A Day that Changed My Life
When Professor Edward Bradley said, "Dammit man, you must come to Rome with me."
As you read this, I am in Assisi, Italy, celebrating the 89th birthday of a man who has meant more to me than just about any other.
“Dammit, man, you must come to Rome with me! We’ll walk in the footsteps of the saints!”
For years now, those words, spoken to me by Professor Edward Bradley at Dartmouth College in the spring of 1989, have rung in my ears.
When I arrived in Hanover, two-and-a-half years earlier, I hadn’t been away from my family for more than a week — and that had been for church camp. In my case, going to college did not include a station wagon full of belongings wending across country. I took only what I could fit in a suitcase, a duffel bag, and a backpack. I experienced the flight from Minneapolis to Boston, as I recall, primarily as a burning throat from fighting back tears of loneliness and terror. Three classmates were on the plane with me, or I’m sure I would have let the tears flow freely.
In Boston, we caught a Vermont Transit bus to White River Junction, and from there we took a Dartmouth Taxi to campus. That was my first cab ride.
The next mental image deserves one of those boom cameras, or even a shot from a helicopter: the lens pulling back wider and wider showing three kids, surrounded by luggage, standing in the middle of campus as the taxi pulled away. More terror.
My freshman roommates were East Coasters — prep school kids. The father of one was a governor, and state police cased our room whenever he was coming to visit. The other roommate decided he wanted a single instead of a triple, so he moved into the closet. He hung a sign over the door that read, “The Fetus.”
I was a long way from church camp.
I actually met Professor Bradley in my very first class at the College. Latin 3 met at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I slept through my alarm on the first day of college. Without time to take a shower, I put on a baseball cap to cover my irascible bowl cut, and I ran to class. Breathless, I arrived a few minutes late. Bradley looked at me disapprovingly: “No hats in class.” Bad hair terror consumed me for the next 50 minutes.
Our little Latin class came to be less terrified of “Bradley, the Latin God,” over the course of the quarter. He lived on a mountainside past White River Junction, and his commute was often our salvation. If the gods were smiling on us, Bradley had listened to an AM radio station on the drive in, and that meant that he was sure to be completely torqued about the poor grammar in the latest McDonald’s commercial. If we played our cards right, we could stoke the fire of his outrage and keep him talking about the devolution of the English language for nearly the entire class period — and that meant no Latin. We took to calling him, “Bradley, Master Grammarian” (behind his back, of course).
I struggled through my first two years at college. I joined a fraternity, but didn’t quite fit in. I decided to major in history, but felt lost in the big classes. I joined a conservative Christian ministry on campus, but got kicked out for being “unteachable.”
The one place I seemed to fit was at the hockey arena. I had gotten to know a classmate from Duluth, and we heard that students got to broadcast the hockey games on the radio. After lunch one day, we walked up to the radio station and asked to see the sports director. A junior or senior came out of the office and met us outside the studio.
“Well, it’s kind of a seniority thing around here,” he told us. “What we’ll do is give you some equipment and let you practice at a couple home games. By next year, you’ll probably get a little air time, and you should get to travel to some away games by your junior year. By the way, where are you from?”
“We’re both from Minnesota.”
“Oh. Can you go to Army and Princeton next weekend?”
Pete and I were given the keys to the Mobile Unit of WDCR/WFRD, a box of equipment and cables, and wished good luck. The trip went swimmingly, except for the flat tire (no spare) at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, somewhere in Connecticut.
“How fast were you going?” the tow truck driver asked.
“About 85,” Pete said.
“Yup. That’s enough to strip the bark off the tree,” the driver chuckled.
“How fast were you going?” the groggy college dean asked us, having been phoned by the tow truck driver when he discovered that we had no credit card and little cash.
“About 60,” I said.
I took off both the Spring quarter before and the Fall quarter after sophomore summer (a required term at Dartmouth), and when I returned in January of my junior year, it seemed like all of my friends were on foreign study trips. I had applied for the History department’s trip to Scotland but been rejected. I ran across Professor Bradley somehow, and he told me about a group of guys who played pick-up hockey a couple of times a week at Campion Rink. I told him I didn’t have a car. He said he’d give me a ride.
Over the winter, as we drove back and forth to the rink, we started to talk about faith. I was a Protestant, burned by my experience of being kicked out of Campus Crusade and trying to recover in another Bible study. He was a “born-again Catholic,” he said. “What’s that?” I wondered. I’d never heard of a born-again Catholic. He told me about his spiritual journey, and I told him about mine. And we talked hockey, campus politics, grammar, and women.
That Spring, I saw a sign announcing a meeting for the Classics Department’s foreign study program to Rome. Bradley was going to lead the second half of the trip. I swung by his office on the third floor of Reed Hall to ask about it.
But I was ambivalent, I told him. I mean, to go on that trip would mean missing Senior Fall, homecoming, football games…
That’s when he interrupted me, slammed his hand on his desk and leaned across it, “Dammit, man, you must come to Rome with me! We’ll walk in the footsteps of the saints!”
Of all the words that pass others’ lips and slip into our ears in a lifetime, so many hundreds of thousands, so many millions are meaningless. Of the trillions of words that have been uttered since 1769 on the Dartmouth Campus, so many with contrived gravitas, few ever hit their mark. But some, a few words in every life, a few syllables every academic year – they stick. Like an Arthurian sword thrust into my soul, those words will never be removed. When I am drooling with dementia, I’ll turn to the kind nurse who is changing my bedpan and say, “Then he said, ‘Dammit, man, you must come to Rome with me.’”
The short story: my life turned on a pivot at that instant.
The long story: I did go to Rome. I learned how to recognize the four types of Pompeian wall painting, and I could tell in which century an Etruscan wall was built. I learned where to find good wine for less than 4,000 lire, and I made out with a girl from a foreign study program of another school. I walked to the Vatican everyday, just to look at the Pieta. I learned how to smoke Galouises, Bradley’s chosen smoke — “French cigarettes with Hungarian tobacco,” he’d say.
“By the end of this trip, Rome will be your city,” Bradley told us. “Rome is a walking city. Don’t take cabs or buses – walk, and this city will be yours for the rest of your life.” (He was not wrong — this week marks my twenty-fourth trip to Rome.)
So we walked. And I learned how to drink coffee and wine, and I learned how to read a train schedule. I learned how to make spaghetti carbonara (illegally) in a hotel room with one pot and a camping stove. Every morning I went to the market in the Campo dei Fiore, every noon I got pizza or half a roasted chicken at Pizza Rustica (“Old Fashioned Pizza”), and every night, around 11, we’d walk to Giolitti’s for gelato.
Bradley took us to Ravenna, the mosaic capital of Early Christianity. He showed us pristine churches with little pieces of glass so blue that they seemed otherworldly. He took us to Florence and we climbed Brunelleschi’s dome. He told us about the ingeniousness of its construction, how the two onion peel-like layers meet and are held together, almost miraculously, at the oculus. We looked up at the mosaics in the Florentine baptistery as he walked us through every biblical scene, explaining the connection to the rite of baptism.
“Why are baptisteries octagons?” he asked.
Silence.
“How many people were on the Ark?”
I counted in my head. “Eight?”
“That’s right.” Bradley smiled. “Eight were saved from the waters of the Flood, so baptisteries are eight-sided to remind us of the connection between water and salvation.”
But it was back in Rome, at St. Peter’s Basilica, that the truly holy moment happened. We met there in the morning. Bradley sat us down in the portico. It was the last lecture of the quarter, the end of our classes in Rome. He began by pulling out of his bag an 8½ by 11, glossy, black and white photo. It was of a plain New England Congregational church — simple, clapboard siding and plain, clear windows.
“This,” he said, “is what is most valued in American spirituality. Simple, plain, nothing ostentatious.” He went on to describe how we as a culture value a simple, humble faith — it’s based on our Puritan past and the “Protestant work ethic.” Then, he swung around, his arm sweeping across the countenance of the grandest church in the world. He told us about Catholic sacramental theology, about the extravagance that runs in Mediterranean blood, and about how the church had to make a statement to the worldly governments about where true power really lay. Don’t be judgmental, was his point; there are plenty of good reasons to build a church this big and beautiful.
Then, for the next two hours, we walked from the portico, through the piazza, into the basilica, through the side aisles, down the nave, under the dome, and to the apse. There, an enormous empty chair, suspended from the wall, awaits its cosmic owner. All the way along, he stopped and quizzed us on translations of Latin and Greek inscriptions, spoke of the sculptures and marble-inlaid floors, about the four massive piers that hold up the cupola and the holy relics ensconced therein, and the baldachinno that shelters the high altar. Every bit of that overwhelming structure was explained by Bradley with the passion of an evangelist. It was as religious an experience as I’ve ever had.
I wrote my final paper in Rome on basilican architecture. Bradley gave me an A with a citation — he wrote that my essay was, “at times eloquent.” I still remember that. I had never been called eloquent.
When I returned to Hanover, I petitioned to become a Classics major (changes to one’s major during senior year are frowned upon, I discovered). That was approved, and my final six classes at Dartmouth were all in the department. I went from one of dozens of History majors to one of six Classics majors.
When my parents came out for graduation, I brought them up to the third floor of Reed Hall. They met the Department profs, and my fellow majors, and they had some cheese and wine. And their son, now a man, introduced them to Professor Bradley.
Edward Bradley retired from teaching at Dartmouth years after 43 years of service to the College. His younger colleagues may have wondered why he didn’t make more of a mark on academia. Where are the award-winning books? The interviews in the New York Times and on N.P.R.? Where are the kudos from the guild of Latinists upon his retirement?
I have an entirely different standard for measuring the man’s career.
I have been to Rome several times with Edward since his retirement, and, at 89, I assume this will be the last trip for us. Tonight, a handful of his favorite students will surround him at one of his favorite restaurants, La Stalla, and raise a glass to a man who has meant so much all of us — to me, especially.
Tony, this is among my favorite things that you have ever written. Please greet Edward for me.
Beautiful