We finally arrived in Steubenville, which was the name of the town in which the college we were to visit was located. As we did, the air seemed to become thick not just with smoke but also with desperation. I couldn’t avoid noticing the poverty and living conditions. It was a dramatic change for me. I had never seen things like that in Toronto. I was in foreign territory, all right, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I vaguely considered mentioning the names of a few colleges in California to my dad. California — at least the California of my imagination — was all gleaming and new, and I was sure it would smell more like the sea than like soot.
The university itself turned out not to be the most spectacularly beautiful thing I had ever come across, but as my dad and I drove onto the campus it looked exciting to me. How could it not? It was going to be the scene of my adventure. The school, by the way, was called Franciscan University, and it was named after St. Francis of Assisi. Despite my very Protestant upbringing, I knew a little about him (who didn’t?): he was kind; he liked animals, especially the cute, cuddly ones; he had an affinity for birdbaths.
My dad and I were given a dorm room to share. We were given tours of the campus. We were given brochures and other reading material. The students in general were surprisingly kind and welcoming. They seemed to like me, and I was impressed with their obvious good taste. I saw a few crosses (different from the ones I was used to: these had a crucified Jesus hanging from them) and other Christian symbols. I noticed the chapel and thought it looked weird and not like a church is supposed to look, but that was about the only impression that the religious nature of the place made on me. I had other, more important things on my mind.
I was biding my time, you see, eager for my adventure to begin. And finally my moment came. My dad was otherwise occupied and would be for a while. Seizing the opportunity, I told him I was going for a walk and made my way up a hill past the weird chapel to the academic buildings. I tried to work up some interest in them but found I couldn’t, as they were just dull, drab, three-story brick buildings, about as boring as it was possible for anything to be.
So I continued wandering, heading toward the center of the campus, soon finding myself in the J. C. Williams Student Center. Miracle of miracles, it housed a campus pub, and almost immediately this pub started to exert some strange gravitational pull on my body and maybe even my soul. It was clear that I was in the grip of a powerful force. Resistance was futile, so I had no choice but to let myself be drawn inside. There I discovered that the miracles continued: beer was on sale for a mere fifty cents! Yes, this must be the place for me after all, I realized in a vaguely revelatory moment. My father was a very wise man, and Catholics were obviously very practical people.
Thanks to my above average height and a fake ID (which my dad didn’t know about), I soon had my first can of American beer. Every drop was indescribably terrible, but I discovered that with perseverance and quantity the taste slowly but steadily improved. I was soon having a good time — the good time I had come to Steubenville to have. Despite being only sixteen years old, I was being accepted by college students as an equal, and that filled me with pride. I was feeling happier and happier, and I was becoming louder and louder.
Then in my growing exuberance I suddenly stopped, beer in hand, transfixed by a maple leaf on an article of clothing not far away. At home, this would be a common place occurrence, but I was far from home, a universe away from Toronto. I was in Ohio, in the United States, at a school named after a Catholic saint who liked animals. Maple leafs were out of place here. As I expanded my slightly fuzzy focus, the face of a shaggy haired, unshaven young man came into view. He was older than I was but not by very much, and seeing his maple leaf T-shirt was like beholding an oasis in the desert. After all, I was an expatriate, an exile who had found a fellow countryman. I was overcome with emotion.
Thank You, Sir. May I Have Another?
Slightly buzzed extrovert that I was, I jumped up to introduce myself to the only other Canadian in Ohio — the only other one for miles around, perhaps the only other one in the whole state of Ohio. Mark was his name, and he came from Montreal. Within minutes we were swapping stories from north of the border … and drinking more beer. We would be friends for life; I could feel it. Much to my amazement I learned from him that there was yet another Canadian on campus — a member of Mark’s fraternity who hailed from the Toronto area, just as I did. There were actually three of us! I had to meet him. We would become a triumvirate; we would go down in the history of this school.
And meet him I did, as Mark and I soon left the pub and made our way to a dorm where many of his Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity brothers — the TKEs — lived with plentiful beer in their rooms. The rest of the evening was spent meeting — and drinking with — the other brothers in the fraternity and enjoying their generous hospitality. By the end of the night, I was completely blasted and completely certain that Franciscan University was the place for me. I was going to be a TKE, and who cared that the place was Catholic? In fact, who even remembered? It was a place where I would be happy, and that was good enough for me.
My exuberance began to fade a little as, in the early hours of the morning, I made my way back to the dorm room I shared with my dad, weaving every inch of the way. I discovered as I walked that someone apparently had moved the dorm since I had left it hours before — moved it and put it very far away. But I got there somehow and, incredibly, managed not to wake my dad as I fell heavily half onto and half off of my bed.
If somebody had told me that I had taken a small, almost infinitesimal, step toward becoming a Catholic that day, I would have laughed out loud. But I had.
Chapter 3
A Fish Out of Water
And Jesus wept.
— John 11:35
The miracles that flowed from that day continued, and they were not limited to cheap and plentiful beer. The first miracle was that my father forgave me for getting rip-roaring drunk and going missing until the early hours of the morning. The second was that after an appropriate period of anxious waiting, I was accepted at Franciscan University. So, several months later, after my rather inauspicious first visit, my dad and I were back in Steubenville. This time our car was stuffed with just about everything I owned, and my head was stuffed with dreams of becoming a TKE — certainly not with those of becoming a Catholic. I was excited, raring to go.
The odd thing was that I somehow still didn’t really comprehend the intensely Catholic nature of the place that I, who knew nothing but Protestantism, was about to enter. My father did, but he was playing his cards close to his vest. I was very aware that the school was Catholic, of course; I had actually seen Franciscan friars in their long medieval-looking habits and knotted white cords (what was up with that?) on our first visit. But I didn’t really grasp that they weren’t just some quaint Steubenville custom, like a mascot at a football game — that they meant business. That would come, of course, but not for a while.
I did have some concerns, however. The most important of these was that I wanted — needed — to be paired with a suitable roommate. The word “suitable,” as I’m using it here, should be understood in the following way: No judgmental Catholics need apply. But since I assumed that all Catholics were by definition judgmental, I realized the pool of possible applicants in a place like Steubenville might be relatively small (maybe even minute).
I hardly knew anything about Catholics at that point — and not only that, I didn’t even know I didn’t know much about them. What I thought I knew was little more than a mixture of nonsense, prejudice, and misinformation. That, of course, did not stop me from having deep emotional and mostly negative opinions. As I look back, I sometimes wonder where those opinions came from — certainly not from my father, who was always warmly disposed toward Catholics; he even seemed to admire some of them. It didn’t come from my mother either, one of the most gracious and charitable people on the planet. I even had a couple of close Catholic