Portland Magazine
October 19, 2022
FIFTY YEARS AGO, I was dropped off a couple of blocks from Notre Dame, a newly admitted student with my steamer trunk at my feet. In those days, steamer trunks were standard equipment for college students. They contained everything we’d been told we’d need at university, and they were all the luggage we had. Mine was blue with black trim and silver-colored fittings. Stenciled across the top were my name and my new address: 215 Sorin Hall, Notre Dame, Indiana.
Over the next few years, the trunk followed me from one dorm room to the next, and to the off-campus house I would share with my friends senior year. After graduation, I kept the trunk, but its function changed. It became a depository for relics of my childhood, like the autographed pictures of baseball players that I wrote away for when I was thirteen and my forty-five rpm records (e.g., “Kind of a Drag” and “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago”). My birth certificate with a note of the doctor’s first words to my father after my birth: “He’s a big one. He’s a really big one.” Yellowed clippings of articles I wrote for The Milford Daily News. Notebooks recording my impressions of the first Ingmar Bergman films I saw. Then, relics of my brief career with Hemingway Transport (“A Whale of a Truck Line”).
My business career ended when I entered the seminary. After ordination, souvenirs of years teaching in Africa and of studying in England found their way into the trunk, along with odds and ends from decades of teaching at Notre Dame and the University of Portland. In sum, the trunk came to testify to the extraordinary variety afforded by an ordinary life in Holy Cross.
Now, I’ve accepted an assignment with our Holy Cross community at Notre Dame University Bangladesh. I am as far away as I could possibly be from that steamer trunk—currently in storage—but it’s clear to me that so much of my life is in there. My family, my identity, my small victories and failures, my faith. No matter where it is, I will continue to carry it wherever I go.
FATHER CHARLIE GORDON, CSC, taught at University of Portland from 2006 to 2022, where he was also Co-Director of The Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life and American Culture. He is currently assigned to Notre Dame University Bangladesh.
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