The Power of Prayer

EDIT:  Soooo, I thought there was something vaguely familiar about this post.  There was: I'd written it before in 2008 which you can read HERE.  It's pretty much the same, word for word.  Dang, I hate when I do that.  For those of you who've been faithfully (and strangely) following this blog for a while, you've probably read this story.  I apologize for repeating it.  But rather than deleting the whole first part here, I'll leave it.  The new stuff is down below, in Part Two.  That part, as far as I know, I haven't written before.  

Part One: Dreamers

My friend Warren and I were going to be pilots! We were thirteen at the time, so what did we know? The possibilities were endless for two kids growing up in New York City.  When we were in junior high (middle school) sometimes we'd play hooky and go out to LaGuardia or Kennedy Airports to hang out on the open-air observation decks.  This was in that more innocent time before hijackings and before America became terrified.

Our other friends, the ones who did not want to be pilots, thought we were weird. They thought so because on sunny, summer days Warren and I would lay down on a patch of grass on a hill high above the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx and we'd watch airplanes fly over. Our neighborhood just happened to be under a departure corridor of LaGuardia Airport so there was a non-stop parade of airliners all day long.  We got good at identifying the various types of airplanes and airlines, even being able to differentiate between A Boeing 727-100 and -200.  (It's not that difficult.)

Warren had a battery-operated multi-band radio that could pick up the air traffic control frequencies. So we could listen to the airliners as they soared overhead, climbing out on their way to exotic destinations (i.e. not New York). We were dreamers, he and I. And we dreamt of the day when we too could command an airliner to exotic (i.e. not New York) destinations.

Of course, age thirteen was when I began drinking alcohol and smoking weed. That's when the dream almost came undone.  Almost.  For me.

Warren was a couple of months older than me. Better-looking, glib, charismatic and charming, he always got along well with the older kids in the neighborhood. I looked up to him with admiration. Hey, when you've only been on the planet for thirteen years, a couple months seems like a big deal.  He wasn't just thirteen - he was thirteen and a half!

One night Warren somehow managed to procure a couple of bottles of Boone's Farm Apple Wine. We drank with them unbridled gusto, like guzzling a Coke. I got sick right away and puked all over the insides of a pizza place on Kingsbridge Road. Warren, ever my protector, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and got me the hell out of there toot-sweet before the irate shop owner could get even around the counter. He deposited me in an alley where I proceeded to empty my stomach of everything I'd eaten for the last few days.

The next morning was spent with the World's Worst Hangover. It was also the morning my mom decided that the entire house needed to be vacuumed and cleaned (including my room), which necessitated the inexplicable and loud clanging of every pot and pan we owned. The apartment sounded like a continuous car crash.  I vowed solemnly that I would never drink again. Over the years I've made that very same vow more often than I care to admit.

New York City is unique in that it has vocational high schools which specialize in certain trades. I chose Aviation High School in Queens, which would have given me my Airframe and Powerplant FAA mechanics licenses if I hadn't wasted my time and not taking it seriously. I barely graduated, squandering a priceless opportunity.

Warren went to a high school that taught electronics, something in which he was keenly interested. So we saw less of each other. Until he dropped out, which didn't take long. He was hanging around more and more with those older guys in the neighborhood, who had coincidentally all dropped out as well. They hung out in the park, doing basically nothing...until their parents threw them out...in which case they'd get horrible little apartments with beanbag "furniture," and they had crappy jobs to pay the rent. I didn't like those guys very much and so didn't hang out with them.

I knew that aviation demanded drug-free people. By high school I'd pretty much cut out the pot-smoking and (most of) the drinking. But it was tough being a “goody-goody” in The Bronx, New York in 1970. Since the guys in my high school came from all over the city, we didn't see each other in our off-time. I felt pretty alienated. But hey, we make our own choices, right?

Flash forward a couple of years. My parents had moved us out of the The Bronx and into Manhattan. I was working as a charter dispatcher for a local helicopter company. It was the very beginning of my career in aviation. My uncle came down to visit from the old neighborhood where he still lived.

“Sad about your friend, Warren,” he said offhandedly at some point in the conversation.

Say what?

Apparently Warren was with some friends in some apartment where he succumbed to a lethal combination of drugs and alcohol. I hadn't heard.

I went back up to the old neighborhood, but nobody was talking. The circumstances were sketchy, better left alone. He's gone, they said. Just let it be. And so I did. What am I, Lt. Columbo? Warren liked to drink – liked to party without limits. It's no surprise that his lifestyle did not foster longevity.

Flash forward a few more years. Now I was working as a pilot for that same helicopter company, flying sightseeing tours around New York. There were five tours of varying lengths that covered different parts of the city. One of the more expensive took passengers up over the Bronx, over Yankee Stadium, almost all the way up to Yonkers before turning south on the Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty. It was not one of the more popular tours, and so I didn't fly it much.

But when I did, I always looked down to find that little patch of grass on which those two thirteen year-old dreamers used to lie. No, I never became an airline pilot – I'd discovered helicopters and my life was changed. But I was a pilot! And every time I'd fly over the old neighborhood I'd feel a twinge of sadness that Warren never got to experience it.


Part Two: The Power Of Prayer

Now we get to the point. Both Warren and I came from Irish-Catholic families. His parents went to mass every Sunday right alongside mine at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church on Fordham Road. I'm sure that his parents prayed for him just as often and fervently as my parents prayed for me.

And so we must ask: What good is the power of prayer? We Catholics hear about it a lot. We are told to pray for this or that. And I wonder, all things being equal, how come it worked for my parents and not for Warren's? Is there any value at all to prayer? Or is it illusory? Does it just make the person doing the praying feel good? Because it certainly did not help Warren.

I've struggled with this issue ever since then. I've always wondered why I “made it” and he did not. We were exactly the same, he and I: just two city kids with the same aspirations and opportunities. He even seemed to have it better than me, being more sociable and more physically fit. Not only that, he had an uncle who owned an airplane who used to take him up!  Given all that, why does one guy live and one die?

Obviously there are no answers for such questions. But they do make you wonder...does prayer even work? Because in Warren's case, it appears to have not.