The Late Great Johnny Ace Thursday, March 31, 2005

According to the National Review's blog, CNN is saying the pope has been given last rites. When I was a kid, my mother and I stood on Queens Boulevard with a zillion other people waiting for his motorcade to drive by; it was around that time I told her my goal in life was to be the first American pontiff. And an astronaut too--I had seen Star Wars around the same time.

The day after Wrong Turn Jr. was born, Mrs. WTJ tried to get him to feed and he turned blue. I was standing in the hallway with my parents--we figured we'd give her some privacy--then all of a sudden every doctor in sight rushed into the room. A couple seconds later they wheeled out a little glass box with my son in it. He spent a long week in intensive care, getting schlepped from one little box to another and covered with sensors and wires everywhere he went. When he wasn't turning blue he had problems with his heart. The Six Million Dollar Baby.

Mrs. WTJ stayed with him, in a little isolation room in a corner of the ward. She slept on a cot and washed herself in the sink. To use the bathroom you had to walk through something like decompression doors. I came by every day and watched while other people did things to him: Mrs. WTJ learning to feed him, and nurses doing hospital things. I felt as powerless as he looked.

Like the song says, someone saved my life tonight. Not long before the birth, I had read a compelling review of JPII's Crossing the Threshold of Hope, a book I had sort of sneered at when it first hit stores and became a gazillion seller. I didn't want to be part of the crowds on Queens Boulevard anymore. But times change, attitudes change, and so I got a copy.

I wish I'd written about it at the time, because it's already fading from my mind. But the core message is simple and unforgettable: a discourse on Christ's admonition: Be not afraid! Why the hell not, in a world where two-day-old babies can turn blue and suffocate and their fathers can't do anything to help them? Because we are never alone. We are never forsaken. And if we remember that, evil and death have no hold over us.

There are no atheists in foxholes, but sometimes when the shells are bursting all around you even the believers forget the basics. He was always there to remind us. And now he leaves us, but not alone: never alone.

He saved the world, and he saved a billion souls with his own gentle but unyielding spirit. Stalin asked about another pope: Where are his legions? I'll tell ya, buddy: waiting in the rain on Queens Boulevard, and a thousand streets around the globe.

Pax forever. And an early goodbye.

@ 8:20:00 PM,

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