Excerpt: 'The Longest Trip Home'

Oct. 21, 2008 — -- From John Grogan, the author of the New York Times best-seller "Marley and Me," comes a hilarious and touching memoir of his childhood in suburban Detroit.

In his follow-up, "The Longest Trip Home," Grogan shares hilarious stories of growing up in a Catholic household -- run-ins with no-nonsense nuns and family vacations to religious shrines.

The story is punctuated by major milestones in Grogan's life and delves into his decision to distance himself from Catholicism and marry a Protestant woman, a choice that crushed his religiously fervent parents.

In Grogan's distinctive blend of humor and grief, "The Longest Trip Home" takes the reader along on a revelatory journey of love, laughter and life's misgivings.

Read an excerpt below and check out other selections featured on "Good Morning America" by clicking here.

The call came on a school night in the autumn of 2002. Jenny was out, and I was fixing dinner for our three children, who were already at the table. I grabbed the phone on the third ring.

"John!" My father's voice boomed through the earpiece. He sounded exceptionally buoyant. At eighty-six, Dad was quite the physical specimen. Just as when he was a young man, he began each morning with calisthenics, including forty push-ups. He always loved the outdoors and still cut his own acre of grass, gardened, shoveled snow, and climbed on the roof to clean the gutters. Dad bustled up and down the stairs of his home with a teenager's vigor and routinely got by on six hours of sleep. His handwriting was as neat and controlled as the day he went to work as a draftsman for General Motors in 1940, and he honed his mind each night by breezing through the crossword puzzle in the newspaper as he ate peanuts in his trademark way – with chopsticks so he wouldn't get his fingers greasy.

There was never enough time in each day for everything he wanted to get done, and fourteen years shy of becoming a centurion, he joked that someday when life settled down, he would get to all that leisure reading on his list. "When I retire," he'd say.

"Hey, Dad," I said. "What's up?"

"Just checking in," he said. "How's everyone there?" I gave him quick updates on the kids, told him we were all fine. We chatted aimlessly for a few minutes as I carried the pasta and sauce to the table.

I placed my hand over the mouthpiece. "It's Grandpa," I whispered to the kids and motioned them to dig in.

"Everyone says hi," I told him.

"Say," he said, pausing just a little too long. "I need to talk to you about something."

"Is Mom OK?" I asked.

It was my mother we all worried about. Over the years she had grown weak and fragile. Her hips and lower back had deteriorated, rendering her all but immobile. And in recent years her memory had begun to slip. Dad had become her fulltime caregiver, helping her bathe and dress, and doling out a daily regimen of medications that was comical in its quantity and complexity. Always the engineer, he kept track of them all with a meticulous flow chart. There were pills for her heart, for her diabetes, for her arthritis, for her aches, for what doctors said were the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. Despite Dad's characteristically upbeat tone, every phone call I wondered if this would be the one with the bad news.

"Mom's fine," Dad said. "Mom's doing all right. It's me. I got a little bad news today."

"You did?" I asked, stepping out of the kitchen and away from the kids.

"It's the darnedest thing," he said. "I've been feeling a little run down lately, but nothing worth mentioning. Just kind of tired."

"You have a lot on your plate, taking care of Mom and the house and everything."

"That's all I thought it was. But a few days ago I took Mother in to Dr. Bober for her regular checkup. The doctor took one look at me and asked, 'Are you feeling OK? You look washed out.' I told her I was a little worn down but otherwise fine, and she said, 'Well, let's get you tested just to make sure you're not anemic.'"

"And?"

"And the results came back, and sure enough, I'm anemic."

"So they give you iron or something, right?"

"They can treat the anemia, but there's more to it. The anemia is just a symptom of something a little more serious."

He hesitated a moment, and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully. "After my blood work came back, Dr. Bober said she wanted to rule out some other things and sent me in for more tests." He paused. "They show I have a kind of leukemia, and—"

"Leukemia?"

"Not the bad kind," he said quickly. "There's acute leukemia, which is what you think of when you say leukemia – the kind that can kill so quickly. I don't have that. I have something called chronic lymphocytic leukemia. It's just lying there in my bloodstream not doing anything. The doctors say it could sit there dormant for years."

"How many years?" I asked.

"Anywhere from a couple to ten or twenty," Dad said.

My mind raced to process everything I was hearing. "So that's good, right?" I asked. "It may just sit there for the rest of your life."

"That's what the doctor said: 'Go about your life, Richard, and forget about it.' I should try not to worry and they'd treat any symptoms, like the anemia, and monitor my blood every four months."

"How are you doing on the 'try not to worry' front?" I asked.

"So far pretty good," he said. "I just want to stay healthy so I can take care of Mother for as long as she needs me."

Standing phone to ear from three states away, I felt a swell of optimism. Dad always bounced back. He had bounced back from the heart attack he suffered shortly after retiring from General Motors and from prostate cancer after I was married. Dad, a man who greeted adversity with stoic determination, would bounce back from this, too. The sleeping cancer would simply be something to monitor as my father marched vigorously into his nineties, holding together the strands of the life he and my mother had spent more than a half century building together.

"It's really nothing," Dad assured me. "I'm going to follow doctors' orders and try to forget about it."

That's when I asked: "Dad, what can I do?"

"Not a thing," he insisted. "I'm fine. Really."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Absolutely," he said and then added the one request that was so deeply important to him, the one thing that seemed so simple and effortless, and yet the one I had such difficulty delivering to him.

"Just keep me in your prayers," he said.

"Wake up, little sleepyheads."

The voice drifted through the ether. "Wake up, wake up, boys. Today we leave on vacation." I opened one eye to see my mother leaning over my oldest brother's bed across the room. In her hand was the dreaded feather. "Time to get up, Timmy," she coaxed and tickled the feather tip beneath his nostrils. Tim batted it away and tried to bury his face in the pillow, but this did nothing to deter Mom, who relished finding innovative ways to wake us each morning.

She sat on the edge of the bed and fell back on an old favorite. "Now, if you don't like Mary Kathleen McGurny just a little bit, keep a straight face," she chirped cheerily. I could see my brother, eyes still shut, lock his lips together, determined to not let her get the best of him this time. "Just a tiny bit? An eeny teeny bit?" she coaxed, and as she did she brushed the feather across his neck. He clamped his lips tight and squeezed his eyes shut. "Do I see a little smile? Oops, I think I see just a little one. You like her just a tiny bit, don't you?" Tim was twelve and loathed Mary Kathleen McGurny as only a twelve-year-old boy could loathe a girl known for picking her nose so aggressively on the playground it would bleed, which was exactly why my mother had picked her for the morning wake-up ritual. "Just a little?" she coaxed, flicking the feather across his cheek and into his ear until he could take it no more. Tim scrunched his face into a tortured grimace, and then exploded in laughter. Not that he was amused. He jumped out of bed and stomped off to the bathroom.

One victory behind her, my mother and her feather moved to the next bed and my brother Michael, who was nine and equally repelled by a girl in his class. "Now, Mikey, if you don't like Alice Treewater just a smidgeon, keep a straight face for me…" She kept at it until she broke his resolve. My sister, Marijo, the oldest of us four, no doubt had received the same treatment in her room before Mom had started on us boys. She always went oldest to youngest.

Then it was my turn. "Oh, Johnny boy," she called and danced the feather over my face. "Who do you like? Let me think, could it be Cindy Ann Selahowski?" I grimaced and burrowed my face into the mattress. "Keep a straight face for me if it isn't Cindy Ann Selahowski?" Cindy Ann lived next door, and although I was only six and she five, she had already proposed marriage numerous times. My chin trembled as I fought to stay serious. "Is it Cindy Ann? I think it just might be," she said, darting the feather over my nostrils until I dissolved into involuntary giggles.

"Mom!" I protested as I jumped out of bed and into the cool dewy air wafting through the open window, carrying on it the scent of lilacs and fresh-cut grass.

"Get dressed and grab your beer cartons, boys," Mom announced. "We're going to Sainte Anne Du Beaupre's today!" My beer carton sat at the foot of my bed, covered in leftover wallpaper, the poor man's version of a footlocker. Not that we were poor, but my parents could not resist the lure of a nickel saved. Each kid had one, and whenever we traveled, our sturdy cardboard cartons doubled as suitcases. Dad liked the way they stacked neatly in the back of the Chevrolet station wagon. Both of them loved that they were completely and utterly free.

Even in our very Catholic neighborhood, all the other families took normal summer vacations, visiting national monuments or amusement parks. Our family traveled to holy miracle sites. We visited shrines and chapels and monasteries. We lit candles and kneeled and prayed at the scenes of alleged divine interventions. The Basilica of Sainte Anne de Beaupre, located on the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec, was one of the grandest miracle sites in all of North America, and it was just a seven-hour drive from our home outside Detroit. For weeks, Mom and Dad had regaled us with tales of the many miracles of healing that had happened there over the centuries, beginning in 1658 when a peasant working on the original church reported a complete cure of his rheumatism as he laid stones in the foundation. "The Lord works in mysterious ways," Dad liked to say.