God's Blessed Mother was more important perhaps than any other person after God. And she was a woman, and a uniquely powerful woman. Not only was she uniquely powerful, she was uncompromised. In sum, power and blameless-ness coexisted in her. God was immediate and absolute. Mass and Holy Communion were for everyone, old and young.
Yet life as an American teenager was penitential and excruciating. This was another half existence, rather like that of childhood. I wanted full existence. I dreamed of marrying young so as to be an adult; I dreamed of having a child young so as to be an adult. I dreamed of any sort of escape from the control of the adults around me who seemed to have contempt for all of us young people a priori, as if we were an offense to them for having been born.
I was just too confused, however, to make much of the whole struggle.
By my senior year in high school, I had a full-time job that kept me working school nights till 10:00 p.m., and all day on weekends, including Sunday. This made me happy. It seemed to have some value. I don't recall how I passed my classes. I think it was the same old formula: listen, seek to follow the spoken words, and write well on the exams. There certainly wasn't much time to read.
By the time I entered Texas Woman's University, I had earned and banked money for the entire first year's room and board and fees. I welcomed the genderless world of TWU, not because I knew it was genderless but because it was a serious place.
I wanted a meaningful and significant life.
I was already deeply in love with a high school boy named Stan Rice, but as he had his senior year to complete in Richardson, Texas, and did not seem to be in love with me, I was on my own. It's worth noting that my militant Catholicism had discouraged him. I couldn't engage in kissing and hugging because it was a mortal sin. I had committed a mortal sin in kissing and hugging him quite a lot, but I think the grief and the sense of catastrophe on my part, my misery over all of it, understandably put him off.
Of course the atmosphere of the university attracted me mightily. Over the years, I've found it impossible to explain to people who never went to college that college is too different from high school for the two to be compared.
In college, one is an adult, expected to select one's classes, and get to them, at various times, and in different buildings, on one's own. Different university departments immediately bring one into contact with scores of new people.
The prison of high school is indeed blasted to pieces, and one wanders in a "brave new world."
Perhaps it's worth noting in passing that an aunt who visited before I went to college strongly advised me to major in something much more realistic than journalism. She suggested secondary education so that I might be a teacher, as the idea of working for a newspaper and being a reporter or a writer was far-fetched. She made quite a case for normality, averring that highly intelligent people weren't happy. Her thinking was not unlike that of nuns who had urged me to be good in all subjects, rather than to try to excel in any one subject. I simply didn't agree with these people. And college was the place where I left all such thinking behind.
More than thirty years later, this aunt came to a jam-packed book-signing party for me in Kentucky, with an arm-load of my published novels for me to sign. I didn't remind her of that old conversation, in which she had so strenuously urged me to curb my ambition. But I think of it every time I see her. My life went a different way.
Let me return to the year 1959.
I landed at a secular campus in a Protestant part of the country, and among my many classmates and teachers there were no Catholics, and I soon found myself confronted with barriers to understanding the modern world that I felt I had to overcome.
The Index of Forbidden Books loomed over my head.
More insidious than the Index itself, which contained many venerable classics, including all the works of Dumas except for The Count of Monte Cristo, was the concept of the "general index" which governed any book which was likely to lead a Catholic into the occasion