Summary
The Lineup at Holy Rosary is a memoir that begins in the front seat of a car, idling in a slow procession of vehicles outside a familiar brick church. The narrator sits at the edge of another Catholic ritual, watching people file toward a door that has opened for him his whole life. In the side mirror, he can see both the bell tower and his own aging face. Between the two hangs a question that will not move: How did all of this become the story of my life?
From that present-day scene, the book turns back to follow the long road that led here. It traces a childhood in prairie Catholicism where music, ritual, and obedience framed every week. A father’s ragtime piano woke the house before dawn. A mother’s alto voice climbed the choir loft steps and made stone behave. A small boy learned that if you put on the right robe and ring the right bell, adults call it holiness. He also learned that the same church that held his family together knew how to send children away.
The first major turn is the move to a convent school in Ituna. The book lingers there with clear dates, ages, and seasons marked, showing the collision of a child’s longing with institutional order. Dormitory bunks hold boys who pray, joke, and dare each other to invent new reasons for the nurse to look down their throats, because even a tongue depressor can feel like proof that your body matters. The rules around clean plates and "please" and "thank you" form one kind of grammar. Quiet rebellions, midnight whispers, and sudden laughter form another.
From Ituna, the story travels to Regina and the parish of Holy Rosary, where the narrator’s life grows heavier with detail and consequence. The move is a patchwork reunion. Older and younger siblings arrive in stages, and the sidewalks feel like air the first time they are all in one city again. Here we meet Jackie, the sister whose warmth organizes playgrounds, teams, and classrooms around her; and Shauna, whose music builds a softer sanctuary inside the noisy one.
The book’s middle chapters unfold during this Regina period. They mark specific school years and liturgical seasons as the narrator becomes an altar boy, learns the choreography of Mass, and discovers how incense, linen, and brass can shape a life’s imagination. Sunday mornings are mapped not just by memory but by year and age, allowing us to witness a boy’s understanding deepen from simple awe to complicated loyalty. Alongside the beauty of ritual, he encounters the harder truths: the strictness that confuses people-pleasing with virtue, the way charity can be offered with a sting of shame, and the quiet hierarchies that determine which children deserve attention.
Work arrives early. In adolescence and young adulthood, he finds his way behind a salon chair. The narrative brings the reader into specific shops in specific years, revealing how scissors, mirrors, and small talk become a classroom in human dignity. Here the lyrical shading remains present, but each story is rooted in concrete time. The same sensitivity that once fixed his gaze on chalices and bell ropes learns to read the tilt of a client’s chin, the tightness of a jaw, and the way gratitude can be as small as a nod when hair falls just right. This thread of craft and care becomes a counterpoint to the strict church world. It is another kind of liturgy, one that is less interested in perfection and more in presence.
Running underneath all of this is the story of a brother. The memoir does not rush through this part. It names the years of boyhood games, shared dares, and uneven but genuine affection. It marks the ordinary Tuesdays as carefully as the high holidays. When the brother’s leaving comes, it is not treated as a twist but as a culmination of countless details the church bells could not quite hold together. The suicide itself is not staged for shock. We arrive at it the way families do, through a phone call, a question at the door, a garage that will never again smell like only oil and dust.
After his death, grief rearranges everything. The book returns to the present-day car but now folds in the years in between. We see the siblings sorting through his belongings, each taking an object that becomes a private practice. For the narrator, it is his brother’s glasses, a small artifact that refuses to be filed away. They reside in pockets, bowls, on tables, and in the palm of a hand that has cut thousands of heads of hair yet cannot quite put this one thing down. Scenes from the years after the loss are anchored by specific ages, jobs, and relationships, but they are tinted by the same questions that began in the car: What do we owe the dead, and how do we keep living without turning them into either saints or accusations?
Throughout the book, time is explicit. Chapter headings track the movement from early childhood to the present with place, year, and age. The structure is simple and chronological, yet each chapter is imbued with the lyrical attention that already resides in the narrator’s mind. Dates, schools, jobs, and addresses build a spine. Around that spine, the prose lingers on the small, luminous details that truly make a life: dust turning into stars in a shaft of light when a bell rings, the way a rope remembers the pull of your weight, the sound of Sister Elizabeth’s shoe tapping twice on the floor.
Faith in this memoir is not a single verdict. It is a field of tension. Holy Rosary Cathedral stands as both refuge and witness. The church gives the family music and structure, teaches the boy a language of service, and offers him a stage where he can belong by learning his steps. It also fails to see what it does not want to see, including the invisible burdens that can weigh down a son. As the narrator ages, his relationship with Catholicism shifts from inherited obedience to negotiated love. He keeps the bells, the hymns, and the belief that attention to others is holy. He begins to question the reflex to endure everything silently.
The Lineup at Holy Rosary is, in the end, a book about how a person assembles a self from the pieces handed to them by family, church, and work, and from the pieces they salvage when those institutions crack. It is about brothers and sisters, nuns and nurses, priests and hair clients, all of them stitched into one life that aims to be honest. The story does not choose between poetry and clarity. It names ages, years, and cities with precision. It also allows itself long looks at how a pair of glasses lying on a table can hold more truth than any official explanation.
The memoir closes where it began, in that car outside Holy Rosary, but by the time we return, the lineup has changed its meaning. The narrator steps out knowing more clearly what he wants from the remaining years, even if he cannot articulate it as doctrine. He carries his brother with him, not as an ache that stops time, but as a weight that helps him walk straighter toward whatever door is next. The bell rings, as it always has, cutting the day into before and after. This time, he chooses his own way up the steps.
