When I walk across my university campus - or even just look out at my students in class - it looks like a meeting of the United Nations.
I have about 50 percent students who are arguably Caucasian, but the rest are a mix of Latino, Asian, African-American and every subgroup imaginable.
Lately, I have had several Irish students in each class - Irish as in from Ireland, studying in the U.S. because it's actually cheap, given the state of the U.S. dollar versus the Euro.
Isn't that something.
But I posted a brief entry on the Yahoo site because I was part of the Catholic minority at SWCS, a small enough group, though I hardly felt any kind of discrimination. As a group, the Class of '66 was a pretty secular outfit when it came to our school and comings and goings.
I only remember getting extremely pissed off during the summer when my mother would drag me to church every Sunday about 10 a.m. while my Protestant buddies would be out waterskiing and getting all the flat water before the wind came up.
I learned about religious intolerance when I was dating my first wife, who was from Titusville, Penn. whose family had a strong dislike - no, make that hatred - of anyone of the Catholic faith.
To their credit, most of that family was up front about it, my now ex-father-in-law telling me early in that relationship that no Catholic would marry his daughter and if she were foolish enough to marry a Papist (Isn't that a term!), well, he would never walk her down the aisle.
He didn't have too, as I wasn't much of Papist and got married by a Justice of the Peace. Could his name have been Willard Ayres in Busti? Whoever he was, I had stood before him on other occasions for speeding tickets. Then the night I was married, I had three double Manhattans at The Pub which somehow convinced me he was the right guy to perform the ceremony that snowy December night in 1969. There was a blizzard but somehow my '65 Mustang made it there and back.
The one thing I do remember about the difference between being Catholic vs. Protestant in elementary school was Friday lunches.
Catholics, at the time, were forbidden to eat meat, so we had such sumptious choices as fish sticks or tuna noodle casserole.
To this day, the smell of a tuna noodle casserole makes me almost as ill as a whiff of Scotch whiskey.
This all reminds me that I haven't actually attended a Mass in at least, well, I can't even remember. In Mexico, though, I stop in at every church I visit, usually lighting a candle for my late mother who was very devoute.
Missing Mass means I've also missed out on the one part of being Catholic that I thought had a leg up on most other religions: going to confession.
If I understand my Catholic dogma correctly, you can go out all week, sin like crazy, go to confession and be absolved. Voila - goodbye sins!
A pretty good deal I suppose, even if you do miss the flat water early in the morning.
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