Mount St. Mary's College

Last Sunday, I went to Mount St. Mary’s College, the Chalon campus in Brentwood, with my niece. She is thinking of transferring there for the fall to be an English major.

I have a long history with the Mount, as the faculty, students, and alumnae call it. My grandmother took a degree in dietetics from the school in the 1930s, and sixty years later, my wife followed suit with a liberal studies degree.

There was a point in my life, when I was on the cusp of adulthood, that my grandmother and I made the pilgrimage up the winding roads of west Los Angeles to the hilltop campus to hear a concert. It was the dead of winter, and my grandmother was trying to open some doors for me. She wanted me to attend Mount St. Mary’s for a music degree. I wanted to go to Cal State Northridge. CSUN had a jazz program. The Mount was steeped in classical.

Sister Teresita Espinosa, the music department chair, met us at the concert. She told us about the programs and facilities, the practice rooms, the fact that the school was mostly all-female, but certain majors were admitting men. Then she led me to the stage after the concert audience had filed out, and I sat down and played the gorgeous, seven-foot grand piano. The instrument was heavenly to touch and to hear. The notes echoed off the walls, reverberated through the hall.

Sister Teresita told me there might be scholarship opportunities, since my grandmother was an alumna. I stood there on that crisp, December night, and I turned it all down.

In the car on the way back down the mountain, my grandmother said, “Whatever the scholarship doesn’t cover, I will pay it.” She tried to change my life, and I walked away.

Years later, I accompanied my wife to the school for her classes. While she studied and researched, I worked in the basement of the library, writing my one and only unpublished, or should I say unpublishable novel. It was a quiet room with a large table and a view of the ocean. Sometimes I left the writing and thought about what my life could have been, the turn I might have taken, the doors that I closed. What if?

So there we were last weekend, with Kristina, walking the campus and listening to speakers, including school President Jacqueline Powers Doud. How familiar it all was, and how refreshing to hear someone speak of ethics and morals as a first priority of education. I haven’t heard someone speak of such lofty ideals for a very long time.

I went into the library, remodeled probably a few times since I worked on my writing there. Students shifted about, lounged in chairs reading, studied at desks. Silence, golden and pure.

Outside the weather was cold, the wind blew, and there was a hint of rain. Walking into the building to get warm, I passed a familiar face in the hall. She smiled at me with welcome. Sister Teresita. She thought I was a prospective parent, which for that day, I was.

Somehow, what I believed in as an English teacher, what I valued most about my job, why I finally did change my life long after that trip with my grandmother, all of that has been lost. I do not hear those ideals about education anymore. The idea of a classical education, one where character counts for something, and morals, ethics and values run like fine thread through the silk of golden dreams, that is what’s missing in the contemporary debate about teaching and learning.

My grandmother rests in her grave now. Her house has been sold, her possessions disposed of, her life remaindered to memory. I realized far too late, as is my habit, what she tried to do for me. I hope that I might be able to rectify my blindness by helping my niece. In this day and time, so much is uncertain. But I am glad the Mount still stands.