Less dramatically, I mowed lawns for a pittance, pushing ancient and often ill-maintained reel mowers through sometimes impossibly long grass for hours on end, blistering my tender hands in the process. Then old Father Marshman, who tended to view our family as a ready source of indentured servants, hired me on as part-time janitor for the parish church. At least my lawn mowing improved, as I cut the extensive church and school lawns with a roaring rotary power mower. But most of the church work I was required to do was either boring or disgusting. Every week I had to wash, wax, and buff the church floor, which seemed about the size of a football field. While other kids were out playing baseball or idling away their summers at lakeside cottages in Muskoka country or making good money caddying at golf courses, I’d spend hours on my hands and knees rubbing with steel wool at black marks indelibly imprinted on the church’s linoleum tile floor by cheap rubber pads on the kneelers. Cleaning ashtrays, toilets, and the kitchen of the parish hall after weddings or dances, revolting as it was, at least instilled in me an abiding empathy for people compelled to do such work for a living.
All of these formative experiences with “good, old-fashioned hard work” fell into the category of work as necessary evil, something one is compelled to do in order to survive. The money earned was the sole rationale for doing it. There was no question of job satisfaction, no delight in the nobility of honest labor, no sense of locking muscular arms in unity with the workers of the world. My father worked at jobs of not much better caliber all of his life, but I don’t believe it would have occurred to him to complain that the work was boring, repetitive, or unfulfilling. He considered himself fortunate to have a secure job that allowed him to support his family and buy a house. Expecting nothing more, he made the best of it, taking pleasure in his gardens rather than the job that made them possible. For him garden work seemed more a hobby, a form of relaxation. I can remember him being out in the summer garden for hours in blazing hot sunshine, wearing no shirt or hat and returning to the house with blisters all over his back. But he didn’t complain. I suspect he was happier in his garden than anywhere else. None of us kids took any interest in his gardens, nor did he encourage us to do so, likely because he loved the peace and quiet of working alone.
We did not socialize with, or indeed even know, any of his coworkers. He had nothing good to say about the union at the t tc , and apparently little sense of its having won for him the few privileges he enjoyed. I can remember him describing the popular socialist politician Tommy Douglas as “a dirty little Communist.”
From very early on, I knew this life was not for me, but escape from the dungeon of unrewarding work was not as readily imaginable to the children of the British working class as it perhaps was to many North Americans, at least white ones. My brothers and I did not grow up with an expectation of attending university. My mother liked to emphasize that for people in our situation the two time-tested avenues for “getting ahead” were the military and the Church. For a brief time I did become infatuated with militarism— I suppose it was a logical progression from my gun-totin’ cowboy phase—and began an avid study of warplanes and their armaments. I painstakingly glued together flimsy bits of balsa wood to create model fighters and bombers. The successful deployment of the first Soviet Sputnik during my grade 8 year ignited an interest in rocketry, and I took to making rockets propelled by metal cylinders packed with gunpowder extracted from fireworks. The air show at the Canadian National Exhibition came to rival the excitement of radio disc jockeys in their glass booths. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that my terror of heights might be a wee bit of an impediment to a career as a fighter pilot.
I REACHED A great watershed at the end of grade 8. The choice I faced was either to attend the nearby public high school—a daunting place rife with vice and immorality—or try to get accepted by one of the three exclusive Catholic boys’ high schools in the city. Paying the tuition fee was out of the question; my only hope was to win a scholarship. An immense anxiety gripped me as I journeyed alone by bus to these distant schools to sit for the scholarship exams. Then came nervous weeks of waiting, and finally the grand news—I’d won a scholarship to Michael Power High on the city’s west side. I’m convinced that the only reason I succeeded was that dear Sister Rosalie had secretly provided me beforehand with copies of the examination papers used in the previous few years, in which many of the same questions recurred year after year. Quite how she justified this chicanery I never thought to ask.
As it turned out, this was a favor I could well have done without, for my grade 9 year at Michael Power was one of the most miserable of my life. The school had been founded only two years earlier by the Basilian Fathers and was a long commute from home, involving three different city buses. None of my pals from elementary school went to Michael Power, and I largely lost touch with them. Apart from a few scholarship kids like me, the student body came from wealthy Catholic families, the sons of doctors and lawyers and bankers. While some were thoughtful and intelligent, a disproportionate number were vulgar and arrogant bullies. Older ones would physically intimidate us younger kids and they in turn would be physically intimidated by a couple of the brawny Basil-ians. Some years later the school was amalgamated with a nearby Catholic girls’ school, and today it boasts an active social justice program and a code of conduct that promotes “responsibility, respect, civility, and academic excellence in a safe learning and teaching environment.” But that was scarcely the tone during my brief stay. I hated the bullies and I hated the place and, of course, soon came to hate myself as well. No longer able to deliver newspapers after school, I kept on with the dismal janitorial work at our church, but as for the charms of capitalism, the bloom was definitely off the rose.
After a year of high school hell, it didn’t take much for me to convince myself that I had a vocation, called by God to the priesthood. I’d been more or less prepped for this all along. Our family’s deep piety, our almost fanatical attendance at daily Mass and other religious observances, our diligence in work, plus the fact that I usually secured top marks in class, all conspired toward repeated suggestions from various priests and nuns that I think seriously about becoming a priest. As a final inducement, my brother Ger had gone off to the seminary the year before, returning home for the summer holidays with tales of the marvelous time he was having there. Detesting my home, my school, and my work, I decided to answer God’s call.
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet.
Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
JOHN CIARDI, Simmons Review, Fall 1962
AT THE TENDER AGE OF fifteen, bristling with anxiety and excitement, I entered Holy Cross Seminary in Dunkirk, New York, in the fall of 1960. Operated by a monastic order known as the Passionist Fathers, the preparatory seminary represented the initial stage of a long and demanding journey toward becoming a monk and eventual ordination to the priesthood. “The Sem,” as we called it, was a sprawling, four-story brick building with crenellated roofline, set amid seventy acres of fields and woods. Physically the place appealed to me immensely—the venerable old building, the sense of religious depth that echoed along its silent corridors, in its chapel and library, refectory and study hall. Outdoors it was everything I loved, set in a rural area, with mature trees, expansive fields, woodlands through which