Now We Are Sixty-Five

My young friend, Charles, muses on his 65th birthday earlier this month, and on all the changes in both society and the Church that have taken place in those 65 years. I wish I were 65 again! There's been much water under the bridge in the last 13 years.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while
—Don McLean, “American Pie.”

This last November 8, I passed a milestone – I turned 65 years of age.  There was no gold watch nor pension awaiting me; as with many junior boomers, my retirement plan is to work until I drop – in all likelihood my retirement village is Notre Dame Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts, wherein lies my family plot.  But the young people here in Trumau gave me a truly wonderful party, the memory of which I’ll always treasure.  As always, they remind me that there is a present and a future as well as a past, a lesson people my age can profit from being constantly reminded of.

Nevertheless, it is to the past that we’ll first address ourselves, not least because the older one gets, the larger a part of one’s life it becomes.  In my case, I first opened my eyes in the old Doctors’ Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  As it happened, it was the day that John F. Kennedy was elected president of these United States.  My parents were actors to begin with, having met on a radio stage.  In some ways they were very Bohemian, in terms of the literary and theatrical people they knew; but at the same time they were conventional on terms of tastes.  Both were devout Catholics and remained so until they died.  Dad had been a Tail Gunner in World War II against the Japanese.  His French Canadian heritage (although his English was perfect, French was his first and favourite language), his Catholic Faith, the army, and the theatre shaped him in different ways; so too with my mother, whose background was much more exotic.  Dad would take my brother and me to the Natural History Museum; Mom would bring us to the Met.  In some ways that symbolises their differing but complementary roles in our upbringings.

At any rate, Dad was at the time a New York Guardsman, a Knight of Columbus, a member of the New York Civil War Round Table, and an American Legionnaire.  We had a home in Mount Kisco and split our time between there and the city.  My brother and me would hunt for crayfish and painted turtles in the nearby creeks, and on weekends – especially Sunday after Latin Mass at St. Francis – we’d explore the countryside, with its colonial buildings and graveyards.  These forays would end with dinner at long-vanished spots like the Log Cabin in Armonk.

But financial reverses caused Dad to move us to Hollywood, California.  There, at Blessed Sacrament Church and School, Jesuits and IHM Sisters threw us into the maelstrom of the post-Vatican II era.  The hippies abounded in Hollywood, and by chance we had rented our apartment from the Amazing Criswell, a then famous television psychic whose antics with his various …er…unusual cronies at once amused and horrified us.  Little did we know these three circles of insanity would be the perfect preparation for the remainder of the century and the first quarter of the next.

The 1960s became the 1970s, and the ideas of the Counterculture were institutionalised over the next decade.  My brother and I were active in the Boy Scouts – both of us becoming Eagles.  Styles and music took a nosedive while first my brother and then myself dealt with High School.  All the while, the spectre of the Soviets loomed over all – while the many Central European and Russian emigres my family and I knew were concrete reminders of what would happen if they triumphed.  In Junior High I discovered Tolkien, and that encounter began a wild series of discoveries which still shows no sign of ending.  I met Cardinal McIntyre my freshman year, and he would be my confessor through High School.  He recommended I visit the Anglo-Catholic parish of St. Mary of the Angels, and through them encountered Fr. Feodor Wilcock, S.J., and the Russian Catholic church of St. Andrew in El Segundo.  At that time, I first began to consider myself a Monarchist.  Then, in 1978, I set off to college at New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico; adulthood began.

Looking back from 2025 to that far off world of my youth is in some ways a painful exercise.  My parents are gone, and every month carries away at least one old friend; last September was a bumper crop, as five of my old friends took their final curtain.  When I return to Los Angeles, it has become a city of ghosts, every corner offering poignant memories for reflection. 

But pulling out of personal reveries, one looks to the larger picture.  In matters ecclesiastical, it has been quite a roller-coaster ride.  When I was a boy, it seemed as though every time one turned around something new and strange would come out of Rome liturgically.  Eucharistic Ministers eroded belief in the Real Presence for a great many; priests declaring that one no longer needed the Rosary and/or the Sacred Heart and the almost complete evaporation of Benediction and Adoration really devastated the Vineyard.  The “Catholic” education imparted by parochial schools routinely turned out non-Catholics; Traditionalists were rooted out and punished at Catholic institutions, while dissenters from defined dogma (and especially Humanae Vitae) were lionised.  By the time I left High School, despite a number of clerical friends – most particularly His late Eminence of Los Angeles – I was left with a distrust of the clergy in general which has never left me.

Things improved considerably under John Paul II and especially Benedict XVI.  But the latter’s departure allowed those members of that generation of priests under whom I grew up – at least, those who were not dead, in jail, or out of the priesthood – to attempt to pick up where 45 years of renewed adult supervision had forced them to leave off.  Pope Francis was a powerful source of nostalgia for me, as he said the kinds of things at the highest level that I had heard from many a local pulpit in my far-off youth.  At the moment, the terror has simply continued at the diocesan level in the new Pontificate.

What has distinguished the current political scene from that of my childhood and youth – other than the acceptance of infanticide and other sorts of evil as sacred rights by all parties here and abroad – has been the dissipation of anything one might call a “mainstream,” or a “centre.”  There are two utterly opposed narratives, whose proponents inhabit different universes.  The year I was born, Nixon and Kennedy could agree as to goals, differing only on the means of getting there.  That America is utterly gone, deader than Austria-Hungary.

Of course, politics are downstream of culture, and the cultural changes in America and abroad that I have seen are enormous.  Literacy is a thing of the past to a great degree, and even the vocabulary is shrinking.  I have no connexion to to-day’s music: folk, big bands, and doowop are pretty much what I listen to.  In the arts and even in personal appearance there is a cult of ugliness that has its remote origins in the Counterculture of my childhood – but which in itself aspired to colour and a sort of Renaissance Faire-style flair.  Now, rich and poor alike dress in ways that my father would say makes them look like bums. 

The whole Trans thing, quite apart from its other annoyances, is another step in the attack on both masculinity and femininity that has been going on my whole life.  I was blessed to have parents who were at once secure in and happy and proud with their respective gender roles.  Gender specific clothing and behaviour has been in slow decline my entire life.  Even the continually attacked practise of smoking was so presented to me – my father’s cigars and pipe definitely differed from my mother’s cigarettes and holder.  I had no desire to wield the latter but certainly appreciated its grace and style.  So too with drinks; my father’s rye whiskey and brandy stood in stark contrast to mother’s Sidecars, Brandy Alexanders, King Alphonses.  Different their styles were, but how they came together when they danced!  Indeed, it was my mother who taught me to dance, and I shall always be grateful to her for it.  Indeed, I came to realise that the assault on masculinity and femininity were really attacks on Fatherhood and Motherhood – ultimately, on Christ-God and His Mother, the ultimate exemplars of both qualities.

All of these things have continued through the long decades of my adulthood down to the present.  What has my strategy been in dealing with them all?  My first tactic, adopted from my father’s arsenal, is to laugh at any enemy I cannot defeat – which is to say, the dominant forces in Church, State, and Society.  It is better to laugh than to curse, because the one brings what joy you may find in a situation, whereas the other will make you more like the devil who is ultimately behind it all.

But beyond that, one must pray, receive the Sacraments as often as possible, and try to separate the wheat from the chaff in one’s religious life.  My father said to me that there is no greater act of humility than to go to a priest for confession whom one despises.  Thus if it is a choice between going to such a cleric or not getting the Sacrament, I shall go.  Holy Communion has become more and ever more important, a daily trip to Heaven which makes the darkness in which we all must stumble more bearable.  Various Saints, the Rosary, the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, the Precious Blood, the Kingship of Christ and the Queenship of Mary, Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces (as one of my favourite Papally-indulgenced prayers puts it) – all become key to maintaining sanity.

Matters of dress, bearing, and etiquette become all the more important, as reminders of where one has come from – both in time, space, and DNA.  Finding congenial bars, restaurants, clubs, hotels, pubs, and the like provide refuge from current but passing “realities,” and allow one to concentrate on what is real and true.  Of course, old friends become ever more important – not simply to remain grounded in one’s past, but to gauge things in the present.  As one ages, their passing becomes more frequent, and one is very much aware that one’s own turn looms.  This too is important, because it reminds one that death, judgement, Heaven, and Hell are not only the ultimate realities – more important than those who wield power over us, and our own pleasures and pains – but what we come closer to, day by day.

All my adult life I have tried, in various ways, to educate, and to entertain.  I have not always lived up to the high ideals my parents left me, but I have tried to pass them on.  The times I live in now would be completely alien to my parents and mentors – even as the world in which the young people I know now shall be completely alien to me.  But I hope to pass on tools and weapons that shall be useful to them, even as mine did for me.

For the truth is, whatever the joys of remembering the past, it is the present in which we all must live, and the future for which we older folk have a special obligation to help the young prepare.  But if we are wise, we shall see this as a joyful duty God has given us.  As I looked around the room and chatted with the guests at my party, I could not help by feel grateful to God for all the young people in my life.  I hope whatever of value I pass on to them shall stand them in good stead – and that when they are in my current shoes, they are surrounded by youngsters as good, true, and brave as those whom I am privileged to know.