Reminiscing recently at the grave site of a dear (if unique) friend, my mind kept wandering back to the present, and my troubled thoughts about Gary, my son, who was about to join the Navy. And suddenly I saw the connection.
Hangin’ Out in the ‘Hood
People often wondered how a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame became friends with a man like Samuel Principato, Sr., so we’ll cover that part first. Unlike many of my classmates who had six-figure jobs upon graduation, I was attempting to become a Catholic journalist and was living in a broken-down boarding house above a pizza restaurant — neighbors with drug dealers and prostitutes as well as one cranky ex-con.
To summarize a man like Sam in several paragraphs seems impossible, but for the sake of a story, Sam was born to a loving but loud Irish mom and a proud but headstrong Italian father. Dad left home when Sam was quite young, and in his early teens Sam followed suit. Living on the streets, he married his girlfriend, only to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally killed her in a lovers’ quarrel. Released from prison five years later, Sam married the first girl he got pregnant because he desperately wanted kids.
As you probably guessed, Sam’s luck did not get better. Sam’s second wife divorced him and he lost custody of his son and daughter when he was sent back to prison after being convicted as the lookout man in a safe-cracking job. After leaving jail the second time, he was beaten to within an inch of his life with baseball bats by a rival mob, and was run over by cars twice, but survived all of this only to succumb to his lungs collapsing from a forty-year, two-pack-a-day Camel Straight habit — at age 52.
Underneath It All
But even tough guys shed tears if you listen long enough, and after I got past his cigarettes and incessant cursing, he cried while telling me how he missed his first wife, idolized his absent father and wished to be reconciled with his two children.
I married and moved out, but Sam would still invite me over to talk and watch mobster movies like The Godfather and GoodFellas. And although Sam never did reunite with his children, and his short life could definitely be called a tragedy, something miraculous did indeed happen. So at the funeral lunch, when the only positive stories relatives could tell about “Skippy,” was how happy he was when he was six years old and received a sailor’s suit, I decided to update them on Sam’s quest for salvation.
“Toward the end of his life,” I told the crowd, “Sam not only started watching and believing shows on Blessed Faustina and the Little Flower (instead of gangster or porno flicks), but he practically adopted my nine-year-old daughter, buying Therese gifts or cards out of his meager disability money every time she came over.” But to my surprise, instead of being overjoyed, the crowd just stared. Did they not believe me, I wondered — or was it still not good enough? “If you don’t listen to his swears, you won’t hear his prayers,” my young daughter had once commented, and at that moment I realized how true her statement was.
Instead of dressing Sam in his beloved dago t-shirt, black leather jacket, jeans and his “cool” scruffy beard, Sam appeared in the casket as Mr. Rogers, groomed and clean-shaven while wearing a dress shirt, slacks and a pale yellow cardigan sweater. Now, six years later, while gazing at the tombstone, I noticed above the words “Samuel Principato, Sr., only son of Salvador Principato” (an inscription Sam had personally picked out to honor his father), that Mom had later engraved “First Born of Dorothy McCarthy” figuring she could once again get the last word in now that he was dead.
A Turn of the Heart
Like Sam’s mother, I too had come to the grave heavy of heart and angry at my son. Angry at the people or demons who changed Gary from one who walked to daily Mass and weekly confession to one who doubted or denied almost every aspect of his faith, angry at Gary for calling his mother a “horrible mom” and me a bad dad (only the latter was partially true, for as a Catholic freelance writer I was sometimes a poor provider). I was angry at him for “escaping” to the Navy, whose wars he did not believe in and desperately did not want to fight, and angry at the Navy for accepting Gary despite knowing this to be true. But suddenly, Our Lady used a memory to turn my anger into laughter, and I again remembered my role.
I recalled the story of how Sam had chased a nun (whose first act of “charity” toward him was to tell everyone in the complex not to give or buy him cigarettes) out of his apartment with a baseball bat. Of course, “chase” was a relative term, for Sam was wheezing and attached to a 20-pound oxygen tank, but Our Blessed Mother’s message was coming in loud and clear.
Even if Gary’s choice of the Navy wasn’t made with the soberest of minds and purest of intentions, our job was still to support him the best we could. My wife and I had to continue to listen to him, hope he would take advantage of the career training and stay out of harm’s way, and, lastly, trust in the words of St. Ambrose to St. Monica about her son Augustine, that “God would not reject the prayers and tears of so loving a mother.” And I laughed again when, in my mind’s eye, I saw Mary dressed in her traditional colors, herself laughing as heaven’s new arrival, clothed in Levis, dago-T and that trademark leather jacket, strolled up and joked, “Hey Mary! Tell Gary's dad that at least the Navy wears blue, too!”
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Tom O’Toole is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and lives in Elmhurst, Illinois. His book Champions of Faith: Catholic Sports Heroes Tell Their Stories is available through Amazon.com. To purchase an autographed copy, or to have Mr. O’Toole speak at your function, contact him at [email protected].
