I'm reading "You Can Go Home" again by Gene Logsdon. (2002, Wooster Book Company, Wooster, Ohio) It is a memoir of his youth as a farmboy-turned-seminarian.

He has a wonderful down-to-earth way of telling his story, including his heretical thoughts, doubts, and failures as a Catholic.  Not preachy at all, but shows us a world just about lost to us now.

Here is a quote telling how Gene and his friends faced off in a hockey game with some "town boys" who had beat them in a game, after an incident in which the Catholic kids were put off a school bus until the Catholic community objected to the discrimination.

"It was one thing to be ridiculed because we were Catholics. In the realm of religion we could almost understand the philosophy of turning the other cheek, especially since we believed our detractors were all going to hell anyway. But to suffer insults because we were farmers was something else entirely. We might render to God the things that were God's, but we would render to Caesar exactly what Caesar deserved."

This brought me back to all the anarchic neighborhood hockey games and other games of my own youth, when my brothers and other boys in the neighborhood would be gone all day in completely unsupervised yet well-organized games that hearken back hundreds of years in our generations, us girls sometimes joining in and sometimes staying home as our inclinations dictated....