Tidal charts. Bicycle wrenches. Problem solving has never been my forte, but working collaboratively as a tight team of three we’ve made some progress this summer. Charlie can cover all the ocean he sees in dreams when at low tide; good rapport with lifeguards ensues and we’re back to day tripping from beach house a mere 85 miles from ocean. That’s why they print those charts! We can also handle rudimentary repairs to his mountain bike down along the rugged trails hugging the Raritan River. But it’s not the tools that make it work; it’s the loving family—from the East Bay to N. Ctr. Jersey, ocean to ocean–that has blessed Charlie with the opportunity of showing the way. And taught me how it works too.

Susman loved Brooks but he was not part of my pre-exam readings; that’s trouble though Warren had always said my exam would likely be weak albeit I appeared capable of writing a worthy dissertation (draft chapters of which were in Sus’s luggage at the time of his sudden death at a Minneapolis lecturn in Spring ’85; would that were only a bad dream).

Charlie and I launched a tradition of lengthy bike rides to and fro Van Wyck Brooks’ home town of Plainfield 3, 4, years ago: first in autumn to celebrate another safe and lovely season a-bike; then more regularly to the point where the Queen City is now a routine destination: two lively go-rounds to historic neighborhoods today, in fact, those thirty-plus miles courtesy of Charlie’s between school sessions and my summer course Tuesday-thru-Thursday schedule.

Yet it was only days ago I made the wholly obvious geographic connection. I call it “the lag” and it’s a steady cognitive companion; one salient feature of the ADHD kingdom. But I did quickly remember that in the dream, I initially stood atop a picnic table using a piano bench to write on; then I stood atop the bench itself. Of course! Plainfield was also home to the great Bill Evans, who graces Charlie’s I-Pad thanks to Dr. Chew.

I have a long way to go in learning how to write not only about my dreams but one Charles Vincent Fisher. Dr. Chew, on the other hand, has been bearing nightly witness since June 2005; that anniversary won’t be obscured by any lag. That is some archive K. has compiled, and since I don’t travel much anymore…someday, when my learning has grown at least commensurate to where I was at in dissertation stage.

Yet another notable Plainfield native was the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins. Why couldn’t Susman have quizzed me instead on Perkins’ client F. Scott Fitz? Because Warren always knew what he was doing: no lag there. Had he lived I hope he’d now be asking students about Parliament-Funkadelic founder George Clinton; sure, he too hails from Plainfield.

New York Times obituary

And thanks always, Larry, for helping me make it through high school or not.

All is grace, as Dorothy Day would put it. All is gravy, as I might be more inclined to exclaim. No curves, as Corridan woulda put it. Happy birthday, Pete…S.J….religious orders and waterfront bosses may come and go but your memory is eternal, even as we move on to other stories.

Autistic Cranford teen will help self and others as part of the Ride for Autism

Published: Tuesday, June 07, 2011, 4:25 PM

CRANFORD — On June 11, dozens of cyclists will gather at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft to participate in the 11th annual Ride for Autism. Riders of different skill levels and experience will take part, selecting differing routes to match their needs, as they support the non-profit Autism NJ, the largest statewide network of parents and professionals dedicated to improving the lives of people with autism and their families.

Among those participating will be Cranford couple Kristina Chew and Jim Fisher and their teen son, Charlie. As he participates Charlie will be one of the most important riders that day, for he is one of the autistic children the event aims to help.

Chew explained that her 14-year-old son was diagnosed with autism at age two. She classified Charlie as being “moderate to severe” on the autism spectrum. He has limited language skills, but very easily engages in physical activities like running and riding his bike.

The Ride for Autism, a charity event to support the non-profit group Autism NJ, will take place on June 11 at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft. While the event will draw avid cyclists, it will also have some very important riders — those diagnosed with autism — including 14-year-old Charlie Fisher of Cranford. (Photo by Kristina Chew)

For Chew writing about her son and the impact of autism on their family proved cathartic. She began a blog —originally titled “My Son has Autism” — in June 2005.

“I got a very desperate kind of feeling and I needed an outlet,” Chew said. “It felt as though we were very isolated.”

She began to write every day, offering an inside and often very frank look at what it means to raise a child with autism. Chew chronicles everything from the clear benefit that physical activity has for her son and the family’s use of technology for teaching, to the more perturbing moments, including his breaking a tablet computer, seemingly in frustration.

“Writing about Charlie has also been a way, to me, of providing witness,” she said.

One of the common themes in the blog is Charlie’s bike rides with his father Jim, with most of the bike trips averaging more than 15 miles. His father was the one who wanted Charlie to learn to ride a bike without training wheels, Chew explained. When he was six-years-old, Charlie began riding his bike. It remains among of his favorite activities and one at which he excels.

Riding his bike and participating in the Ride For Autism have become proven confidence builders for Charlie, but he is not the only autistic child who rides in the event.
As he made the ride last year, Chew said her son struggled at a few points and, when other riders moved past, Fisher was quick to point out the importance of their son’s participation.

“He pointed to Charlie and said ‘that’s why we’re here’,” Chew said.

That ability to participate is, in large part, what caused Andy Abere who founded the Ride for Autism as a way to support Autism NJ and his autistic son, Spencer.

Abere said his family was at their local bike shop 11 years ago, looking for a bike for Spencer when he noticed the pamphlets for charity rides. Looking for a ride to benefit autism, Abere couldn’t find one. Undeterred, he began his own event—Ride for Autism—which now draws more than 500 riders a year.

A number of those riders will be, like Charlie, autistic. That, Abere said, is one of the main objectives.

“Quite frankly, it’s a ride for autism so people with autism should be there. So we try to set it up as best we can for them,” Abere said.

There is a one-mile “fun ride” loop on the Brookdale campus that all riders can take and more intense rides —up to 100 miles—for the more experienced.

To encourage families with autistic children to attend the event, even those who can not make the ride, Abere said there is a component of the Ride for Autism designed to accommodate their needs.

For parents or caregivers of children on the autism spectrum, the ride will offer a “Respite Rest Stop” — a special area at the start/finish on Brookdale’s campus, staffed by therapists. This will be a safe and secure place for children to have fun while parents or caregivers enjoy the ride.

Instead of having to raise funds through pledges, the Ride for Autism requires only a flat registration fee and allows walk up registration the day of the event. While any donations will be accepted, Abere said the focus remains in large part about raising awareness of autism.

“We do like raising money, but just as important is raising awareness,” he said.
For more information about the Ride for Autism or to make a donation to support Autism NJ, visit autismnj.org

© 2011 NJ.com. All rights reserved.

Christie’s bombastic arrival in bucolic Montvale, complete with courtesy car to ferry the Gov. and Mary Pat those final hundred yards from chopper to bleachers, evoked for me the pre-revolutionary Virginia gentry described in a classic study by historian Rhys Isaac: these brash cavaliers would ostentatiously rear up on horseback in public places, to remind the lower orders–relegated to hoofing it–just who was in charge.

The fuss that rose like the fancy chopper’s dust over Montvale reconfirmed suspicions that for Gov. Christie, power-privilege is the point. And in light of New Jerseyans’ reluctance to confess when they’ve been taken, the flood of online recantations is remarkable. They thought they’d elected a blustery, accessible Jersey guy to replace the erstwhile Illinois farm boy who, in our one encounter with him at a So. Jersey gas station where he’d stopped en route to his LBI beach house seemed mostly intent on going unrecognized by constituents.

The only time I’ve seen Christie, on the other hand, was at a Parkway rest stop; I was headed out the door unwrapping a candy bar when I saw someone walking in who looked vaguely familiar (he was the crooked-pol busting U.S. attorney at the time). He waited long enough to discern I could not place him before sticking his hand out with a friendly ‘I’m Chris Christie’ greeting.

Then he won election to our state’s uniquely powerful governorship–to everyone’s surprise including his own–and it’s been all gravy and vitriol ever since. He betrays no affinity for his noblesse-obliging precursor Tom Kean’s conviction that New Jersey and You are “perfect together;” it’s not at all clear that he likes the Garden State much less its peoples (yet another ploy to resonate with heartland Republicans? Why can’t he love Jersey like his new pal Sarah P. loves Alaska?).

And no, he’s not reimbursing us [now says he is; fast-breaking story!] and no, he’s not apologizing for leaving the ballgame in the fifth inning for a whirl down to Drumthwacket, where GOP suitors from Iowa waited while honing their pitch: run, Chris, run.

I hope he runs, is nominated, and conducts a spirited campaign, with the Garden State in foreground as a kind of winner-takes-all referendum on the unabashedly class-conscious, class-baiting nationwide political insurgency which, given Chris Christie’s rapidly-plummeting fortunes locally, may bellow its last hurrah in November 2012.

It was a special treat to receive the J. Owen Grundy History Award from Landsmark Conservancy president John Hallanan who, as I informed the audience in my own Hudson County moment, was an all-time favorite student during my stint teaching at Saint Peter’s College. Yet as John quickly rejoined, those grades were submitted nearly a decade ago.

John wrote his senior thesis on Frank Hague, whose mayoral successor a few removed, Jeremiah Healy, made a gracious appearance early in the evening’s festivities. I’m counting on John Hallanan to make his own City Hall ascendancy in a decade or two from now. I know he’ll make it much easier for historians to function openly in Jersey City than did Hague, who petulantly harassed J. Owen Grundy for decades. The city’s official historian only made it harder on himself by reminding Hague that the Grundy’s had been present in Jersey City since the era of the American Revolution.

Hague’s idea of history was yesterday’s receipts from the ‘Horse Bourse,’ the incredibly extensive, ruthlessly efficient telephone wagering empire he installed throughout Hudson County after most of Manhattan’s leading bookies were driven across the river in a publicity-grabbing Tammany gesture at civic reform.

Thanks in very large part to the Landmarks Conservancy, Jersey City is today a model of discerning historic preservation (though the Horse Bourse was lost to the mists), much if not most waterfront and rail-traffic related. There is no place like that place, as I learned over a decade of historical inqury—much of it conducted in the precious confines of the New Jersey Room of the city’s public library—endless walks, and revelatory passages from classic works by Tom Fleming and Helene Stapinski, Jersey City authors I’m now honored to call both friends and fellow recipients of the J. Owen Grundy History Award. Thanks to all, and especially Dr. Chew and Charlie for making this special night out work smooth as a cool breeze for our tight team of three.

Father Edwin is an Irish waterfront kind of guy in the Pete Corridan tradition, as he himself noted. But he’s a Benedictine priest not a Jesuit, so I was astounded to learn that he did his theology at Woodstock seminary just prior to becoming the headmaster at the newly reopened St. Benedict’s. Woodstock on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, that is, where the Jesuit theologate had been relocated from rural Maryland in one of the boldest experiments in the history of U.S. Catholic priestly formation.

It slowly dawned on me this was the missing piece of my mini-narrative on the two Woodstocks (really three: two seminaries and one festival); that in fact the Jesuits’ dramatic engagement with ‘the world,’ rugged late 60s West Side incarnation, highlights the deeply problematic nature of the U.S. bishops-sponsored study of the ‘causes and contexts’ of the sex abuse scandal and ensuing, ongoing crisis in the church. This historic engagement of Jesuits and community was wholly mutual; these young scholastics and faculty did not require insulation from the culture and/or counterculture; indeed in their own way they helped shape the latter just as older Catholics had been doing since the mid-40s if not earlier; as to the former, well as my colleague Daniel Soyer and I hope, come next autumn Fordham students will learn that NYC was a largely Catholic and Jewish city for one very long time.

Woodstock as seminary-in-and-of-the-great metropolis was finally scuttled by intra-church politics not scandal, though the slightly salacious tone of journalist and erstwhile Jesuit seminarian Garry Wills’ highly publicized, conflicted and ambivalent take on the experiment surely did not help (everything Wills has written on Catholicism is conflicted and ambivalent, which I find highly appropriate, in sharp contrast to the crystalline clarity and analytic brilliance of his ‘secular’ works including such classics as Nixon Agonistes).

As I tried to hint in the previous post, by the time Crosby, Stills, and Nash made their August, 1969 debut in the presence of 400,000 gathered at Bethel, New York (not at semi-nearby Woodstock as originally planned), the church’s self-defeating insularity had long since been challenged by the likes of John Courtney Murray, S.J. Murray’s experimentation with LSD at the dawn of the ‘Woodstock decade’ was but one sign of contradiction to that legacy of militant separatism much more intimately linked to the sex abuse and cover-up disaster than the putative tainting of priestly vocations by free love and flower power (and I cannot overstate how this brief episode in Murray’s life pales before the grandeur and prescience of his writings on church-state relations).

A Midwestern bishop found guilty of serial sexual abuse tried to put an even finer point on this sorry ‘blame it on Woodstock’ gambit years ago, citing the works of non-Catholic sex therapists Masters and Johnson as the true source of his transgressions! Yet as Jeffrey Kripal—a former Benedictine seminarian no less—showed in his magisterial study of Big Sur’s Esalen Institute and the human potential movement, one of the Jesuits who shared an acid trip with Father Murray promptly left the order and the priesthood and went on to become a prominent sex therapist, integrating spirituality in his teachings alongside a mature understanding of human sexuality.

Catholic fingerprints are all over the counterculture; to me its one of the glories of our tradition, and has absolutely nothing to do with the abuse of children and adolescents. For the ‘causes and contexts’ of that cataclysm we need to look much more deeply into the codes of silence and violence that sustained the ‘church militant’ far beyond the days of its usefulness or legitimacy.

Not that silence is always and by nature a bad thing. The Benedictines continue a rich tradition of elected silence observed during communal mealtimes, a silence broken only by the sound of one individual reading aloud to the community. I always thought the chosen literature was strictly devotional in character, but Father Edwin informed me that On the Irish Waterfront was recently featured at dinnertime at the abbey in Newark. I was rendered speechless by that revelation, and indeed managed to remain unusually quiet while sharing the panel with Father Edwin and Tom; a pair of wise and warm men with much to say about both history and the present day, especially where the city of Newark and the world intersects with the the ever-resilient and renewing monastery and school on High Street.

I was an altar boy for four years at the height of the 60s and the only unraveling priests I observed were those who left the profession, usually to marry (usually to nuns and ex-nuns). Those that remained tended to misquote popular songs in their homilies, but otherwise clung invincibly to the perquisites and privileges that lay people were more than delighted to continue bestowing upon them. I do not believe the ‘Woodstock defense’ will prove useful toward understanding this human disaster, but as time takes time we’ll have to check back in a few decades, once real historical work grounded in real questions has kicked in.  For now, let’s simply note that Catholics in Ireland have proved far more resolute than American counterparts in their determination to trace a comparable story to its roots over a century old, taking into account historic codes of silence, the church’s authoritarian manipulation of data and sources, and a kind of totalitarian occlusion of reality that for decades made painful, traumatic truths simply melt into air.

There’s plenty more to write on this; there’s part of a book in me on the subject down the road. My personal preoccupation is with historic Catholic violence—especially in families, the one institution shockingly neglected in discussions of the crisis. Yet I remain equally committed to understanding and even celebrating how a tradition that imparted no great blessings on my family—least not from this vantage point–has meant so much to others, not only those who’ve performed abundant good in the world, but especially that community of U.S. Catholic historians who lent me a vocation three decades ago when my only alternative to historical understanding was personal oblivion.

At some point I’ll need to document my extremely fleeting and tangential links to some of the folks at John Jay and their two-part study. But for now I’d simply like to note a tantalizing irony. To many Catholics of a certain age “Woodstock” denotes not a mud-ridden carnival of music and skinny- dipping featuring a half-million youngsters congregated at Max Yasgur’s farm in August 1969, but a venerable seminary in rural Maryland where generations of Jesuits learned theology during final years of arduous training prior to their ordination as priests. At that Woodstock titans of the Jesuit order—most notably John Courtney Murray, S.J.–rigorously prepared young men like our waterfront priest Pete Corridan for apostolic service to the world.

Readers of the John Jay study tempted to lament the loss of this golden age of manly clerics —and the riotous age of unreason that succeeded it–might do well to reflect on a single paragraph found in Joseph E. Califano’s 2004 memoir.  Califano, who went on to become, along perhaps with Sargent Shriver, the most prominent Catholic public servant of the past half-century, revealed in his memoir that a Woodstock-trained New York Jesuit sexually molested him at the order’s Staten Island retreat house when Califano was a Jesuit high school student in the late 1940s.

Joe Califano later acknowledged he spent more time dwelling on this episode in composing the memoir than any other from his long and varied career, but finally decided to include the story because, as he insisted at the time, he believed the number of clergy sex abuse survivors was far greater than the grossly understated figure of 11,000 being casually tossed around at the time he was writing. It was quite clear that Califano would never have disclosed his abuse had it not been for the wave of revelations that followed the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposes.

Anybody who thinks there was something anomalous about the 60s and 70s, where sex abuse in the church is concerned, needs to learn about the code of silence and the code of violence that sustained it for over a century, and counting. The second most powerful Catholic in the Philadelphia Archdiocese is not currently under indictment for misdeeds committed back in the glory days of Country Joe and the Fish.

Joe Califano’s story is but one among tens of thousands that fit no convenient scenario highlighting any one narrow sliver of U.S. social history. This is instead a story grounded in a century and a half of U.S. Catholic experience, and anyone who suggests otherwise is simply dissembling.

As it happens, the Maryland Woodstock’s John Courtney Murray went on to partake of several LSD trips in the early 1960s at precisely the moment this celebrity Jesuit was composing a landmark declaration on religious liberty that imparted a distinctly American stamp on the documents of the Second Vatican Council. I hope few will dismiss Murray’s contribution to the Council on the grounds of an “acid offense” though the way things are going in the church lately …(and moral theologians kindly take note: LSD had not yet been criminalized at the time of Fr. Murray’s experimentation, an experience this patrician Republican shared with his friend Clare Booth Luce, among other unlikely postulants).

The more familiar 1960s countercultural Woodstock defense will surely diminish into a footnote or perhaps a very short chapter in the epic narrative that will unfold from widely disparate fragments in the decades yet to come.  I believe that the “other Woodstock,” the long-shuttered seminary in Maryland, and many historic Catholic redoubts like it will loom much larger in more authentic subsequent accounts. Seminaries and Catholic colleges and publications all abetted a kind of totalitarian Catholic mindset between the 1920s and 60s, largely in response to the threat posed by communism, a very real not phantom enemy to the church through most of the twentieth century. As is usually the case amid such titanic struggles, truth was the first casualty, and I suspect tens of thousands of young Catholics suffered as collateral damage under the yoke of the code of silence, via which transgressions large and small readily de-materialized.

This is the historical context that truly demands fearless exploration. Forget Yasgur’s farm, the “causes and contexts” of sex abuse and especially the hierarchy’s decades of cover-ups are traceable to forces at work not in Jimi Hendrix’s virtuoso guitar work but in the religion itself.

Charlie’s birthday weekend opened with a little party graced by the music of friends Sean and Scott and the charm of Dr. Chew’s wonderful former student Jonathan, AND the special presences of his beloved Gong Gong and Po Po. It’s ending with the boyo upstairs listening to Desmond Dekker on an I-Pad quickly and expertly reconfigured by Dr Chew after Charlie’s model was bruised amid the weekend’s only stormy moment in the local neuro-sphere, of which we each form an integral component.

I don’t yet know how to describe those moments perhaps never will avowed intent notwithstanding, and notwithstanding the lessons from Dr. Chew’s six years of daily witness over on ‘We Go With Him’: that’s how it’s done. I do know we covered fifty miles over two days and three counties on the mountain bikes, while Charlie scatted to his own variation of ‘Dis Old Man,’ crooked his ears against shoulders when ice cream truck and other sensory invaders materialized; warily eyed loose dogs before wafting past like a cool breeze; lit up overcast skies of Morris and Hunterdon with his jaunty grin. Happy birthday Dear Charlie: Happy Birthday to you, dear pal.