“We’re going to have a huge several month long reunion because they are going to travel the world with me on a combination fact-finding tour and vacation. I’ve been invited to several countries to meet with their leaders.
“I’ve been thinking of writing a book or working on a TV series on my voyage. I need my friends to help me understand what I will experience. Since playing high school football together in Los Angeles we have been best friends. It’s funny that while at one time we were so much alike, time has etched some rather huge crevices between our world views today. We now span the political spectrum from left to right. The most left leaning is Lee. He is one of the few honest lawyers I know. Chet, is the term ‘honest lawyer’ an oxymoron? He’s the one with the light blond hair. His gift of gab has probably swayed more than a few juries.
“The sun-tanned one just behind him, the other one with the blond hair is Frank Concannon who is our conservative. But he has always been known as Con. He was our quarterback. Always the smartest of us, Con became a multi-millionaire with some pluck and some luck. The pluck, because he was always the hardest worker of our gang, the luck because he got into the wireless communication business and sold out to a Scandinavian
conglomerate. He looks fit enough to don the helmet and shoulder pads and chuck a few 60 yard passes.
“The good looking guy closing the door is Ray. He was our All City end. He got a college football scholarship to Notre Dame. They not only knocked the wildness out of him, a wildness that had so often led us astray as youths, but they put a purpose in him. This led him to become a priest, a rather reactionary priest. I guess the new term for reactionary is neo- conservative. Doesn’t sound as uncivilized as “reactionary.” I would never have expected Ray to duplicate the Medieval approach to religion that the Polish and German popes have been advocating. If anything, I would have expected him to follow Pope John XXIII‘s or Pope Francis’s liberal approach. Of course I would never have expected him to become a man of the cloth. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find him starring in films, coaching football, or becoming a gigolo for some rich European princess—but a priest? Of course my life couldn’t have been predicted either. You know I started as a teacher and football coach. Before I was accepted into astronaut training I was the football coach at Hollywood High School. Anyway here they are.
“Guys I’d like you to meet Chet Roland from World News. Lee and Con, you’ve probably seen him on the nightly news. Ray, you were probably praying.”
“Praying? I only pray 23 hours a day, I always take time out to watch Chet and Bugs Bunny in the 6 o’clock hour.”
“With your reactionary approach to thinking I thought you only watched Robin Hood and The Flintstones!”
“Get off my back Lee or I’ll start telling lawyer jokes. Or worse, I’ll start rubbing it in on how bad Notre Dame beat Stanford. If you are going to go to college there is no sense going to a school without a ‘top ten’ football team. When you played there did you ever score?”
“We scored a lot. We just couldn’t stop anybody. When Con was the quarterback at UCLA he must have thrown 20 touchdowns against us in his career. But seriously, graduating from Stanford gave me my pick of law schools. When you got out of Notre Dame did you have your pick of seminaries?”
“Sure did. And like Thomas Aquinas, I chose the Dominicans.”
“Ray, what is it that has made so many powerful people look to the past for the truth?”
"And Gulliver Returns" Book 1 Reversing Overpopulation--The Planet's Doomsday Threat Page 12
