I was so surprised when the plane landed in San Antonio that I practically kissed the elderly gentleman in the seat be side me. Then we were leaving the plane. It was over. I drove through the familiar streets of the north side of San Antonio remembering the old places, the ended days. Down Broadway I went past Pat's Drugstore, where I had gone to buy comic books on my bike, and Winn's, where we had gotten cap guns and kites, and St. Peter's Church, where I had had my first great battles with the question of the soul, and the Broadway Theatre, where I had spent many a summer Saturday in dreams of darkness while the Texas sun blasted down . . . and then walked home beneath the big trees of the old neighborhood with the lazy cicadas screaming. And what else, what else? Why did I have such a pow erful sense that so much of my life had been lost to me? Where did it go? What did those strange flashes of memory mean? What in the world were all those fireballs doing in my life, and who had come knocking on my door? Then I was at Mother's place, and the door opened, and there she stood, and suddenly she was small and sad and I felt the unknown that surrounds the little light of our lives. I hugged her and we went inside together and talked of the old days. We did not speak much about Granny's death, but rather the way it had been for us in San Antonio in the fifties. It was a much smaller city then, dreaming in the Texas sun. We spoke of hours we had spent together discussing the proofs we had sought for God and for our own immor tality, of the summer nights and books we'd loved, of our obsessions with history and literature, and of the long con versations with Father Patrick Palmer over the sense of pa pal infallibility and the future of the Church. Always the Church would return to the center of our conversations, what it meant to us and where we expected it to go in the future. We were then still involved in such things as not eating meat on Fridays and we believed that it
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