Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of The Pittsburgh That Stays Within You Review of If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes Review of Anson County Review of Dissolution of Ghosts Crossword (Solution Posted in July. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Mar/Apr Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction 1998 By Samuel Hazo Booing the Pope By Matthew D. Taylor Sgt. Robert Starbuck, USMC: Elegy and Essay By John Guthrie Shrink Wrap, Diet Cokes and a Kazoo By Sara J. Ford Poetry And the Time Is By Samuel Hazo In His Winter By Wanda D. Campbell Lester By Thomas Reynolds Generation Gap By Valerie Lauria Stanske Two Poets By Gary C. Wilkens Mongolia, 1930 By Gary C. Wilkens Fiction A Death in the Family By John Speeking Letters By Suzanne Abbot Among the Briars By Pat Tompkins Filling in the Angles By Jessica DelBalzo Miss Mary By Beth L. Block Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html.

Booing the Pope By Matthew D. Taylor In October, 1977, when I was 10 years old, I booed the Pope. That’s right, standing in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, I booed Pope Paul VI. I went to Italy with my parents on what was nominally a business trip. My father, the president of a commercial printing company in San Francisco for 25 years, planned the trip to purchase a new printing press, and asked my mother and me to come along. I don’t recall an explanation of why I was chosen to go, since I have two older sisters and a younger brother, nor do I recall why I was allowed to skip school to do so. I just recall feeling privileged being asked, feeling it was a demonstration of some faith my parents had in me. I was determined to be on my best behavior, never giving my parents cause to regret their decision. After boarding an airliner in San Francisco for New York, then overnight from New York to Italy, we arrived in Milan. Milan was where the presses were manufactured, where the business part of the business trip was to take place. Also on the trip with us was my father’s chief pressman, a jovial Italian-American from San Francisco’s North Beach district, and together he and my father visited the factory and a printing company nearby in Switzerland while my mother took me around gray Milan. Our hotel was centrally located in the city and my mother and I saw all we could within walking distance. We climbed to the roof of the duomo, Milan’s monumental cathedral, and strolled through the Galleria. We dodged traffic and ate roasted chestnuts warm from street vendors. Milan looked drearily urban, but I was enjoying myself. It was a new and exciting place, unfamiliar in a good way. I felt far away. When my father’s business concluded, we continued to make the most of Italy. We boarded a train for a two-day stay in Venice. I was deeply impressed by Venice, that strange city where the canals are the streets and there are no cars, so very unlike the California where I was born and raised. I lived on croissants for breakfast and chicken tortellini soup washed down with orange soda for lunch. We fed the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco and bought gifts for my sisters and brother. After Venice, we boarded another train for Rome. By this time, I had fallen in love with Italy, all the way across the world from home. Moreover, I was spending time with my parents, just the three of us for once in my life. And we were entering the ancient capital of Rome, a place of such history, such import, such meaning to Western civilization. As a 10-year-old, I did not know much about Rome, but I certainly knew of Rome. I felt privileged to be there, but also, at some level, I felt that I deserved to be there, that, of anybody I knew, I certainly qualified for this trip. I was being rewarded for something, the nature of which I could not have articulated at the time but that I believed about myself without question. Perhaps now I should explain that I am not, nor ever have been, a Catholic. In fact, I am far from it. My parents grew up as generic Presbyterians, and for the first few years of my life, my family went to Presbyterian churches. None of my friends at that time were Catholic. Most were either Jewish or attended churches of various Protestant denominations. A few seemed unchurched altogether. Before entering the Cathedral in Milan, I cannot recall having ever been inside a Catholic church of any kind. And if I was aware of who the Pope was, it was a very, very fuzzy awareness. Sometime when I was around six or seven years old, we began attending an Assemblies of God church in Walnut Creek, California. The Assemblies of God are a loose affiliation of churches nationwide that fall under the broad category of Pentecostal Christians. They describe themselves as evangelical, charismatic, full-Gospel, Spirit-filled. Their doctrine, as best I ever understood, is based on a literal reading of the Bible, and on a belief in Jesus as God’s son, a divine being in human form and the one and only savior of the fallen human race. They believe in the speaking of tongues, the visitation of the Holy Spirit, the spreading of the Gospel at every opportunity, and that the Second Coming of Jesus is imminent. This is what I, at an impressionable age, was taught as unquestionable truth. This was the one true way. Of course, the corollary to that statement is that everyone else was wrong. Members of my church rarely spoke against Catholics directly. Much was taught about the fallacies of Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, and most other global religions, but Catholics were held in special regard. They were Christians, yes, but Christians gone astray, Christians caught in a flawed system. Many believed that Catholics, given some time with an evangelist bearing a Bible and a free moment to pray, would re-dedicate their lives to Christ and be brought back to true salvation. The Pope stood as an obstacle that must be overcome so that Catholics could be freed from the empty ritual of the Roman Church. I detected a tinge of bitterness from Pentecostals toward Catholics, as when someone feels betrayed by a family member and stubbornness blocks the way to any reconciliation or understanding. Catholics were wayward children who needed to be brought back to Jesus. It is a bit odd when you think about it, this adversarial relationship, since on many issues, such as homosexuality and abortion, Catholics and Pentecostals agree. The differences, however, were less practical than that. They lay in more doctrinal matters of access to God and the true road to salvation. The mental picture I had of the Pope, then, was as the leader of a rival religion in a competition for souls. He was the Holy Father to millions of people who believed it was good enough to have been born into a religion, to go to church every week and be blessed by a priest, to do what the Pope said to do. My belief was that dedicating my life to Jesus Christ, being born again in Christ, had to be a choice I made for myself. The truth lay in the direct line from the individual to God, through Jesus Christ as our only intercessor—not the Pope, not Mary, and definitely not the Saints. The Pentecostals interpreted of the Papal claim to be the Vicar of Christ to mean that he was at best a distraction from, at worst an obstruction to obtaining true salvation. Christians were supposed to be followers of Jesus, not the Pope. The Pope was a bad dude. *** The weather when we arrived in Rome was warmer and drier compared to the seaside dampness of Venice and the northern cold of Milan. Our hotel was comfortable, located on a busy, narrow street typical of the city. Once we were settled in, we set out to see the famous sights. I was amazed by each thing that I saw, heard, tasted or touched, from the simplest to the grandest. Everything was monumental and auspicious. A soccer game being played in a low stadium ringed around the top with giant statues of Greco-Roman athletes was impressive enough to be worth a few pictures. The food, the elevators, the telephones, they were all familiar and yet foreign at the same time, a paradox that I found endlessly appealing, but also disorienting. The grandest sites were almost overwhelming. Visiting the Colosseum, I was taken by a feeling of unreality, as if my eyes were fooling me. I felt I needed some physical evidence to prove to myself that these places were not illusory. Before our tour bus left for the next stop, I walked myself over to the Arch of Constantine, honoring the deeds of Rome’s first Christian Emperor, and placed my bare hand against the ancient stone. In that way, I was able to commune with Rome, both the modern place and its ancient past. I was able to greet Rome, introduce myself, perhaps get a little stone dust on my palm, perhaps leave a few epidermal cells on the stone. It was a transaction I was compelled to perform because eyes and ears alone were not enough to find a sense of scale. Later, we met up with the brother of the pastor of our church, who was in Rome with his family as missionaries for the Assemblies of God. He took us to see the Roman Catacombs, the tunnels under the city where the early Christians had practiced the rites of their new religion, hidden from the threat of constant persecution by the agents of the Empire. It was, I now realize, a perfect metaphor. We, the Christian Fundamentalists, the true Christians, had entered this ancient city of power, still ruled by the Imperial Papacy in all its glory. We were there to make a statement. We were there to set things right. Why else would the Assemblies of God establish a mission in Rome? In retrospect, the hubris is astonishing, considering that the membership of the Assemblies of God was only a small fraction of that of the Roman Catholic Church. Here I was, this California boy, transported to a place distant in both miles and in time, trying to make sense of it all from my fairly simple perspective. I perhaps can be forgiven some of my conclusions. It did not occur to me, for instance, that the beliefs and teachings of the Assemblies of God might be misunderstood by those outside our church community. I accepted them completely and were all I knew. I did not understand how judgmental I was about others who chose not to believe as I did. I did not understand the adverse reaction I was capable of creating. Our arrival at the Vatican inspired still more awe and wonder. The broad expanse of St. Peter’s Square, the monumental steps leading into the Basilica, the Basilica itself, all worked their magic just as their architects had intended. We saw Michelangelo’s Pieta, five years after an unbalanced man took a hammer to it. Was it behind glass, especially protected against any future assault? In my memory, there was nothing to obstruct my view of the grieving Mary cradling the dead Christ, rendered perfectly in the brilliant white marble. Honestly, the 1972 mutilation of the Pieta I often get confused with the 1991 attack on Michelangelo’s David in Florence. As I remember it, the statue made all things around it dim to insignificance. Further in, we saw the bronze of St. Peter and the Papal throne. The tiled floor seemed to extend to the horizon. Soaring columns lifted upwards vast spaces under a sweeping roof. It was a surreal experience, surreal in a good way, like a beautiful dream that you want never to wake from. And there was little opportunity for any tactile experience to bring it back into the realm of the real. I felt watched—by the crowds, by my parents, by God—and thus kept my hands to myself, using only my eyes and ears to take in the grandeur of St. Peter’s. They proved inadequate to handle the volume of input. I had trouble finding a sense of scale. Where did I fit into this picture? What were the joint and several reasons I was there, in that place, at that time? What series of events took me there? Without a proper point of reference, I overestimated myself. The world is a much more multi-faceted and intricately layered place than I understood at the time. I was actually very moralistic, a believer in absolutes, and I had few doubts about being right. To be fair to my 10-year-old self, most children think that way. But I was perhaps especially unprepared for the diplomacy required when visiting a different culture. My parents, as all parents strive to do, protected me as best they could from hardship. I grew up in well-built houses in safe neighborhoods, went to safe schools, had respectable friends. I never lacked food to eat or clothes to wear. Conflict was rare and always somewhere else. Arguments my parents had were quickly taken out of earshot of the children. Money was never discussed. The government and our church were rarely criticized in my presence. I felt that my life had order and purpose. I never doubted that I would complete school, go to college, be gainfully employed and a contributing member of society. There was one path, and I was on it. Being good provides earthly rewards, and I was proof of that. The upshot of all this is that I had no exposure to differing experiences of the world from which to create a more balanced, less judgmental perspective. I was unable to relate on a personal level to a large portion of the global population, people whose lives are hard and full of uncertainty. Millions of people find comfort in a religion that provides absolution from sin and hope of better things to come, a religion with structure, with ritual, a religion that provides guidance from authority, that changes little from year to year, that provides perhaps the one consistent thing in their unpredictable lives, a religion that does not feel like it was invented yesterday, that has the weight of history on its side. Even into my first years in college, where I interacted with a greater variety of races, nationalities and religions than ever before, I continued to think and behave as if I knew what was good and right and true, until my experiences demanded that I find a new perspective. From this flimsy perch, then, I launched myself into the next events. Leaving the Basilica, we exited out into St. Peter’s Square. My parents told me that we might see the Pope, so we waited a bit with a small crowd of people. The windows to the Papal Apartments opened at last. A long, narrow purple cloth was draped outside the open window, to toss in the cool breeze. A figure in white appeared at the window, raising his hands with blessings for the people, speaking words I could faintly hear and certainly did not understand. My mother drew my attention to him and told me that it was the Pope. I could barely see him. There I stood in St. Peter’s Square, determined to be on my best behavior, yet sure I was there for a reason, certain that there was something unacceptable about the Pope but unsure where I fit into this event. There I stood, surrounded by people with life experiences completely different from my own, on ancient ground, on the home turf of a global religion. Standing there, in St. Peter’s Square, in a moment of spontaneity, I let out a loud, confident boo. I booed the Pope. My mother turned to me with a jerk, shooting me a look of shock and disapproval. I immediately stopped and suddenly, with a feeling of deflation, felt ashamed. Confusion set in as I quietly pondered where I went wrong. My mother, who I was sure was on my side, immediately recognized the wrongness of my behavior. How could I have missed it? It has obviously taken me many years to sort out what it was that brought me to boo the Pope at the very doorstep of his Church, where I could have found the key information with which to judge my size, my position, my velocity. Pope Paul could not hear me that day and probably would not have been concerned even if he had. But the people around me in St. Peter’s Square—and in the city of Rome, and in the entire Catholic world—these were the people I insulted with my juvenile, self-righteous behavior. And they demonstrated enough virtue to keep any reactions they might have felt to themselves. Just ten months after my little outburst, Pope Paul VI died on August 6, 1978, three days after my eleventh birthday. I remember hearing about it in the news. I did not discuss my experience at the Vatican with anyone and I have not been back since. I would like to return someday, to visit St. Peter’s again, so that I could experience the place with a more reverent heart and mind. Until then, this essay will have to suffice as an apology. There may exist someone in this world who is qualified to boo the Pope, but it is not me.