I was in the 4th grade when Dad moved us temporarily to another town one winter and then back to our home city two months later. This move caused a family whiplash of sorts and resulted in my brothers and I being removed from our Catholic school and inserted into a public school in the new town.
Deep winter reigned in the remote frozen village where we went to live for a short time. Everything was wrong with our new situation. Our house was tiny, cramped and awfully cold. The little heater worked its heart to exhaustion trying to warm the house, but it did a terrible job. I remember shivering for two months straight. I didn’t mind sitting around on cold evenings wearing two sweaters while watching television, but to read a book I had to take my hands out of my pockets and wear gloves. I checked the weather forecast in the newspaper each night, but it didn’t appear I’d be sitting in a warm room again until July.
In the little icy village my brothers and I were marched into a large brick school building and ushered into the office of a man who wore a three piece suit that had evidently been serving him well since before the war. Calling himself The Principal, Mr. Wienow seemed about as interested in our arrival as he might have been had a toboggan salesman dropped by. We were about to have a personal encounter with the unholy, the profane world of non-Catholics known as Public Schools. Attendance at this institution mounted a terrific assault on my long held philosophy that a basic goodness pervaded the world and the people in it. Life as a sheltered Catholic boy came crashing to an end.
My school mates swore in public and told dirty jokes within 5 miles of the school grounds. They were disrespectful to the teachers. Had they tried any of their antics on the nuns back home at Blessed Sacrament School, they would have landed in an orthopedic ward. Many of my new mates didn’t even care about their schoolwork, nor how well they did on tests and quizzes. When I explained to a classmate that the “J.M.J” I had written at the top of my test paper stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph and invoked their blessing on my work, she looked at me as though I was a member of a cult. Now that I think of it, the Irish schoolboy version of American Catholicism in the 1950’s was nothing if not a cult.
But soon we returned to our hometown and I was relieved to find myself back in a Catholic elementary school. My feelings upon arriving at Our Lady of Lourdes School wouldn’t have differed much from those of the Pope coming home to the Vatican . The building was constructed in the architectural style of a 12th century fortress that Ivanhoe would have been proud to own, and I’m sure he would have sworn allegiance to Rome on the spot had he been offered the keys. The hallways were darkened in monastic reverence and the entire building smelled of sacred candles. Statues of the saints, wall mounted crucifixes with palm leaves affixed all brought back a peace to my soul. All the kids were in school uniforms and the nuns softly padded the halls in their medieval regalia. God was in his heaven as the sun shone bright (figuratively) and everything was Roman Catholic all over the place. It was definitely more monastic in flavor than the monastery in which I currently reside.
At Lourdes school, I quickly became lost in an ocean of children. Fourth grade teacher Sister Clementia managed 56 children in a classroom built for 26. That’s not a typo; fruitful Catholic parents, heeding their Church, were hard at it procreating in those years and the schools were bursting at the seams. Mothers were worn out and fathers worried about money, but the Bishops were evidently happy.
Until I lost it years ago, I had a photo of our fourth grade class, Sister Clementia sitting up front near the camera and myself way back on the horizon of the fifth row, my finger just coming out of my nose. The nun looks pensive as she sits there under a huge Flying Nun hat called the Cornet, dressed in a cute little French outfit from the 15th century. She may be wondering if a jungle outpost in Borneo would be more to her liking than bronco-busting tens of boys and girls each day.
I think the photo may have been taken on a Tuesday, and if it was the third Tuesday morning of the month, Father Fudzniak, who absolutely hated children and cared even less for nuns, was probably then walking from the rectory over to the school to preach at us. Without asking, Father always chose his topic with no regard to what we were studying in our Religion lessons. He might lecture us nine year olds on the evils of birth control or he might summarize the major points of the Third Lateran Council, which took place about two hundred years before Sister Clementia's clothes were designed. Father Fuddy was an overly serious man, having lost his sense of humor in the war while assigned to an outpost in Borneo.
At Lourdes school, I quickly became lost in an ocean of children. Fourth grade teacher Sister Clementia managed 56 children in a classroom built for 26. That’s not a typo; fruitful Catholic parents, heeding their Church, were hard at it procreating in those years and the schools were bursting at the seams. Mothers were worn out and fathers worried about money, but the Bishops were evidently happy.
Until I lost it years ago, I had a photo of our fourth grade class, Sister Clementia sitting up front near the camera and myself way back on the horizon of the fifth row, my finger just coming out of my nose. The nun looks pensive as she sits there under a huge Flying Nun hat called the Cornet, dressed in a cute little French outfit from the 15th century. She may be wondering if a jungle outpost in Borneo would be more to her liking than bronco-busting tens of boys and girls each day.
I think the photo may have been taken on a Tuesday, and if it was the third Tuesday morning of the month, Father Fudzniak, who absolutely hated children and cared even less for nuns, was probably then walking from the rectory over to the school to preach at us. Without asking, Father always chose his topic with no regard to what we were studying in our Religion lessons. He might lecture us nine year olds on the evils of birth control or he might summarize the major points of the Third Lateran Council, which took place about two hundred years before Sister Clementia's clothes were designed. Father Fuddy was an overly serious man, having lost his sense of humor in the war while assigned to an outpost in Borneo.
I was relieved to be back in a more militarily crisp environment where the order of the day was set by the nuns rather than the ping-pong precepts of modern child psychology. Little man that I was, I appreciated someone being in control. Whatever weapons were used …. rulers or blackboard pointers or “the back of me hand”….. it didn’t matter to me. What did matter was a predictable environment I could enjoy for six hours each weekday.
At lunch time, we were all sent to the basement to eat, a symbolism that was not lost on me. Students up through the fourth grade ate in a low ceiling room filled with small tables seating eight, with tiny little chairs that were too small for the smallest of us. Light streamed in the high cellar windows and outside I could see telephone wires that I pretended was the barbed wire fence I’d seen in the prison camp movie, “Stalag 17.” Swaggering forth like a young William Holden, I approached the black attired SS prison guard (Sister Mary Gertrude) and asked if I could join my fellow prisoners outside on the stalag’s parade ground. She grabbed the brim of my hat and pulled it down over my eyes, then spun me around twice and pointed me toward the door, just like Pin The Tail On The Donkey. Staggering forward as if I had been on rice-only rations for six weeks, I proceeded out through the sally port. Sister Trudy would have had good time in the Hitler Youth when she was a kid, I imagined.
I climbed the stairs from the basement and stepped out into the damp frigid air, letting my ears delight in the sound of traffic passing on the busy street. My young soul had now been saved from the remote desolateness of a small town. Lourdes School and its environs were to me much preferred over the eerie frozen quietness of that other village. Here there was slush and cars caked in road salt. Even in winter puddles sometimes formed when the temperature peeked just above thirty two degrees. Fog abounded most days, thrilling the heart of this winterized boy. Everything was grey and wet, damp and cold. But not frozen solid and below zero, thanks be to God. Most days were pleasantly balmy in the low twenties. By the time we returned, winter’s end was in the air with the temps headed toward thirty. I didn’t need a thermometer; spring beckoned with the smell of melting dog poops as they began to warm up beneath the snow.
Now returned safely to my hometown, I’d had a long trip to nowhere, a scary detour on my journey upward. As I walked the mile home after school, slogging through slush covering the sidewalks, I could not but thank all the saints in heaven that I no longer had to ride a school bus home across the tundra and put up with all those noisy and profane children. I could walk home by myself, and when I arrived, feet and gloves and seat of my britches wet with the slop of winter in the city, I would head for the cellar and change into dry clothing while standing before the immense roaring octopus coal furnace, the winter god of my childhood. It was good to be home.
Rave On!
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