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The Key

The Key to advertisers

in the Victoria Gazette.

Located at www.VictoriaGazette.com.

Not one to beg favors unnecessarily, I decided a couple weeks ago to tackle the project on my own. The old J.C. Penney tape recorder -- I recall that it cost $35 about 25 years ago -- was still on the top shelf in a bedroom closet. I plugged it in and verified that the machine, which is smaller than a bread box, could still play, record, rewind, and fast forward. It could.

Then I put the newly purchased Mitch Miller CD in my Bose, set the two pieces of equipment next to each other, and began to record the music onto a blank cassette tape that I found in a bottom drawer. This was a backward way to do things in this forward moving time, but that’s what my old friend wanted -- a cassette tape of the “Bridge on the River Kwai March.” Remember the soldiers whistling and marching over the Bridge on the River Kwai? That’s it.

The quality of the cassette I produced is not great, but I had called and googled and yahooed and searched otherwise for an original cassette to no avail. Hope you will enjoy it, Father Bernardine. When you’re 92 years old, you should be able to have anything your heart desires.

***

On Thursday, May 8th, 2008, Eddy Arnold died and my heart skipped a beat so I went downstairs and exchanged out my five Elvis Presley CD’s for my five Eddy Arnold CD’s and listened to them from beginning to end. I’ve been an Eddy Arnold fan since my college days when music was sold on records called 78’s. Eddy Arnold brings Father Elstan to mind.

When Father Elstan Coghill, OFM, arrived here at my home to eat dinner with us every night for that last year he was in Victoria --from the fall of 1995 to the summer of 1996 -- I’d often have Eddy Arnold join us for the evening. He and Fr. E. got along fabulously and together they knew all the tunes and all the words. Turns out that Father’s father, Old Man Coghill, could yodel like Eddy Arnold in “Cattle Call” and that he even resembled Eddy Arnold with the big “proboscis,” the term used by Fr. E.

As I listened to Eddy Arnold sing “For the Good Times,” I relived the weekly Wednesday evening gatherings at the Victoria House, where Father Elstan would join a few choir members and me, faithfully, after choir practice. We called ourselves the Literary Society, with tongue in cheek, of course, but partly because Father was always correcting our grammar and telling funny stories, some of them literary.

We often had scriptural questions on those evenings and Father had the answers. It was he who led me from Kathleen Woodiwiss to G.K. Chesterton as he loaned me G.K.’s biography of St. Francis of Assisi. The book was a far cry from “The Flame and the Flower,” yet it fanned the true Flame and unfolded the fair flower. Both Fr. E. and Chesterton spoke common sense and were, simultaneously, the wittiest people I ever met. They quenched my thirst for truth and tickled my funny bone at the same time.

I listened to “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me,” and recalled those years -- 1996, 1997, 1998, and so on -- when Father was then living and working at The Cross in the Woods, which is an impressive shrine in Indian River, Michigan. I made the ten-hour drive often with family and friends. The scenery was gorgeous along Lake Michigan -- which I called “the ocean” -- and the fall color was more magnificent in the Upper Peninsula than anywhere else.

I listened to “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and saw myself, and humanity in general, tumbling from one day to the next, from one year to the next, sweeping away a little dust here and there. I am always thankful that we tumbled into Victoria and became, along with many others, close personal friends of Father Elstan.

I listened to “Tennessee Waltz” and could hear Father croon as my girlfriends and I followed his directives down the picturesque road to Cross Village and Harbor Springs. Father knew where all the best restaurants were located.

Memories associated with the music of Eddy Arnold filled much of that nostalgic Thursday, May 8th.

***

It was 7 a.m. the next day, Friday, May 9th, when I received the awful phone call that Father Elstan died that morning. I gasped. Two of the puzzle pieces in God’s world had fallen right next to each other.

I prayed for Father and lit the candle by his photo in my office. On the back of that photo, which he sent while living in Michigan, Father had written in his singular script: “Hang this on the wall and put a vigil light under it.” You gotta smile through the tears. It’s the photo I’m using with his obituary on page 10 in this issue of the Gazette.

I went downstairs and switched out Eddy Arnold for my favorite classical music CD’s, which were also favorites of Father Elstan. It was only a dozen years ago that Mozart and Beethoven also joined us for supper, when I knew the melodies but Father also knew the composers. Mozart is ethereal and my thoughts rose in that direction.

***

Father Bernardine flew in from St. Louis for the funeral of his friend and he stayed at our house, which was our honor and privilege. I forgot to give Fr. B. the cassette I made for him, which gives me a chance to make a better one, but I remembered Father Elstan’s favorite hymn, which I played at his funeral Mass here at St. Victoria.

Fill my house unto the fullest.

Eat my bread and drink my wine.

The love I bear is held from no one.

All I have and all I do I give to you.