Shorties: Stories from Life

By Dennis Oulahan

Shorties is a collection of stories about things that have happened to me and to people close to me over the course of my life. These stories arent earth-shattering or shocking. They are about everyday experiences that can take on greater meaning when they are examined closely. I believe that everyone has stories like these about things that have happened in their lives. Reliving these experiences in order to write them down has been a joy for me. I hope that some of those who read Shorties: Stories from Life will be encouraged to record their own stories so that they can feel that same joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543460087

Dennis Oulahan

Dennis Oulahan is a teacher. He and his wife, Anne, lived and taught in several states and countries including Wisconsin, Alabama, Texas, El Salvador and Mexico. They are both retired and living with Stella, their English bulldog. Their children, Kevin and Maggie, live nearby with their own families.

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Adultery

This story has a title that should attract the reader’s attention. It’s probably not as sensational as you imagine, but it’s a good story and it’s true.

When I was about 10 and my brother Tony was 8, we lived just outside of New York. We attended a Catholic school about 10 blocks from our house. Every so often, on a Saturday, my mother would remind us that we needed to go to confession. Saturday was the big day for confession. There were several priests at our church, and all of the confessionals were in operation on a Saturday. I’m not sure how my mother knew that we had sins to confess. Maybe she knew us too well, or maybe she was just depending on the law of averages. At any rate, once a month or so, she gave us the reminder and off we’d go to confess our sins.

We walked to confession, and this gave us plenty of time to examine our consciences. What my mother didn’t know was that we weren’t that interested in confessing our real sins. We didn’t want to discuss them. But we knew we had to confess to something, so we traded sins as we walked to the church on a Saturday.

We were young. We knew what sins were from experience. We committed them on a regular basis. But we weren’t always clear on the nature of the various offenses. On a particular Saturday, as we were walking across the football field at a local high school between our house and the church, we talked about swearing. I knew that most of the adults in my life swore on a regular basis. Both of my parents could turn the air blue with the best of us. I assumed, by extension, that swearing was acting like an adult. I knew from Catechism class that there was a category of sins called adultery, but the nuns were never too clear about which acts fit into that group. My brother and I discussed this and we decided, since most of the adults we knew swore regularly, swearing must be covered under adultery. We swapped a few sins and continued to the church.

You may think that we lost the power of confession when we traded sins or made them up, but we had that covered too. We always ended our confessions by stating how many lies we’d told. If we were going to confess to twenty lies we bumped it up to twenty-one in order to cover the fact that we lied during confession. We really had this confession business down cold.

When we got to the church we looked for a confessional with a long line. It wasn’t that we needed more time. We’d pretty much settled on our game plan on the way to church. We wanted to avoid Father Francis’ confessional. He was the head honcho at our church. He was infamous for patrolling the neighborhood park, looking for kids from our school sneaking a cigarette or making out in the bushes. When he found a sinner he administered punishment on the spot. This might include throttling and/or ear pulling, which, for some reason, our parents never objected to. That behavior would land him in jail today, but in the early 1960’s, when this story took place, it was considered normal, if not admirable, behavior in the adult world.

Father Francis was also notorious in the confessional. I understood that confession was supposed to be confidential. I’d seen television shows about priests who refused to turn in murderers in order to protect the sanctity of the sacrament. Father Francis apparently saw it differently. If, by some trick of fate or momentary lapse of your sense of self-preservation, you ended up in his confessional, he was known to scream at you in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the church. Then you had to leave the confessional and face the stares of the parishioners, all of whom were now aware of the intimate details of your sinning life. No one wanted that, so all kids, and many adults, avoided his booth at all costs.

I was able to maneuver myself into another line on this day. I had my list of sins all ready, so I thought I was home free. We were always careful to trade only venial sins so that we didn’t cause a ruckus or end up saddled with too many Hail Marys when we left the confessional.

I recited the usual opening as I entered the confessional. Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession. He blessed me and asked for the rundown. I started off with some commonplace offenses that Tony and I had discussed. I talked back to my parents four times. I took a bite of hamburger on a Friday. Then I dropped the mother lode, totally unaware of the reaction it would elicit. I committed adultery 27 times.

I though that swearing 27 times in three weeks was reasonable for someone my age, so the priest’s reaction took me by surprise, to put it mildly. Dennis Oulahan, (sweet Jesus, he knew who I was) you did what? He was louder than Father Francis. I don’t know if he was as surprised as I was, but he didn’t dwell on my transgression. He simply asked me what I thought adultery was, and I explained that it meant swearing, like adults do. He should have known that. He was a priest for God’s sake. He absolved me of my sins, (whew), assigned an Act of Contrition and about 30 Hail Mary’s, and left it at that. I left the Hail Mary’s a little short (about 25 short if the truth be known) and left the church in a hurry as soon as Tony was done. His confession had been smooth. I’d provided him with some good sins on the way to church.

The nun who taught my fifth grade class took me aside one day during the following week to explain that there was a difference between swearing and adultery. She still didn’t fill in the details on exactly what it was, but she was clear that it wasn’t swearing. It dawned on me that this was another example of a breach in the confidentiality of the confessional. Didn’t these people watch TV?

This incident makes for a funny story now, but it upset me at the time. Some good did come of it, though. I didn’t find out what adultery was until later in life, but I did find out that it isn’t swearing. I stopped going to church as an adult, so the only person I confess to now is my wife. She can be tough, but she’s not in the same class with Father Francis. I have to admit that I still swear from time to time, but I have never committed adultery and, as Martha Stewart would say, that’s a good thing.

Papa Silvestri and the Incinerator

When I was a teenager in Connecticut I worked at a hamburger and hot dog restaurant on Route 7 along with about six of my friends. It was called Bob’s Charcoal Grill, and it was open from April to November. It had large garage doors in front that opened to let the customers come up to the counter. It was a hang out for all of the local kids, and it had been popular for at least a generation. My older sister had worked there before me when she was in high school. I worked there over three summers.

By the time I worked there, Bob was long gone. It was owned by an Italian family, the Silvestris, who drove up from Yonkers every day to run the show. And it was a show. We had our own language that we used to talk about the food. A hamburger was a slab, or a beef, and a cheeseburger was a blonde slab. Two hot dogs to go were referred to as two porkers to travel. When the grill cook burned one side of a burger he yelled sunny on the beef to the bun boy. That meant he should put the sunny side of the burger, the side that wasn’t burned, facing up on the bun.

At the end of each season, on the weekend in November that the restaurant closed, the Silvestris invited everyone on the staff to their home in Yonkers for a big Italian meal. This was an all-day affair. We would drive down there in the morning and spend the day in their finished basement eating, drinking, and carrying on until the wee hours of the night. When we entered the Silvestris’ recreation room, there would always be homemade pasta drying on every flat surface. The pasta was converted into delicious, and authentic, Italian dishes before long, and we ate from late morning until we left. There was always wine and a keg of beer and, at the end of the night, a glass of triple sec, rumored to be 200 proof. I’m not sure that’s possible, or legal, but that was the way we talked about it. This was a teenager’s paradise, our reward for a long summer of hard work. We had some interesting drives back to Connecticut after these feasts, but we always got back safely