Jack Kerouac died on Oct. 21, 1969. He wrote "On the Road" in 1957, the year I was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, a city of red brick and gray granite and slush and limited opportunities. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is just like Fall River except Lowell made shoes in its industrial glory days, and Fall River wove cotton cloth. Both are towns where the biggest success in your family is likely to be either a cop or a janitor up at the high school.

He was bisexual. He used morphine, Benzedrine and weed, but it was alcohol that killed him at 47. Alcohol was his favorite.

Like me, he had a French last name, and he attended one of the old-style French-Canadian Catholic schools that the nuns ran like tender battleships of God.

He spoke the Quebec version of French, like I do, and he once said that dialect was "a series of stomach noises," a phrase that always makes me think of my shot-and-beer uncles with their cigarettes, roaring happily at each other at my grandmother's after Sunday Mass.

I've lived in a few places, but once you've lived in red brick and granite and slush, and if you remember the iron dark of old churches flickered by the light of devotional candles, every other place seems less real, less demanding.

I came home. Kerouac never did, not for long, but he couldn't stop reaching back for the security of that granite church, French-speaking, plain three-decker house world.

He hobo-ed and hitchhiked and slept in flophouses. I walked into a newsroom, walked out with a paycheck and kept coming back.

In other words, I'm a coward.

If I'd had the courage to cut myself loose from "nice" neighborhoods and newspaper stories about municipal bonds, I might have been the great, alcoholic writer. Best of all, I'd have died at 47, like he did. I was 47 in 2004, so I would never have had to live in the terrifying country I live in now.

"Safe in heaven dead" was the phrase Kerouac wrote to describe life's reward. Reading him in my teens, I didn't get it then, but I do now.

It's easier to believe in God when groceries are expensive than when they're cheap, or when death is close.

You'll read this a couple days after I wrote it, but on the anniversary of Kerouac's death, I went to a local church called Ste. Anne's. The church is huge and beautiful, built over 100 years ago with the pennies of French-Canadian immigrants. Due to declining attendance, the upper part of the church is closed, but there's a shrine to Ste. Anne in the basement. Some people call that shrine "the crypt" because there are some of the old pastors buried in the walls.

I go every year on the day Kerouac died and I buy a tall candle for $5 and I light it at the foot of Ste. Anne's statue and I tell Jack that I think of him. I speak to his soul in French.

Kerouac himself said he often cursed in French, and often dreamed in French, but he always cried in French.

Kerouac said the prettiest girls in the world were in Des Moines. Like the rules of the Catholic Church, that hasn't changed. Beauty is still just outside the crypt, out where they grow corn and raise fat hogs for slaughter.

"On The Road" was Kerouac's bubbling, Benzedrine-lit holler of freedom, but he wrote books like "Maggie Cassidy" and "Visions of Gerard" that hardly anyone reads, books that weep with the feel of gray slush in mill town gutters, and smell like the brown Catholic air that drifts like dust in the corners of old churches.

He loved this country. I love this country. And when there's not much of it left to love, I go down in the crypt and talk to Jack Kerouac about the girls of Des Moines.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other creators syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

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