On the way back to California from Washington, last summer, I decided to take a Greyhound at least part of the way. The bus went through lovely Western Maryland, to Cumberland of fond memories, up through Morgantown, the “Penn Alps,” to Clarksburg and Parkersburg in West Virginia, across the Ohio River to Athens in Ohio, and on to Columbus and Cincinnati. A long-distance bus these days seems to stop about twenty minutes every four hours or so. Most smaller bus stations are serviced by food and drink machines, even in a place like Springfield, Illinois. The larger stations like Columbus have Burger Kings. Along the way, I went through three dramatic black thunderhead storms, which were refreshing after a very dry spring and winter in Washington.
At Hagerstown, Maryland, I bought the local newspaper at my first twenty-minute stop, a policy I always recommend when traveling. Evidently, on the previous day in Hagerstown the big event was the giving away, during the noon rush downtown, of some 2,400 cans of the new Coke. The head of the local Coca-Cola Bottling Plant in an interview was naturally quite pleased with the new taste’s Hagerstown reception. With somewhat mysterious metaphysical implications, he asked, “Can the best get better?” “Can the first improve?” His own answer was (you guessed it) “Yes.” Well, however much a shambles such a position makes of the laws of grammar, not to mention those of metaphysics, I decided firmly to try a new Coke, which I finally did at my sister’s in Milwaukee, I believe, or maybe St. Louis. However, unlike the experience of the good folks in Hagerstown, I realized that I had not had a Coke in a decade, so I had forgotten the grounds of comparison. So much for metaphysics.
In the very same Hagerstown paper, whose name I cannot recall, I could not help but notice a headline which read: “CAN’T KNEEL, BISHOP SUES.” Fearing perhaps yet another pastoral, I decided I had better read it. It turns out that the Episcopal bishop of Central Florida was suing nothing less than the U.S. Government for $200,000 because a knee injury he suffered on nearby U.S. Navy tennis courts prevented him from genuflecting before the altar. “At least somebody still genuflects,” I sighed to myself, unexpectedly. What caused this theological accident was not some fast smash at the net, but slippery algae which some poor swabbie had not cleaned up on the tennis courts. The bishop claimed he should have been warned, because genuflecting is part of his normal occupation. The Navy, in turn, not to be outdone and with considerable courage of its own, put in a counter-suit, which charged that the bishop had been trespassing all along on Navy property and, in fact, owed the Navy $5,200 for use of the said courts over a five year period. The bishop was cited, in conclusion, as affirming that “it took a lot of thought, prayers, and consultation” to sue the government. And here I had thought that P. G. Wodehouse made up all those fantastic stories about the clergy in The World of Wodehouse Clergy!
So much for Hagerstown. Surely one of the highlights of the trip was hearing, with Anne and Bill Burleigh, Lizst’s “Christus” in the beautiful Cincinnati Music Hall, along with a visit to the lovely small Medieval Chapel dedicated to St. Joan of Arc, which has now made the Marquette University campus so beautiful. My sister and brother-in-law attended Mass with me there, and we liked it a lot. Bill Burleigh, who had gone to Marquette before the chapel was placed there, told me not to miss it. He was right.
After arriving back in San Francisco, I put on some old clothes and walked downtown. I passed by the new Federal Building, out of which suddenly poured about fifty uniformed, fully regaled, truncheoned, male and female riot police. Since they seemed to be headed for some crisis, not for me, I crossed Larkin Street and went into Harrington’s Pub for a draught Guinness. It took the bartender three glasses and ten minutes to handle the foam, and besides the Guinness tasted flat, proving once again that the stuff does not “travel.” On the wall, there was a sign saying, philosophically I thought, “If baby needs a new pair of shoes, don’t drink here.”
Finally, I went into McDonald’s on Turk Street, not the McMuffin place, but the used book store. I found an old New Yorker from 1972, which had a crayola’d 25 cents marked on it. I figured it was cheaper than the Guinness, better too, but on presenting the fee, the clerk told me that it cost 75 cents, not 25 cents. To my obvious economic confusion, he explained that used magazines are one-half of the current price, not the price of the magazine when originally sold. In other words, a used New Yorker costs 25 cents more, fifty percent, than when originally sold. There is a lesson here, no doubt pertinent to the revision of the economic pastoral.
Anyhow, I found in this 1972 New Yorker this clerical end-note taken from a paper not in Hagerstown, but from the Anna Marie Beachcomber, in Florida—no doubt from the diocese of the non-genuflecting bishop. It read, “About 90 people gathered at the clubroom Sunday evening to hear the Pastor describe… as well as he could, what heaven will be like.”
Well, you can’t blame a man for trying, right? I wonder if they genuflect in heaven? Can the best get better? Can the first improve? Alas, in spite of the new Coke, I doubt it. Not even a Wodehouse or a Muggeridge could improve much on these accounts from real life—which continues to be, I suspect, more marvelous than anything we could possibly make up. That is probably why life was given to us in the first place.