I don’t appear in the Notre Dame yearbook for my senior year. Putting on a coat and tie for the yearbook photo, with my shoulder length hair and earrings seemed silly, so I took a pass on the process. I guess I regret it a little now, but who would know after almost thirty years, after all? Yesterday I was looking for a book in my home library, and I noticed my collection of Notre Dame books. My prizes are an 1895 first edition history of Notre Dame published by the university to celebrate its 50th anniversary, a very rare 1951 first edition history of ND by Richard Sullivan (a colleague of my dad), and a volume of The Four Winners, a book by Knute Rockne (1925), dedicated to Arnold McInerny.
As I was flipping through these tomes for the umpteenth time, a line of poetry slipped through my memory. I stopped and thought of it, and suddenly wondered if I had written it. In the basement a few moments later, I was digging through my “school box,” a collection of memorabilia my mother kept for each of her kids, which included everything from kindergarden drawings to athletic monograms. In it was a musty 1983 edition of The Scholastic Magazine, Notre Dame’s literary magazine. I flipped through it, and there were a two submittals I’d made that were published. I’d forgotten about them completely, except for a fragment that somehow crept into my mind in the library.
Feel free to wince at the creative poverty of these poems – I surely did. But I feel a little better that, short of evidence of my tenure at Notre Dame in the yearbook, there is still some little proof that I shared the Irish experience.
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