Page 208 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK196 Jack FritscherLife poured into my very being. Senses glutting, digesting. Soul expanding like a sponge in sweet deep water. I, among them, moving, smiling, seeing, hardly being seen, listening, nodding, smiling, feeling, leaping nearly, wanting to reach out, touch, grasp all to me to protect them, to save them, to lock them all forever into their happiness.My own mother was thrilled at the prospect of being known as the mother of a priest. My own father counted the days until he was the father of a priest.Sun soaked deep into the black wool of my cassock. I felt like David Niven in Around the World in Eighty Days, floating in a balloon high above the world, watching out for it, landing on a white bench among the shade trees where three little girls in Sunday dresses played hide-and-seek.%u201cRyan,%u201d Lock called. %u201cCome here.%u201dI turned, seeing him all in black break from the colorful crowd.%u201cCome quick,%u201d he said. %u201cLive ones.%u201dI walked toward him. He took my arm and I went cold. On no day but this would one seminarian dare touch another without wrestling for a hold. On Ordination Day, Lock thought nothing of it, forgot the rule completely. He wanted me to meet, I had to, really had to, he said, meet this wonderful group of lay people come for the Ordination. He%u2019d run into them, quite by accident, them asking for directions on the lawn. I really had to meet them. Particularly this one couple who were writers. I really had to, he said, and he pulled me toward them, a rare cast to his always precise eye.Five guests stood in an eager, curious circle that opened expectantly to receive us. A gaunt thin girl with a high forehead stood between an acnefaced boy and a tall smiling man with yellowish skin. The girl gestured frantically across the circle to a shorter man. He reached into his green suit and produced a package of cigarettes. The big woman next to him frowned, started to speak, but seeing us, instead showed her teeth and placed a small white-gloved hand lightly across her enormous breast.%u201cI could cry.%u201d She was being wonderful. %u201cI could just cry meeting all you dear sweet dedicated boys at once.%u201d%u201cThis is Ryan O%u2019Hara,%u201d Lock said.%u201cHow do you do?%u201d I looked directly at the thin girl with the unlit cigarette. She looked petulant. I spoke directly to her. %u201cHow do you do?%u201d She seemed as if speech were an effort beneath her. The big woman intervened. %u201cHow do we do? Not so well as you, Mr. O%u2019Hara,%u201d she said. %u201cNot nearly so well as you. Or should I call you %u2018Father O%u2019Hara%u2019?%u201d