Chapter 2

The following Sunday, I went to Mass at Saint Paul's Church in Harvard Square. Father Mark Abdella, the chaplain of Harvard graduate students, celebrated the Mass. When Mass was over, the members of the congregation shook hands with Father Abdella. He was a fairly young priest, barely 35 years old. The women of the Harvard-Radcliffe Newman Catholic Center called him, "Father What-A-Waste".



Father Abdella was a tall, athletic man with a dark complexion and short dark hair. Rumors said Father Abdella was quite the ladies' man in college. That is until the Lord called him to the priesthood. He entered Saint John's Seminary upon graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Archbishop Benjamin Cardinal O' Rourke ordained Mark Abdella a diocesan priest in the Archdiocese of Boston.



"Father Abdella," I said to the young priest outside Saint Paul's Church, "could you bless my rosary bracelet?" I presented him with the jewelry box containing the bracelet, and he opened it. "Who are you giving this bracelet to, Michael?"



"My girlfriend," I said to the priest wearing traditional green vestments for Masses in ordinary time on the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar.



"And what is your girlfriend's name?"



"I don't know yet."



"What do you mean?" Father Abdella looked puzzled.



"It's for my first girlfriend."



"Oh, I see," said the priest. He took the box with the rosary bracelet and held it in his right hand. "Bless this rosary bracelet, Lord Jesus Christ. May the woman who wears it bring a lifetime of joy to Michael. Let the two of them live in faith, hope, and love. Amen." Father Abdella handed the rosary bracelet back to me.

"Thank you, Father," I said.

"No problem, Michael." The priest gave me the thumbs up. I walked alone, as usual, to my dormitory room in Perkins Hall. My room was just big enough for a single bed, a desk, a small closet, and a book case.

In those days, we did not yet have the World Wide Web. For fun, I read books on science and engineering. I bought them at the MIT Coop, Cambridge-speak for "book store". Harvard had its own Coop, but MIT's Coop had a better selection of science and engineering books.

I had filled my wooden bookshelf with books on subjects from biology to chemistry, and from materials science to nuclear engineering. That particular day, I cracked open a book on quantum mechanics by J.J. Sakurai. I couldn't believe the US Department of Defense was paying me to do this. I held a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG Fellowship). The Office of Naval Research (ONR) was my service branch within the DoD. That next summer I was to report to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC for summer research..

The Department of Defense paid for my tuition, fees, and living expenses at Harvard University. The NDSEG Fellowship required no military service. It objective was to increase the number of Ph.D. trained scientists and engineers who could contribute to the defense of the United States. Most of us would go on to work in academia or industry. A few would work in federal civilian or military research and development laboratories.

At the time, I had no idea what path the Lord had in mind for me. I was young and didn't know anything about life. My best friends were the derivative and the integral. Yet, I was lonely. Shortly after Bill Clinton was sworn in as President of the United States, I left my home of Las Vegas, Nevada for the first time. I had spent two years studying physics at the College of Southern Nevada, the only community college in Las Vegas. I spent the next two years completing my Bachelor of Science degree in physics at the Universit of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) on Maryland Parkway, a few minutes from the Las Vegas Strip. My family lived off Sahara Avenue near Sunrise Montain on the eastern edge of the Las Vegas Valley.

At Harvard University, I had no friends, at least no close friends. All of the other graduate students, whether in the dorms or in the Department of Physics, seemed to care only about their own lives. Each of us had lives before Harvard, and everyone seemed unwilling to let go of the past and to meet new people. Most of my classmates were in long-distance relationships when they entered Harvard. That made it difficult for me to have any woman even give me a chance.

It seemed like every woman at Harvard was born with a boyfriend, fiance, or husband. I was on a date with my quantum mechanics textbook. I read about the spin-orbit coupling in atoms. I even did a few problems at the end of the chapter. Kep in mind, I was studying outside the coursework in which I was enrolled at the University.

"This is pathetic!" I yelled out loud in my room. "Lord, I need a girlfriend!"