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a position with a firm in Herndon. Gradually, then, the nightly rosaries dwindled, and finally ended. If you asked any of us to say exactly when, we wouldn’t be able to agree about it: we missed one night, then another; then, a week later, still another. Like that. We bought a new car, and there was even talk about getting a bigger house. Vance was making more money. I remember having the thought that this was the reason the nightly rosary lapsed, along with a couple of other family habits: we seldom ate dinner together anymore since Vance had appointments showing houses at times outside the normal eight hour day. As I said I had stopped going to morning Mass. By the late-sixties, I had stopped going to Mass at all. There was no single defining event, really, no turning point. The whole house just fell (if, given the story I have been telling, I may be allowed the metaphor). Anyway, I began to drift from my childhood, as we all do, of course. And as I must do now, in fact. PART TWO 1. I left home for good in the Spring of ’65, when I transferred to George Washington University from the community college. I had decided I would major in history, thinking of answering Kennedy’s call to service in something like The Peace Corps. I still envisioned now and then how it might be to live in a monastery like the Abbey of the Holy Cross. I had read Thomas Merton’s The Sign of Jonas, a journal of his first year at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and the idea was inviting; but as Father Drummond had said to me in confession, there was nothing to be gained in thinking of it as refuge. Finally, like the priesthood, the idea of entering the