Saturday, October 16. Full House. Fountain. Bosco's. Jude arrived this morning to stay for a week. This was, more than anything else, a huge boost for Mary Ann's mood. As she always does when Jude is coming, she cleaned up the house to a degree equaled only by the preparations for Thanksgiving.
What brings our son home was the confluence of two things. He has a rare pause in his frenetic schedule of filmmaking. He finished one movie yesterday, and starts a new one a week from Monday. Given that he just moved into his first house, he probably would have spent the off-week settling in. But a wistful event brought him here instead. A fountain on the campus of St. Paul's High School in Covington was being dedicated to his friend Ben Bragg, who died in a freak accident about a year ago. Ben and Jude met in first grade at the first meeting of a group of boys who would stay together for over a decade in a very active Boy Scout troop. All of them remain friends even now.
Ben's parents George and Margo proposed to build the fountain for the school if it could be dedicated to their son. Ben was well-liked at St. Paul's, as he was in every community through which he passed. The story of how the fountain came together includes what Margo says is a series of unlikely miracles. The right people showed up at the right time with the right skills and donations, usually at a moment when it looked like the project was at a dead end. The story ends with a handsome piece of work, the kind of place where you might go just to sit and be calm and happy for awhile.
The dedication took a couple of hours. All the relevant former Scouts were there, of course. They were surprised to see Jude. I'm proud to say that my son takes matters of friendship seriously.
Also there was Brother John Fairfax, who lives in retirement on the St. Paul campus. Brother John was the second person I met when, on the first day of the Archbishop Rummel High School 1967-68 school term, I showed up to ask whether they would take me in. Jesuit booted me out at the end of my junior year. I let the summer pass by without doing a thing about continuing my high school career. (This is a good illustration of why I was not invited to return to Jesuit.) Brother John listened to my desperate entreaty and accepted me on the spot. I wrote a check for the whole tuition and handed it to him. (I was sixteen, but worked enough that I paid for everything like this myself. Which is another reason for my demise at Jesuit.)
Brother John told me I would be put in the honors class. This seemed strange treatment for a student who flunked three subjects the year before, but I kept my mouth shut. Was Jesuit really that much better than other schools? I mentioned this to Brother John at the fountain dedication. "We must have had a lot of open space in that class," he said, chuckling. Brother John always expected people to have a sense of humor.
Most of the people at the event were very familiar, from the long time we all were very active at Our Lady of the Lake Church and its school. Now we only run into them at the grocery store. When occasions like this bring us together, I realize that each interim is longer than the one before. As we left, I wondered whether this would be the last time I'd see some of these folks, who were such a big part of our lives for so long. To borrow a common illustration of the Big Bang, we're like dots on an inflating balloon, steadily moving away from all the others.
The increasing distances in their worlds prevented the Scouts from meeting at Pizza Man for dinner, as they frequently did in the old days. But these young men have much else going on in their lives now. Jobs and girlfriends and such.
Our family foursome went to dinner at Bosco's. It was the usual delicious array: barbecue shrimp, artichoke bottoms stuffed with crabmeat, spaghetti with red sauce, panneed chicken, fettuccine Alfredo, Caesar salads. All wonderful. Jude unloaded his many weird stories about Hollywood, but was more intent on crowing about his new digs. He has the entire top floor of a house in Studio City, close to the Paramount Pictures lot where he works. The rent, split with two other guys, is four grand a month. This represents a drop of $400 from what he (I) was paying for his first apartment. He paid for all the deposits and up-front rent himself, with no assistance from me. Now we're getting somewhere.
Spumone for dessert. I'm glad to see that a few restaurants recognize that if they made their own spumone or lemon ice, it would be just to show off. How can you top Angelo Brocato's?
Bosco’s. Mandeville: 2040 La Hwy 59. 985-624-5066.
