Pull Me Up
Barry, Dan & Gibson, David
A REPORTER'S STORY School, an all-girls public school where she thrived academically and socially, becoming close for the first time with one of her older sisters and making her first close white...
...I love your anger," Riley had said through his tears...
...After all, what is a stranger's death to a reporter but material for a solemn yam that explores, yet again, the fragility of our existence...
...Don Wycliff, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is public editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...Rather than closing his eyes to it all, however, Barry explores the tragedy of illness, bravely turning his keen journalistic lens on him-self to produce a memoir that is riveting, moving, and not the least bit cheap...
...A chemo drip is "the sound of chemically altered holy water, washing away the sin of my cancer...
...Communion rights...
...She carried that enthusiasm with her to Louisiana State University, where she broke down racial barriers social and political and made friendships that have stood her in good stead in politics ever since...
...As a Roman Catholic, I must protest that access to sacraments is indeed a matter of "rights": the canonical rights of the baptized to fulfill their baptismal obligation to celebrate the liturgy and to receive Communion...
...The private lives of journalists are strewn with sad testimony to that cultivated habit of avoidance...
...The stories Barry tells are often graphic, especially when he recounts his mother's death and his own brutal course of treatment...
...I found that during my week-day walk from Penn Station to the Times building, my whispered mutterings of God, oh God, became the softest notes among the street shouts and horn beats and gear shifts that are synthesized to create the Eighth Avenue Morning Symphony...
...That allows us to cluck and memorialize and find cheap context...
...There is much to mine here, starting with Barry's evocation of the other side of suburbia, of the daily struggle to survive rather than the Cheeveresque anomie that often characterizes the "suburban novel...
...Rather than railing at, and rejecting, the church—and taking satisfaction in recounting such a meager victory—he wrestles with God and learns from the struggle, and by doing so seems to find strength, or at least a way to move ahead: "I raged on through the days and weeks," he writes of his cancer gauntlet, and continues: Gradually, though, fear displaced rage...
...Reducing abortions You say that "abortion is an especially complex legal and political issue," but you ask John Kerry to stick his neck out and criticize abortion practice and take steps "to reduce the number of abortions" ("Kerry, the Catholic," June 18...
...Kerry should write an article for Commonweal explaining why Humanae vitae needs to be refashioned in a hurry...
...The difference was that his campaign, through his brother the governor and the Republican Party power structure in Florida, controlled the system, including access to the polls...
...then life does the rest...
...THOMAS F. MADER Walnut Creek, Calif...
...No amount of knowledge of one's voting rights will trump such control and the will to use it...
...But there are Catholic heroes as well: A few days after my diagnosis, my friend the Franciscan, Dan Riley, had called to comfort me...
...Now the gods of journalism had granted my re-quest...
...Nor is it a reflexive embrace of the faith of one's fathers, the idealization of heritage...
...SCHWADRONCORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) she was also ashamed to be an American...
...Andrew Greeley would be pleased with such an imagination...
...Barry, now a columnist for the New York Times, recognized this trap early in his career, while working at a small news-paper in Connecticut...
...Heck, someone has to remind us that the Yankees used to be losers...
...Yet the more reporters learn about others, the less it seems we know about ourselves, or perhaps the less we want to know...
...Barry follows some familiar terrain in recounting the hazing rituals at his Catholic school—merciless bullying produced many a journalist—and the major and minor cruelties of priests and religious...
...There are his father's migraines and grinding commute to Wall Street (until the headaches killed the job and left the family teetering) and his parents' twin crutches of beer and cigarettes that you know, just know, will come back to haunt them...
...The latter half of Cooking with Grease recounts her progress up the ladder of Democratic political organizing—first in the 1984 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign and culminating in the Gore-Lieberman race of 2000...
...Contraception is about the best answer we have to abortion, and it solves the problem of what you call "the tragedy of unwanted pregnancy...
...Come voting time this November, I hope that if Donna Brazile is serious about winning, she'll have not just an educated corps of voters, but a batch of election lawyers who are mean as junk-yard dogs...
...He is the St...
...Not that Riley had said any of these things...
...Brazile had become immersed in politics even while in grade school, helping a black community activist campaign for improved recreation facilities for black children in Kenner...
...Bonaventure priest who performed our wedding ceremony, a man who brings refreshing vigor to the cliche of living one's faith, my trusted spiritual guide...
...All that is for sure is that through the sorrows of his mother's death, the terrors of his own cancer treatment, and the anguish of infertility and the travails of the adoption market, Barry emerges on the other side and generously shares his story...
...By what "right" and in what circumstances should a priest "really" deny Communion to anyone...
...Pull Me Up ~A Memoir l_)nrr Poi rii David Gibson ike many of us in the journalism dodge, Dan Barry has spent much of his career piecing together the shards of wrecked lives, sidling up to tragedy and then retailing it to the rest of the world, as if such casual intimacy with mortality would somehow inoculate us against its inevitable toll...
...A REPORTER'S STORY School, an all-girls public school where she thrived academically and socially, becoming close for the first time with one of her older sisters and making her first close white friend, who remains a friend to this day...
...That's what makes you you...
...Barry leaves plenty of mystery, as he must...
...I had simply used him as a foil for God...
...I could barely breathe...
...What is most remarkable about Brazile, at least as she depicts herself, is the fundamental decency that she brings to what looks to have become a cutthroat enterprise...
...Here you go, they had said—asshole...
...The title quotes the plea of Barry's mother, Noreen, to her eldest son as she lay dying...
...I find it telling that, while many of the ordained speak routinely about denying lay people Communion for engaging in legitimate discussions of difficult moral issues, few Commonweal 3 6 August 13, 2004...
...The danger of abuse is obvious...
...This is much more than another Irish-Catholic kitchen-sink drama in which religion and tradition are merely handy devices to advance the plot but bear little weight of their own...
...And while awaiting a verdict on his cancer treatment, he discerns a cross in the random pock-marks of a ceiling fan's blades...
...And there is the coming-of-age angle, a story bursting with equal parts ambition and insecurity, and the triumph of romance despite it all...
...It is...
...Catching up on past issues of Common-weal, I was flabbergasted to find this throwaway remark in John Garvey's usually careful column: "no one has a right to Communion, rights being a stupid category where the sacraments are concerned, and priests really should refuse Communion in some cases" ("Politics or Idolatry...
...His mother falls ill with terminal cancer, and a few monthsafter her death he is diagnosed with a tumor on his trachea...
...Once his neck is loped off, where are we...
...Indeed, Barry himself is an inspiring messenger, whether he intends it or not...
...Once initiated into the art of political organizing, she was hooked...
...There are no easy answers to any life, certainly not his...
...Frankly, and with all due respect to Brazile, the difference between her campaign's voters and those of the Bush campaign was not that his knew their rights and hers didn't...
...Is her republican pride such a fragile thing...
...After college, Brazile headed straight for Washington, D.C., where, she was convinced, the action was...
...The suggestion that priests should be the gatekeepers to Communion is offensive and smacks of clericalism...
...How could he not...
...He is a re-porter...
...Yet I had shouted at him that I didn't want to hear any more about the crosses we must bear, or that God gave me this burden because He knew I could handle it, or that I should prepare for the possibility of meeting my maker before Nora graduates from kindergarten...
...I am astonished that Garvey would make such an unqualified statement...
...Sure, the children succeed, but at what cost...
...June 4...
...Barry goes deeper than that, and perhaps be-gins to limn a new narrative for a new generation of Catholics...
...His moment of insight came when a young newsroom colleague was murdered...
...David Gibson, a former reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger, is the author of The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco...
...For Catholics, however, one of the en-during pleasures of Pull Me Up may be L Commonweal 3 5 August 13, 2004 the profoundly Catholic sensibility permeating the book...
...It is that decency that allows her to say she harbors no ill will toward George W. Bush...
...In Barry's hands, free-throw shooting becomes a devotion—complete with "decades" and supplications to the Almighty—and baseball becomes a liturgy...
...WILLIAM F. DAUGHERTY San Antonio, Tex...
...There is the durable immigrant saga, the abandonment of the Old Sod for the promise of the New World, only to find the dream so much cheap tinsel...
...And as Barry, who is the About New York columnist for the Times, moves back in time, his recollections of a sub-urban Long Island boyhood emerge as tactile and vivid experiences, especially so for those of us who are also veterans of a 1960s suburban upbringing...
...Yet for all the pain and nostalgia, Barry always in-fuses his narrative with such earthy spirituality and wry humor—usually of the self-deprecating variety—that he keeps you rooting for the hero, and convinced that the payoff will be worth the effort...
...The episode seems to shock Barry into an awareness of the nearness of death...
...All those afternoons and nights spent in the newsroom, waiting for the telephone to ring with a good story—a good murder, as reporters like to say—so that I could find diversion from my petty woes," Barry writes in Pull Me Up, his poignant new memoir...
Vol. 131 • August 2004 • No. 14
