernity was a recurrent source of dramatic tension. These plays were among the brighter sparks that emerged from the darkness that severely circumscribed the creativity of those who managed to work in the industry at this time, that is, the whole Cold War atmosphere surrounding them and the specific pressures of the witch-hunting and blacklisting focused on film and television. The ideological parameters surrounding television production were carefully policed.

Life was not altogether unlike what appeared on the television screen, especially in the dramas of domestic life. Most American citizens really were patriotic and law-abiding, almost childishly trusting of the powers that be, unquestioningly loyal to “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Both on television and off, there was a striking lack of psychological probing. Class consciousness and sociological awareness were equally absent. Popular media portrayed most of America as middle class, defined by white collars and white picket fences rather than relationship to the means of production. The working class was confined to blue-collar manual workers in the image of Ralph Kramden, Chester Riley, or Ernie Bilko, dreamers and schemers in the grip of get-rich-quick fantasies and rags-to-riches myths. Like many others, my family saw itself as middle class, because my father wore a white collar and tie to work and we lived in a mortgaged suburban house, though we depended no less on wage labor than did the families of bus drivers and plumbers. No one questioned the prevailing division of labor, patterns of exchange, or distribution of wealth. There was no sense of how it was all structured or how it could be structured differently. People were rich or poor, that was it. It was an inherent right to be born rich—but at the same time, with a bit of luck and effort, anyone might strike it rich. There was no querying the right of those who produced nothing to consume lavishly, while those who did produce bowed and scraped before them. Any disaffection seething beneath the surface tended to be of the inarticulate rebel-without-a-cause type or the campy, anarchist beatnik. There was high culture, too, of course, but it was not part of our world. In Philadelphia, as in most US cities, it was possible to attend theater, ballet, opera, and art exhibitions, and to read challenging books and journals, but no one I knew growing up did so. Even in universities, life revolved more around sororities and fraternities, football scores and grade-point averages, upwardly mobile careers, and suburban dream homes than around any sort of critical thought or alternative visions.

School might have been expected to open a wider cultural and intellectual perspective, but it did not go very far in that direction. I began school in 1949 at Saint Luke’s in Glenside. I couldn’t wait to start. From my first day in kindergarten, I saw the nun standing in front of the class and wanted to become her. All my teachers, from kindergarten to eighth grade, were Sisters of Saint Joseph. One Halloween, my mother made me a costume that was a small but exact replica of the SSJ habit. I not only donned it that night to collect candy bars, but also wore for years afterward on the porches of Rosewood Avenue “playing school,” with me as the teacher and my playmates as the pupils. I showed them no mercy, bossing them around and working them hard. It is a wonder that anyone would play with me. One of their fathers named me Sister Mary Impatient of the Outrageous Order. (Unlike those who dreamed of becoming baseball stars only to become insurance agents, I later lived out my childhood fantasy.) There were Catholic schools from primary and secondary schools on to university level staffed by various religious orders. Primary schools were mostly coeducational, but high schools and colleges were not. Catholic boys who aspired to attend university could choose between Villanova, La Salle, or St. Joe’s, while girls could go to Rosemont, Immaculata, or Chestnut Hill. No one spoke of Harvard or Princeton or even Penn or Penn State. It was unimaginable.

Every morning we gathered in the schoolyard. When the bell rang, we lined up and marched into our classrooms in our blue and white uniforms. We pointed our hands to heaven and said our prayers, followed by the pledge of allegiance, which was recited, hands on our hearts, in the same voice and with the same solemnity as our prayers. I had already started to read, but the process stepped up in school, starting with the primers of the day that featured the bland adventures of Dick, Jane, and Sally with their pets Spot and Puff. From there, we moved to stories of saints and crusaders and missionaries and statesmen. I frequented the public libraries and was especially keen on biographies. They were hagiographical accounts of the lives of Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, but I knew no better at the time. Lessons were organized around rote learning. We memorized prayers, hymns, poems, multiplication tables, answers to catechism questions, lists of presidents and dates of battles and state capitals. We competed in spelling bees. We spent much time practicing penmanship. None of these activities encouraged critique or creativity. We heard constant slurs against what was called “progressive education,” which purportedly allowed children to do whatever they wanted, turning them into spoiled brats. Strict discipline, we were told, was an essential factor making our schools superior. The core component of our superiority was that we had the truth. Other school systems were full of laxity and error.

I did well in school, but my parents did not put much emphasis on academic success—motivated more, I think, by a desire to pump up my brothers than to put me down. The notion prevailed that you were either smart at school or good at sports and mechanical things. I accepted the caricature more than I should have, making myself less adept at sports or mechanics than I might have been, but I preferred to be smart. I valued learning and I became less tied to their values or dependent on their approval. Church and school and library became more important to me than home.

Religion permeated the whole curriculum. We didn’t always adequately digest what we were taught. We were told that the Trinity and transubstantiation were mysteries we couldn’t possibly understand. We memorized the Ten Commandments without grasping much of their meaning. I was particularly intrigued by the wording of the Sixth Commandment. I came home one day and shouted at my mother through the letter box, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” She was in the living room talking with the insurance man and was mortified. Eventually in school we were told that the word meant “impurity in thought, word or deed.” (I confessed to it once. When the priest inquired further, I had to explain that I had urinated in the woods, which was extremely embarrassing.) We prepared for first communion, first confession, confirmation, and liturgical rituals during school time. Every year a girl in eighth grade was chosen to be May Queen and to dress as a bride and crown the statue of the Virgin Mary in the May procession. We were asked to contribute our allowances to the “ransom of pagan babies.” Every $5 made it possible for one more child in Africa to be baptized, we were told—and we could even choose the child’s new name.

Everything was precisely codified: ten commandments, six precepts of the church, seven sacraments, eight beatitudes, seven capital sins, twelve apostles, fourteen stations of the cross, nine first Fridays, forty hours’ devotion to the blessed sacrament, five joyful mysteries, five sorrowful mysteries, five glorious mysteries. All over the world, mass was celebrated in the same way and in the same language, so that we could go anywhere and be at home wherever there was a Catholic church. It was all prescribed down to the smallest detail. We worried about inadvertently doing something wrong. We were required to attend children’s mass on Sundays and to sit with our class, boys on one side of the aisle and girls on the other. The nuns would click for us to stand, sit, kneel, genuflect, file in or out in unison. Every movement, every gesture was predetermined.

Growing up in this world got me into the habit of thinking cosmologically, for which I have always been grateful—even if the cosmology of a three-storied world, composed of heaven, earth, and hell, eventually came to seem utterly implausible. But at the time, this all-encompassing worldview seemed self-evidently true and beyond question. It was as if all historical change belonged in the past and history had come to a kind of final resting point. All important issues were presented as basically settled; the answers only had to be looked up somewhere. Eisenhower was president of the greatest country in the world and Pius XII was pope of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, together personifying the stability and complacency of the world over which they jointly presided. Our church and our country embodied truth and goodness. The other, the adversary, was communism. It was falsity and evil. At the end of every mass, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Likewise, during the presidential contests of 1952 and 1956, between Dwight Eisenhower versus Adlai Stevenson, I saw “I like Ike” buttons and bumper stickers everywhere. Our house was for Ike, because he was a soldier and the other guy was an “egghead.”

I was affected by death for the first time in the early 1950s. A boy in my class died, then another boy on our street, and then two of my grandparents. I found their sudden absence from the world shocking and haunting, but was comforted by the belief that they were in heaven looking down on me. My mother said she heard her father being released from purgatory. She believed that God, saints, angels, and devils intervened in her life daily. We lived in constant expectation of miracles. If it could happen to peasant children in Lourdes or Fatima, why not to us? Indeed, some children in Philadelphia in 1954 claimed that Mary appeared to them. We went to the roped-off spot where people left rosaries and money and cards with special intentions. We prayed to Our Lady of Fairmount Park. I wondered why no one from heaven appeared to me.

In 1952, we moved to Springfield, Pennsylvania, in Delaware County, where my extended family lived. I attended Saint Francis of Assisi School from third to eighth grade. There was no difference in curriculum or custom, as all was standardized in the Philadelphia archdiocesan schools. The family grew, and the house was extended. In addition to the babies arriving, my disabled uncle moved in with us. It was a noisy and busy household, but never chaotic. My parents were highly organized. My father was particularly meticulous and laid out domestic projects much as he drafted plans for manholes and substations at work. My mother started doing the Christmas shopping during the post-Christmas sales nearly a year in advance.

Holidays took a lot of logistical skill, as huge numbers of diapers, pajamas, bottles, peanut butter sandwiches, and much more were piled into the station wagon along with kids who started scrapping before the car even pulled out of the driveway with cries of “He touched me” and “He’s breathing my air!” We always went within driving distance, mostly to New Jersey or Virginia. We stayed at a Sheehan bungalow in Atlantic City or the Moore Farm in Virginia. Occasionally we stayed in motels and all piled into one room. Once my father took the three oldest of us on a train to New York and we stayed in a hotel. We went to the top of the Empire State Building, walked around the crown of the Statue of Liberty, took a boat trip around Manhattan. It was so exciting. I was keen to go to Greenwich Village to see beatniks. Although I didn’t have a very good grasp of what they were at the time, I could feel the lure of forbidden fruit. We never traveled anywhere by air, but we did make excursions to Philadelphia airport to watch the planes take off and land. Other trips were organized through the Brownies and then the Girl Scouts. We went camping in the woods, toured Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the United Nations in New York. We earned merit badges for sewing, cooking, and camping. My parents aspired to military precision in running our home. Our dining room was called the “mess hall.” My father was deeply marked by his time in the army and acutely proud of his military service. He showed us the insignia of the 7th Armored Division in which he served, the Purple Heart he had been awarded, the Luger he had taken from a German soldier. When we misbehaved, my mother took out a horsewhip that my father had reportedly taken off a Nazi officer he had killed. She told us how many strokes we would be getting, made us lie down on the bed and expose our bare flesh, and on she went. She sometimes said that it hurt her more than it hurt us, but we never believed it. One day, after many years of this, my brother, by then stronger than my mother was, broke the whip in her face. Corporal punishment was common in those days, both at home and in school. The military ethos was powerful. We marched around the house singing the anthems of each branch of the armed forces. It all seemed like good fun at the time. Little did we realize that, when the wars of our generation would come, we would find ourselves on opposite sides of the barricades.

The idea of masculinity was inextricably tied up with military combat. Any man who had not done military service was a dubious character, and even those who had been in the military but not engaged in combat seemed vaguely suspect. Each of my brothers would come to terms with this in his own way, but they were all shaped by it. Whatever his other children’s achievements, I believe that the military service of my two brothers meant most to my father, certainly more than my degrees and publications. He also felt a special bond with his cousin Jim Thomas, who had been a prisoner of war. Jim was one of the quietest men I ever met. I sensed that he was inarticulately damaged by the experience, and he later had what was mysteriously called a “nervous breakdown.” But men did not talk much about such matters. It was only decades later that a public discourse began about the devastating mental impact of military service and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The idea of femininity was similarly constricted. The only women in the world of my youth were housewife-mothers and teacher-nuns and shop assistant-maiden aunts. The one thing I knew for sure was that I was not going to be a housewife-mother, not least because, as the oldest in a large family, I was under constant pressure to be just that, even while still a child myself. Any book I wanted to read was preempted by a seemingly never-ending list of domestic tasks. It was assumed that no one chose to be a shop-assistant-maiden-aunt, but it happened because some unlucky women were “left on the shelf.” I thus intended to be a teacher-nun, aiming toward something larger and higher than the small domesticated lives of other women. When my mother advised me never to let a man think I was more intelligent than he was, I dismissed her words with disdain. As the years went on, I had less and less respect for women like my mother, particularly housewives. I had more and more respect for men and actively sought their company and respect.

There was a tension for me between being intellectual and being feminine. It caused me to develop in a one-sided way. I grew confident intellectually, but not sexually. Many girls of my time developed in the opposite direction, but it was still one-sided. That most girls no longer face such caricatures and choices represents one of the great advances in human history. Although even as a child I increasingly felt the existing sexual division of labor was problematic, I could not yet articulate a critique. There was no trace of feminism in my life-world at that time. The male of the species was perceived as rational, the female emotional. I found it hard to think of rationality as opposed to emotion, since they seemed to flow through me as one. The male was destined to inhabit the world of the political, the scientific, the economic, while the female was confined to the domestic realm. I could not accept it, but without a critique of it, all I could do was to feel increasingly uneasy with being female and sometimes wish that I had been born male. At the same time, I was a heterosexual female attracted to the male of the species in the conventional way. Not that I understood much about sexuality of any kind. I’d heard vague suggestions that some men were a bit effeminate and some women a bit butch, but the idea that people of the same gender had sex with each other was not a part of the picture.

Sometime, starting in second grade, I became uneasy, no longer so blissfully happy, no longer so at one with it all around me. I can’t pin it to any one thing. It was a gentle dawning of critical consciousness, I suppose, although I didn’t yet have much of a critique. I no longer took my parents and teachers to be founts of wisdom. My pre-feminist fretfulness about gender was part of it, but it was more than that. As the fifties progressed, I felt like a “rebel without a cause.” Like others of my generation, I saw James Dean as an icon of something struggling for expression. We went mad for Mad magazine and rallied to the rhythms of rock and roll. My parents had 78 rpm records of Tommy Dorsey, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. That was their idea of music. My first record was a 45 rpm of Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” on one side and “Don’t Be Cruel” on the other. In my home, as in homes all over the country, my parents denounced that “jungle music.” The generation gap had opened.

I found adolescence excruciating. I don’t guess it was easy for anyone, but it seemed that some were sailing through it by comparison. Along with my peers, I developed an attraction to the opposite sex, but it ran according to script only for those at the top of the cruel and crude pubescent hierarchy of the popular and cute. At parish dances, where girls were grouped on one side and boys on the other, many of us on both sides watched and languished as the popular ones took the floor. How painful it was standing there in our carefully crafted curls and crinoline skirts and high heels before anyone asked us to dance. It was even worse at unchaperoned dances that turned into “make-out parties.” The popular kids kissed and the rest of us pretended that we preferred to talk and to dance. Games like Spin the Bottle and Post Office were agonizingly awkward. My first crush came at the age of ten, when a new boy arrived in school. I was constantly aware of his presence, blushed when his name was mentioned, and recalled every scrap of casual conversation between us. When our mothers happened to meet at church, it turned out they knew each other and were second cousins, making us third cousins. Thereafter he addressed me as “Cuz,” which killed our one-sided romance.

Sexuality was a mysterious force and I did not come to terms with it easily. For multiple reasons—from my early sense of religious vocation to my adolescent physical insecurity—I felt excluded from full participation in it. As I watched the high school kids on American Bandstand, dancing to the rhythms of rock and roll, I longed to fit into the world as seamlessly as they did, but felt I never would. There was an added dimension to my unease, beyond the usual awkwardness of adolescence. It was the incipient philosopher in me struggling to be. I hardly knew the word. I knew no professor of philosophy or professor of anything. I began to feel that people were so busy going somewhere that they didn’t think about where they were going. I wanted to see the big picture. By the time I was in high school, this became very intense and I started reading works of philosophy. My education began to diverge from the curriculum more and more.

All this unfolded amid a distinct historical atmosphere. Throughout the 1950s, even when innocence and credulity and fun outweighed my emerging unease, a sense of apocalyptic fear hung over all that I did. From my earliest years, I knew the deadliest weapons the world had ever known were being developed. The problem wasn’t that our country had them, but that our enemies had them too. An “Iron Curtain” divided the world between freedom on one side and tyranny on the other. The other side sought nothing less than world domination. The third world war, we were warned, would be a nuclear war. We held regular air raid drills in school and saw frightening films depicting a nuclear attack. We crouched under our desks, as if that would somehow save us from nuclear annihilation. There were debates about fallout shelters, specifically about whether you would be justified in killing someone who tried to get into your fallout shelter. I thought a lot about this, although no one I knew even had a fallout shelter. My mother did have the cellar well stocked with enough tinned food to last for many months. Aside from worries about an attack, I became so concerned about the levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere as a result of nuclear testing that I wrote letters to US senators about it.

We were taught that communism was the enemy. It was not just a fallacious political ideology, but a cosmological evil. It was hostile not only to our country, but to our religion—the work of the devil. I imagined communists entering my bedroom and demanding that I renounce my nation and religion, even my own parents. I believed that I would be brave and be a martyr if necessary. The whole apocalyptic scenario was heightened by the “third secret of Fatima” in a letter which couldn’t be opened until 1960. I got the impression that it somehow had to do with communism and the end of the world. I had a terrible foreboding about the year 1960 and a sense that I could not count on any future after that. I didn’t actually know any communists, yet Senator Joseph McCarthy said they were everywhere, even in the government, the army, and the film and television industry. I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings and was on the side of McCarthy. He was not only patriotic but Catholic, so he had to be right. I even read his biography, Tail Gunner Joe. I wanted all these evil subversives rooted out. Nothing seemed more inconceivable than that I would one day become one. Sputnik sent us into a spin, because it felt as if they were getting ahead of us, not only in the space race, but perhaps in other ways as well.

By the late 1950s, observing mainstream debates between liberals and conservatives, I decided I was liberal. I didn’t think it was right that some people were rich while others were poor, and that a disproportionate number of poor people were black. I was stirred by events in the South, especially when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and when the army had to be brought in to defend pupils entering high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. My mother insisted that communist agitators were behind it. I doubted it, but also began to wonder if they were in fact behind it, whether communists were really so bad after all.

The 1960s arrived, and the world didn’t end. Things were changing, both in the wider world and in my perspective. The stability and smugness of the system I took for granted was starting to show cracks, revealing its vulnerabilities and delusions and hinting at other possibilities. There were new faces at the top, symbolizing the stirring from below. The election of John Kennedy as president and John XXIII as pope put faces on a new mood, a new energy, a new path forward. The faces of the other side changed, too. When we watched Khrushchev debating Nixon in a kitchen and banging his shoe at the United Nations, we didn’t fear him as we had Stalin. The Iron Curtain didn’t seem so iron any more. When revolution reshaped Cuba and Fidel Castro came to the United States, we regarded him as a folk hero. When he became a communist, it was more a push to question our attitude toward communism than toward him and the revolution.

We entered a new phase of the Cold War and of Catholicism as well. Vatican II was a kind of Protestantization of Catholicism, which had a powerful questioning and relativizing effect. At first it was just a new sense of freshness and dynamism, but eventually it set me on a course that led far beyond anything reformers intended. I took to the new vocabulary of dialogue and renewal, along with the exotic imported words such as kerygma and aggiornamento. In the political realm, the rhetoric of the “New Frontier” created a sudden sense of history in the making, of an energy breaking through the malaise of the Eisenhower era. It was not at all clear to me then what the Kennedy era meant in ideological terms, clouded as it was by the whole Camelot mystique as well as by my own political naïveté. It became clear that Kennedy stood for a more social democratic, technocratic, neo-colonial form of developed capitalism. Nevertheless, I responded to the atmosphere of vigor and vitality, to a more liberal, sophisticated approach to many things.

In the world of television, corporate sponsors loosened their grip on scripts, and the whole machinery of blacklisting was gradually dismantled. The first signs of change came in news broadcasts. For the first time, global events appeared on the screen in close to real time: the debates during the 1960 presidential election, the Kennedy inauguration, Khrushchev at the UN, Castro in Harlem, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination and funeral. At the same time, TV dramas continued in much the same manner as before, with the same programs, the same formats, the same standardized settings, plots, and patterns, the same stereotypical characters. It began to jar. Newton Minow, the Kennedy-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared television to be “a vast wasteland,” and many agreed with him. In response, the networks introduced more substantive programming in series like East Side West Side, Mr. Novak, The Defenders, and Dr. Kildare, showing social workers, teachers, lawyers, and doctors dealing with the urgent problems of American society—racial tension, inequality, unjust laws, generational conflict—without pretending they could always be resolved neatly by the end of each episode.

The western, crime, spy, and space genres saw a shift from the drama of righteous individual heroism to a more technocratic team professionalism. It corresponded to a consolidation of a shift from the values of a laissez-faire market economy to those of a more managerial corporate system. The lone lawman gave way to the tough teams of The Untouchables and 77 Sunset Strip. More attention came to be focused on the macho world of international intrigue, with Mission Impossible and The Man from UNCLE emerging as prototypical productions of the period. The cowboy code of honor no longer applied in this arena. Conflict centered less on principle and more on technique. The end justified the means, with less and less emphasis on the end and more and more on the means. The picture of the enemy likewise changed in the transition from the spy stories of the 1950s to the peaceful coexistence, cultural exchange-cum-espionage tales of the 1960s. Agents on both sides became less ideological in orientation and began to look and sound more alike. Agents of foreign powers had less of a furtive, sinister, scruffy look and began to resemble our own, so much so that it was possible for plots to revolve around the chic macho men and glamorous miniskirted women of the one side passing for the other. The spy spoof Get Smart, sending up all sides in ludicrous scenarios, reflected in its own campy way the easing of Cold War tensions. In the New Frontier mood, more eyes turned to space as well, in the mood articulated in the opening sequence of Star Trek, as the starship Enterprise set off on its mythic odyssey into the dark unknown of space, “the final frontier.”

The more liberal values of the Kennedy-Johnson years did not go unchallenged. Companies threatened to cancel their sponsorships and southern stations refused to carry certain episodes of network programs that transgressed traditional norms. This happened with increasing regularity as black actors began to appear more often and in more serious roles, and as the civil rights movement put more and more pressure on the deeply rooted racism of American society. But such ideological tensions as came to the surface in the early 1960s remained within the liberal-conservative spectrum, defined roughly by the ideological distance between Kennedy and Nixon. Despite real differences and acute tensions over civil rights and welfare legislation, there was still considerable consensus. Any discordant notes outside this consensus were still few and far between and somewhat muted.

I attended high school from 1958 to 1962. My grandfather thought I should go to Holy Child Academy in Sharon Hill rather than Archbishop Prendergast in Drexel Hill. I think he believed that posher was somehow better. Not many granddaughters of teamsters or daughters of draughtsmen went there, but daughters of doctors and lawyers and bank managers did. That seemed to be the point. He insisted on paying my fees, and my parents carried on doing so after he died, which was not easy considering they had so many other children by this time. I did not want to seem ungrateful, but there was much that I didn’t like about the school. I thought the nuns who staffed it were sheltered, neurotically fixated on Christ as a child and ridiculously preoccupied with the beatification of their foundress, Cornelia Connelly. One nun cautioned us to be modest about our bodies and advised us to wear cardboard under our undershirts (as if we wore undershirts) and to avoid patent leather shoes or strapless dresses, so as not to be occasions of sin to the opposite sex. As we were segregated by gender for schooling, we had all too few occasions of sin.

The yearbooks from that time show a vanished world. It is not only that the school no longer exists, but the images in Althean provide a window into a pious, conformist, Pollyanna life nearly impossible to imagine now. Girls in blue blazers and plaid skirts are shown at prayer, at play, and at work, all in the care of solicitous nuns. There were numerous campus groups: glee club, mission club, secretarial club, forensic club, dancing club, dramatic club, and more. The school newspaper carried such news as golden jubilees and feast days of nuns, rehearsals for the spring festival, and inter-varsity basketball and hockey scores. Graduation photos show rows of young women carrying red roses and wearing long white dresses rather than caps and gowns, making us look more like debutantes than graduates.

Our classes involved memorizing Latin and French vocabulary, grappling with conjugations and declensions, mastering algebraic equations and geometric theorems, and cutting up helpless frogs. Biology classes were premised on a blend of creationism and evolutionism. We were told that God created all that existed, including the process whereby the ape evolved into man. It was necessary to believe, Mother Jeanne d’Arc emphasized, that at some point God intervened and created a soul. This accorded with the overall idea that God not only created the universe and set the laws of nature in motion, but constantly interceded in the process, so that, if we prayed, it might not rain on the day of the school picnic. Civics classes revolved around papal encyclicals, particularly Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno.

I did try to make a go of it for the first two years. I was happy to be out of primary school, but I was not happy to be in an all-female institution. Still, I made many friends, took part in extracurricular activities, and received high marks. I was especially active with the forensics club, and I represented the school in inter-varsity debating tournaments. On a trip to New York to compete in a debating tournament, I was in my glory. Researching the assigned topic of debate—right-to-work laws and union shops—I took a new interest in my grandfather’s job as a union official and started asking him questions about the labor movement. Several news stories had recently appeared on Jimmy Hoffa and corruption in the Teamsters Union. He did not welcome my probing into these areas. My high school was supposed to be a world away from all these things.

I was happiest at debating tournaments, which opened to me my first serious steps beyond home, church, and school. My best friends were debaters from other schools, especially from male schools. I developed a particularly strong relationship with Ken James, who was intelligent, articulate, and handsome. He was also black. My parents were not too pleased. They could find no fault with him; it was just that they subscribed to “separate but equal,” especially my mother, with her roots in the South, while my father was uneasy about his daughter with anyone of the opposite sex. Although I was attracted to him in that way, it remained a platonic relationship, albeit a deeply serious one. We talked for hours and could express our intellectual yearnings with each other. We also confided to each other our intentions to enter religious orders.

My most serious relationship in those days was with a teacher. Gregory Strickland was a Jesuit who taught high school and coached the debating team at St. Joseph’s Prep. He judged me in a debating tournament and saw potential. He spoke to me in a way that no one ever had. We spent many hours talking throughout my high school years. He inspired me to reach out to life in a higher, wider, and deeper way. Greg was the most exciting person I had ever met. There was something so fresh, so bold, about the ideas he introduced and the way he pursued them. He recommended books and then discussed them with me at length and in depth. One was Great Dialogues of Plato, which I carried everywhere for a while, imagining Socrates roaming the streets of ancient Athens and probing the world from unexpected angles. I not only saw him at debating tournaments, but went to visit him at the Jesuit community in North Philadelphia where he lived, and we talked for hours on the phone. When he came to my house and met my family, my parents were uneasy. Why, they wondered, would a man of thirty spend so much time with a girl of fifteen? I veered between thinking myself quite grown up and wondering if I was just a mixed-up kid with a schoolgirl crush. Although I saw it as “purely spiritual” and he never touched me during my high school years, it was still quite physical in the sense that he was quite alert to physicality—his own, mine, and that of other people and the natural world. It wasn’t so much about sex—though he did stir me in that way—as about his sensitivity to eye contact and directness of speech. I felt a fierce sense of loss when he was transferred from Philadelphia to Washington, but we still kept up an intense correspondence, supplemented by long phone conversations. After he left, I latched on to the next debating coach at St. Joe’s, William Watters, who was quite different from Greg, more traditionally pedagogical and pastoral, but similarly generous with his time and attention, nurturing my development.

The places where I went to meet Ken, Greg, and Bill were innercity neighborhoods considered dangerous, particularly for a white teenage girl on her own. My family and classmates never ventured into these places. I was determined to do so, even though my heart was pounding as I walked the streets. I became ever bolder in my steps away from the well-worn paths. I spent several summers frequenting City Hall. Every day I took the trolley and subway from Springfield into Philadelphia with a copybook to take notes of the trials, conversations, and city council meetings that took up my day. I got to know politicians, judges, and lawyers, all of whom were amazingly indulgent of my presence and took a surprising amount of time to talk to me. I became particularly attached to Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, grandson of slaves and son of a poor working-class family, who had become a distinguished civil rights lawyer, politician, and judge. I spent quite a lot of time in the criminal courts, which were windows on a world quite unknown to me. (I recorded words I didn’t know, such as “sodomy.” I guessed it had something to do with Sodom and Gomorrah. I looked it up in a dictionary, which defined it as “unnatural sex acts,” but I still didn’t really know what it meant.)

I was fascinated by politics. I corresponded with various senators, including John Kennedy, asking questions, requesting reports, and commenting on the world situation. I wrote letters to newspapers on political matters. I took the train down to Washington and sat in on sessions of Congress and talked to political staffers, who got me the passes to go where I wanted. One summer I got a job working for a city councilman in Philadelphia, who was later at the center of a municipal corruption scandal. I was very disturbed by this, but convinced myself he was somehow innocent. During the 1960 elections, I was “All the way with JFK.” I became active in Democratic politics and volunteered for the campaign. JFK shook my hand one day when he met with election workers before a rally in Upper Darby. I spent hours talking with men about politics and big ideas. I was into all the razzmatazz: the hats, bumper stickers, buttons, slogans, songs. I went around singing “High Hopes.” I couldn’t get enough, and I couldn’t bear the thought of missing anything while at school, so I got into the habit of truancy. I left in the morning wearing my uniform before ducking into a public lavatory to change clothes. This involved a lot of lying, which makes me cringe even now. My parents opposed my activities, which took me ever further out of any world they could map. My mother was constantly searching my pockets, bags, and drawers. She was a persistent detective, and one day she called election headquarters and I answered the phone. I was caught. As punishment, I was barred from electoral activities (including victory parties), from inter-varsity debating, from my junior prom, from trips to City Hall or Congress, from writing letters to the paper, from doing almost everything I really wanted to do. The deceit continued, as I tried to find ways to free myself from these constraints, but this only tormented me further, as every lie violated the integrity I so sincerely sought. Finally, I decided never to lie again—a vow I’ve kept ever since.

I felt increasingly alienated from home and school. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to get away from my parents and teachers, but I was trapped. I wanted to fly free. I sent for many college catalogues, the farther from home the better. I would need a scholarship, so I worked hard at my studies, earning a place on the honor roll and winning academic prizes. I was ill at ease with my peers. I dated throughout high school, often with other debaters, but they seemed so young and shallow compared to the older men whose company I persistently sought. I felt torn in my aspirations. As each university catalogue arrived, I imagined going there, enjoying brilliant lectures and intense conversations with professors and students. I fantasized further about going on to be a professor or politician. I toyed with the idea of joining the Peace Corps. I filled out many applications for scholarships, but mailed none. I was destined to do otherwise, I somehow sensed.

I moved far beyond the curriculum in my reading: books on philosophy, theology, history, literature. I burned for knowledge. One summer my mother enrolled me in a typing course, but I went to the park and read an enormous book on world history instead. While grounded, I still had books, though my many domestic duties made even reading difficult. At the time there were three babies in diapers in my house, and my disabled uncle was dying a protracted death in our house. Toward the end, he could do nothing for himself. I recoiled before the caring tasks assigned to me. My mother bore the brunt of it and she struggled to cope. The house was noisy and tense. My mother, whom her grandchildren remember as sweet, generous, and accepting, was bad-tempered, demanding, and repressive. I got up very early in the morning to have some quiet for reading and reflection, and left for school early to get to the library before classes. The dark morning hours brought some degree of peace and much-sought silence.

I still did not question the basic tenets of church or state, but I sought a more intellectually sophisticated version of them. I did wonder about the Church’s warnings about the dangers of venturing outside its limits, asking why I should believe in the religion into which I happened to have been born, when others were equally convinced that the religions into which they had been born were true. Was I brainwashed? I latched on to apologetics textbooks to answer my questions and address my doubts. I pored over the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. I enthused over Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, not only because they expressed the ontological position I was seeking to justify, but also because I took to G. K. Chesterton’s clever and paradoxical style.

I savored novels with political or religious themes, such as The Last Hurrah and The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Advise and Consent by Alan Drury. I took to Frank O’Connor’s stories and nearly split my sides laughing at “First Confession.” I sought sociological analysis in The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman and The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. I took early morning walks in dark streets pondering words I memorized from my reading, such as lines from We Hold These Truths by John Courtney Murray: “The barbarian need not appear in bearskins with a club in hand. He may wear a Brooks Brothers suit and carry a ball-point pen…. The real enemy within the gates of the city is not the communist but the idiot.” One day in downtown Philadelphia, I bought a Communist newspaper. It would be hard for anyone who didn’t grow up as I did to realize how daring this felt. However, lightning did not strike me dead, and I felt improved by exposing myself to the other side. I didn’t find its contents so implausible either. At times, I seethed with contempt for the conformism and mediocrity of the older generation in general, and of my own parents in particular. What enraged me was that they held up this complacency, which they called normality, as the peak of wisdom, the goal to which I should aspire.

After I graduated from high school, I got a job in a detective agency in Philadelphia. I was only a clerk, but I thrived on the office banter with the investigators and on reading reports before filing them. They were mostly cases of suspected adultery or insurance fraud—no murders—but I found it a quirkily enlightening experience. I also liked the independence and the salary. My parents had laid down the law that at eighteen we were on our own financially. If we wanted to continue to live at home, we had to pay our own board. My earnings allowed me to explore further the joys of Philadelphia’s city center, to meet friends in restaurants, movies, and concerts. As I worked full-time and stayed out most evenings and weekends, my mother needed more helping hands at home. Rather than make the demands on my brothers that she had made on me, she hired a “cleaning lady.” It was Ken’s mother. My mother couldn’t understand why I thought this inappropriate, as she needed the help, and Mrs. James needed the money. I saw Ken often at the time, and we both found this embarrassing.

I was also still involved in politics. Dick Doran, with whom I worked during the Kennedy campaign, contacted me and said it wasn’t enough to get our man elected, that we had to go out and garner support for the whole “New Frontier” program. I did so enthusiastically. I was back in City Hall again, too, chatting with politicians, judges, assistant district attorneys, and public defenders.

I felt a burning desire to touch life at all possible points, to live as fully as a person could live. I wanted to push my knowledge and passion to their limits. I was fluttering my wings and wanted to fly free. Nevertheless, I did the opposite.