1941 Pontiac Woody Wagon

An e-mail arrived on Flag Day in which my correspondent on the Pacific Coast wrote, “I didn’t know life at the Abbey could be so busy during the summer season.” As is often the case, it takes an outsider, someone looking in, to hit the nail on the head, to see things more clearly than those insulated on the, well, on the inside. (cf. the excellent 1997 film, The Ice Storm, set in 1973 Vietnam-era New Canaan CT, by the Taiwanese director, Ang Lee, and starring Kevin Kline, a 1965 alum of St. Louis Priory School.) That e-mail got me thinking about just how busy these summer months are on campus despite the absence of the student body. On the weekend before Flag Day, the Portsmouth Institute welcomed participants to their annual summer symposium, reported upon elsewhere in this issue. No sooner did that event end on Corpus Christi Sunday than the Institute kept the momentum going a week later with their PIETAS program which hosted high school teachers for a 6-day residency.

In between those two Institute offerings, we were privileged to welcome the Bursars of the English Benedictine Congregation for their annual gathering, many of whom had never been to Portsmouth or, in fact, to the U.S. Their schedule of events, both business and social, was facilitated by Dr. Ellen Eggeman, Portsmouth’s Chief Financial Officer. Attendees included several lay persons as well as monks and sisters from Ireland and throughout England, with the visiting monk/priests concelebrating the daily morning Mass. Depending on their individual interests, members of the group seized the opportunity to explore areas beyond campus. One monk did genealogical research at the Newport Historical Society, while another went farther afield to view the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, reminding me later that many of the finest American artists of the 18th and 19th centuries on exhibit were actually trained in England.