Catholic school daze
Although I had taken to kindergarten (at the nice new
school right around the corner from my house) with the greatest of ease, first
grade was a shock to the system from which I did not recover for some
time.
While
kindergarten entailed walking around the block, first grade meant a school 3
miles away (a different country, in my estimation). I had to become involved in a terrifying
ordeal known as “car pool”, and a strange woman named Mrs. Ragazinno, whose son
was allegedly in my class, appeared in the mornings to drive me to school. Her car had no windows, so she passed out
head scarves to help us keep what little hair we had left from getting
windblown. Clearly, she was a witch and
I was being kidnapped. I stood on the
sidewalk, unwilling to get into the car, and began to cry. I had convinced myself that if I left for the
day my mother would die. My sister
Marilyn came out onto the sidewalk and urged me into the car: “You better get
in the car! Mom will come out here if
you don’t, and you’ll be in big trouble!”
The
contrast between Ross Elementary (where all my neighborhood friends were going)
and Holy Family continued to be made clear to me. In lieu of a textbook for first grade, we
were given a sheaf of mimeographed pages and told to obtain a hard cover
notebook and glue each page into it. At
Ross, they had actual books.
At
lunch one day, I was sitting on the playground by myself with my sack lunch in
front of me: half a bologna sandwich, a
banana, and a cupcake with chocolate frosting in a little plastic bag. A big mean boy came by and veered over so
that he could plant his shoe right on my cupcake. I could see the tread marks in the frosting
that mirrored the bottom of his shoe, and I stared fixedly at it. I didn’t want to look up in case the random
violence this person seemed to be capable of was visited on me next. The world had gotten strange, scary, and
unpredictable.
I
spent most of first grade in a state of low-grade terror and on the verge of
tears. One of the effects of that was
that I always felt like I had to urinate.
I asked to be excused one day, walked across the little courtyard to the
restrooms, then walked the long way back around the edges of the courtyard. I stopped at the row of drinking fountains
and got a little water, mostly to delay going back into the classroom. Unfortunately, the teacher saw all this and
the next time I raised my hand to be excused she told me that I didn’t have to
go, and to wait. Needless to say, the
tears started up again.
I was
shocked at simply being in an environment where I wasn’t the baby of the family
and indulged. There were large classes,
regimented days, and stern teachers. (We
hit a peak in 3rd grade, when I had 64 kids in my class. There was one teacher, no aides, wall-to-wall
desks). I essentially went mute during
the school day, a habit that lasted until high school. I understand that Asperger’s syndrome had
been identified earlier, but no one seemed to have heard of it in 1960, and I
recognized myself in the description decades later. I didn’t ever feel like I was experiencing
“social anxiety”. I wasn’t anxious in
group settings, just mute. I had no idea
how to enter a group in progress, or how to interact. There always seemed to be some rulebook
somewhere that I didn’t have access to.
The primitive custom known as “recess” was not attractive to me at
all. I chose to stay in the classroom
and read a book I had brought from home.
In the early schooldays, the book was probably something like “Little
Women” or “The Five Little Peppers and How they Grew”. The classroom was quiet and empty, and I sat
at my desk quite happily until one day I looked up and saw the teacher and my
mother peering at me from the doorway.
Although she hadn’t said anything to me, apparently the teacher found
this behavior unusual enough to call my parents, so of course I figured I was
in trouble. My mother thought I was
studious and admirable, apparently, as I overheard her tell people about this
for weeks afterward (“…and there she was sitting up so straight at her
desk…”). All I know is my Nirvana didn’t
continue, and I was forced out onto the playground with screaming, sweaty kids
and baffling social customs.
My brother Mike was in 8th grade the year I
started first grade. One day when the
upper grades were at recess, and our classroom was being supervised by a couple
of 8th grade girls, he peeked in the window to say hi. As usual, I was sitting at my desk in
tears. “Hey, what’s wrong with my
sister?” he asked the girls. “Oh, that’s
your sister?” one said, and they decided they would pay attention to me and try
to pat me and make me feel better. (It
didn’t work). Mike claims that the teacher brought me to his classroom and told
him to take me home a couple of times, and we went home on the bus, although I
have no memory of that.
The teacher called my mom another time to come and take me
home. I had broken out all over my body
in itchy hives. She gave me a bath in
cool water and covered me in calamine lotion; I didn’t mind since I got to
leave school. I still had to go back there the next day.
The 4th grade teacher was the oldest and meanest nun on the
staff, Sister Aletha, and I dreaded the approach of 4th grade. She was short, wizened, and walked with a
decided limp due to a bout with childhood polio. She and the rest of the nuns wore habits that
consisted of black skirts to the floor, long sleeves, and white headpieces and
bibs. Her little pinched face, peering
from beneath her painfully tight headpiece, was further squeezed by a small
pair of wire rimmed glasses.
Sister Aletha had taught my brother 7 years before I
reached 4th grade, and unfortunately remembered him well, since he
was usually in trouble for something.
The fall of 1964 began inauspiciously when she assigned seats and put me
in the last row and the last seat, nearest the windows. The problem with that was that I had been
becoming progressively more nearsighted, and now at 9 years old could not see
the front of the room from the back.
Sister Aletha put something on the chalkboard and asked us a question
about it, and I raised my hand and said “I can’t see the board from here.” Probably the bravest thing I had done in my
short life thus far! She moved my
seat: to the last seat on the other side
of the room, nearest the back door instead of nearest the window. Up went my hand again: “I still can’t see the board.” So she grudgingly moved me up a bit.
The top five students each marking period were deemed what
she called “Co-Teachers” for the next marking period. They sat in the first seat across the front
of the classroom, passed out papers, collected papers, and performed other
small tasks throughout the day. They
wore badges safety-pinned to their shirt that said “Co-Teacher” on them. When the grades came out, (I imagine to her
dismay) she found that the troublesome Feeley boy’s quiet little sister was in
fact smart. And to her credit, I guess,
she didn’t fudge the scores in any way but made me a Co-Teacher. We had a lot of buttons and ribbons on our
shirts at that time for various things:
there was a St. Benjamin pin, spelling bee prizes, etc. All of these
were pinned to the left side of the top of the shirt. I thought one day that I would solve the
crowding problem by moving the Co-Teacher badge to the right. Sister Aletha leaped on the opportunity:
“That is not where that goes! You don’t
even deserve to be a Co-Teacher if you can’t wear it properly.” And back to the back seat I went. By then, I
was so shell-shocked by the arbitrary rules that it did not even occur to me
that this was wrong.
One of the other strange customs at this time was that
classes were always raising money for “the missions” and to “save pagan
babies”. When we got enough saved, we
sent it on and got to name the baby (a saint’s name, of course). The girls in the class named the girl babies
and the boys named the boys. One of the
fund-raising gimmicks was that if anyone in class dropped their pencil on the
floor at any point, they were fined a penny, and if you were a girl you had to
donate to the boys’ fund, and boys had to donate to the girls’.
Sister Aletha had to leave the room for a while one day,
and she left a boy named Randy “in charge” of the class. He was to put names on the board of any child
who dared to talk while the teacher was out of the room. Brian, who sat across from me, reached over
and grabbed my pencil and threw it on the floor. I told him to “quit it!” and Randy promptly
put both of our names on the board.
Since we all were, of course, 9-year-olds, there were 8 names on the
board by the time Sister Aletha came back.
7 of the 8 were boy’s names.
Sister Aletha seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in
what she saw. “Look at this list!” she
told the class. “These are Sister’s
eight wounds, much like the wounds of Our Lord on the cross.” I sat squirming with embarrassment as she
started on me, “And you! You’re as bad
as the boys. I guess you better wear
your brother’s uniform to school from now on.”
She went on, “You know what criminals do, class? They write confessions. I want each of the eight of you to write a
confession and tell what you did. I also
want you to tell me if you started it.
Someone always starts it.”
I wrote a confession, as ordered, and it went something
like this: “Brian Jolliffe dropped my
pencil because he wanted me to have to pay a penny to the boy’s mission
fund. I told him to stop it. I did not
start anything.” I was concerned with
the last word. It was unusual for me to
be adamant, and I wondered if I should say “I did not start it.” But I left it as it was.
Sister Aletha collected the “confessions” and began to leaf
through them and read them to herself.
When she got to mine, she said, “Well, let’s see what SHE has to say” and
began to read it aloud. When she
realized what she was reading, she became visibly less pleased and said to the
boy she had left in charge, “Randy, is this true?” “Yes, Sister” he said. “All right, you can erase her name.” And she went on reading silently.
Father Noonan was the pastor of the parish, and he was
given to dropping in on our classes in the afternoons. The nuns always deferred to him with great
humility, even when it was evident that he had been hitting the sacramental
wine pretty hard. He was also a bit
deaf, so he entertained us with exchanges like this:
Father Noonan: “What
lessons are the children working on?”
Sister Alan Marie:
“Math, Father,”
Father: “Mass?? They went to Mass this morning!”
He used to tell the class long pointless anecdotes about
his life as a boy in Ireland. We
encouraged it with rapt attention, as it meant time away from lessons. When Ronald Reagan became governor of
California, Father told us that Reagan was an Irish name, but in Ireland it was
pronounced Ree-gan. The governor said
Ray-gan, and Father asked the class who could tell him why. When no one ventured a guess, he said that
the first child who could tell him why would get 5 dollars (a huge sum for that
time and place). A classmate of mine
took the initiative to write to the Governor’s office and ask. A few weeks later, he received a response, on
the Governor’s mansion stationary, and Reagan thanked the boy for his letter
and said that his family had always pronounced it Ray-gan, so he did the same. When the boy proudly showed the letter to
Father Noonan, expecting to collect his prize, Father said “No, that’s not
right. That’s not the reason.” Fairness was not something we ever expected
as kids, but it was always puzzling when adults acted unfairly.
The nuns and priests were owed complete respect at all
times, as they were god’s representatives here on earth. In the pecking order, both in the Catholic
church as well as the 1960s society, priests were #1 and nuns, the “brides of
Christ” were #2. This was clear from the
traditions we observed, such as the fact that the priests had a housekeeper and
cook at the rectory, and the nuns did all of their own cooking, shopping and
cleaning at the convent. The nuns had an
old station wagon car, and one of the younger nuns would drive it. I’m sure the priests’ housekeeper did their
grocery shopping for them.
Father Noonan is responsible for one more vivid traumatic
memory. He died. Which I’m sure was worse for him, but it
impacted the schoolchildren also. The
entire school had to file into the church to say the rosary for Father’s
soul. I and the rest of the 8th
graders filled the front rows. The open
coffin was about 2 feet from me and I had to look at his embalmed corpse during
the time it took to say the rosary, about 45 minutes.
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