June 20, 2026: “Buying the Baby,” Father’s Day Weekend, “Hard Work”

From a very young age, I was taught the value of hard work.  Even when my dad retired (after almost 50-plus years of cabling sewers, replacing water heaters, and installing furnaces), he still got up before 5 a.m., sipped his strong black coffee, and then headed out into the day for whatever task he had set for himself to accomplish.  Mowing the lawn or tinkering around in his warehouse or chopping wood at camp.  He never slowed down.  And he instilled that same work ethic in each of his kids.

On this Father’s Day weekend, I find myself thinking about my dad a lot.  How he forced me to do things I hated, like going on plumbing jobs when I was a kid; mowing the lawn to his exact specifications (not an easy feat); and attending catechism and Mass with the Society of St. Pius X (a Catholic sect that rejected the reforms introduced by the Vatican II and insisted on Latin liturgy).  Simply put, I didn’t see eye-to-eye with my dad on a lot of things, emotionally, spiritually, socially, or politically.  But I loved him, even though our relationship was complicated.

Marie Howe writes about attending Catholic school . . . 

Buying the Baby

by: Marie Howe

In those days you could buy a pagan baby for five dollars,

the whole class saved up.  And when you bought it

you could name it Joseph, Mary, or Theresa, thee class took a vote.

But on the day I brought in the five dollars

my grandmother had given me for my birthday something happened

—fire drill?  An assassination?  And if it was announced 

Marie Howe has, all by herself, bought a baby in India and gets to name it,

it was overshadowed and forgotten

And if I tried to picture my baby, the CARE package

carried to her hut and placed before her, as her sisters and brothers watched,

that image dissolved into the long shining hall to the girls’ lavatory.

Even in my own room, waiting for Roy Orbison to sing “Only the Lonely”

so I could sleep, I couldn’t conjure that baby up.

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her.  I knew that,

because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it.

Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention,

sister to the Sin of Omission, which was 

the price for what you hadn’t done but thought.

Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed

it would start to happen,

then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.

I don’t have much memory of those catechism classes I attended as a kid.  Vaguely, I recall buying cows and sheep and chickens for remote African villages.  I also have a memory of learning the Lord’s Prayer in Latin when I was in second or third grade and a priest forcing me to recite it for a group of snickering high schoolers.  However, I have no recollection of buying a pagan baby for five bucks.

But I worked hard at being the perfect Catholic schoolboy.  I went to confession every Sunday, even though second graders don’t really commit a lot of serious sins.  The one sin I committed over and over was this:  I hated attending the Latin Mass.  I admitted this fact to the priest every week in that stuffy little room, and I listened to his admonitions and accepted my penance.  Every week.  Truly, though, I was pretty unrepentant.  To this day, I’m not a fan of Latin liturgy or Gregorian chant or hymns based on Gregorian chants.  Yes, I know I’m going to hell.

So, I didn’t inherit my dad’s penchant for ancient rituals in dead languages.  However, I watched him work from dawn to dusk every day.  To relax at night, he drank 7 and 7s.  A lot of them.  (He eventually gave this practice up after he realized he had a big problem with alcohol.  He never attended an AA meeting or worked any twelve step program.  He just went cold turkey one day and never looked back.)  Because of my dad’s addiction, I’m very cognizant of my own consumption of alcohol and other substances.  I think that’s the reason I waited until I was a high school senior before I indulged in my first puking blackout.  

But, because of the work ethic I inherited from my parents, I was salutatorian of my high school class and received a full-ride scholarship to college, from which I graduated summa cum laude.  Then I went on to graduate school and earned two advanced degrees.  Currently, I hold down five jobs (teaching at a university, programming at a library, and playing keyboard/pipe organ at three different churches).  I’m not a lazy person, and I have my dad and mom to thank for that.

At the laundromat this afternoon, Saint Marty wrote a poem . . . 

Hard Work

by: Martin Achatz

After a morning bagging up dog crap,

stray branches, a desiccated mouse carcass

(probably dropped by a barred owl), then pushing

a mower for a couple more hours under 

a punishing sun, avoiding fat toads in the grass 

after a night of heavy rain, I sit on my living 

room couch in front of a fan, chew an ice cube

in the window-shaded dark, and lick sweat

from my upper lip as I contemplate the real 

hard work ahead of me:  this poem 

with its concrete nouns, feral verbs, Homeric

mystery.  In a few minutes, I’ll launch myself

toward the shores of Troy, ready to war

five, ten, twenty years for a single line of verse

so beautiful and perfect it would make Paris 

forget the golden apple of Helen’s body.