December 25, 2005
My Holiday Essay
AN ANGEL GETS HER WINGS
40 years ago I was a small girl in a small town experiencing my first season of schooling. I was in Kindergarten at Holy Angels Catholic School in Aurora, Illinois. I was four.
There are two significant things that happened to me in this place of education in what should have been a forgettable year. The first story has been told so many times by family members I feel like I remember being there, though I think it’s just a matter of repeating it so many times, I picture myself there, like a dream, like after so many tellings OJ convincing himself he was somewhere else. Continued...
AN ANGEL GETS HER WINGS
40 years ago I was a small girl in a small town experiencing my first season of schooling. I was in Kindergarten at Holy Angels Catholic School in Aurora, Illinois. I was four.
There are two significant things that happened to me in this place of education in what should have been a forgettable year. The first story has been told so many times by family members I feel like I remember being there, though I think it’s just a matter of repeating it so many times, I picture myself there, like a dream, like after so many tellings OJ convincing himself he was somewhere else.
That was the story of the nun deciding to put me on a bus two weeks earlier than instructed. On a bus to our new house that wasn’t finished yet. To a barely there subdivision in the middle of cornfields. A bus to nowhere. While I cried and told them that they were wrong to put me on this purgatorial big yellow sarcophagus, my father sat in the parking lot of Holy Angels eventually figuring it out when I didn’t show up, then racing through town to beat the bus to the middle of nowhere. Did I mention that I was four? It was like in today’s times being snatched by the creepy neighbor guy and taken to the mall - but in this case, it was masterminded by a nun.
The second incident I DO remember like it was yesterday. Albeit forty years of yesterdays. This is the tale of a typical Catholic persecution – a little virgin princess in dire need, turned away at the door to solace. There I was, a cute pixie with a pixie and a tiny, curled smile that didn’t leave till high school. I was shy and timid and sweet. Sweet and cute – a little angel dammit!
It was the last day of school before Christmas break. It was snowing while we were crafting our last oh holy of holy Christmas projects. Twenty or thirty four-year-olds, a stack of paper plates, a pile of pinecones, some glue and some snowy, glittery stuff. We made “center pieces” for our family’s mealtime celebration of the birth of Jesus. A snowy, glittery pinecone glued to a snowy glittery paper plate. Maybe there were crayons involved – I picture an early Jackson Pollock, Crayola scratches, swirling around the pinecone on paper. Oh, holy day, the stars are brightly shining on these masterpieces.
On this day for some reason, there was a Father So-and-So visiting the classroom. And for some reason this did not make Sister Mary Ratched behave any nicer towards these little waifs. Or maybe it was just me she had it in for – the little angelic smiley kid who quietly did her work and didn’t ask questions.
At the end of the day, the blizzard began. Maybe this pissed off Sister Mary Ratched because this meant she wouldn’t be able to go ice-skating later. Whatever it was, it seemed that I was going to be the subject of her habit-wrapped fury.
While Father So-and-So stood silent, Sister Mary Ratched lined us up in two rows, waiting for that final bell to let us out for the holidays. We were wrapped up in our tiny parkas and mittens attached to the sleeves by little elastic cords and clasps. Some of the boys in full snowsuits and tiny hunting caps. We were little lambs with glitter in our hair and on our faces bundled for the blizzard.
Snow just meant snow to kids - the most important thing to these wee future disciples were the “center pieces”. No doubt we were so proud to place them in the middle of Christmas dinner not knowing till years later that our mothers couldn’t wait to throw them away or say shucks when our bigger, older, brute of a brother destroyed it before it ever made it there.
Picture two lines of kids puffy from padding and our grandma’s knit scarves, carrying their day’s creation, like an offering to the baby Jesus. A precursor to First Communion and Confirmation, everything was done in order. But damned if we were going to let a blizzard ruin our hard work! Unfortunately there was something awry in that plan for me.
Sister Mary Ratched had a stack of plastic bags and began to hand them out, slowly walking down each row, handing them to each child to put their “center piece” in the bag. Wait! She passed me up! Wait! I wasn’t invisible! I know I was tiny - and feeling tinier by the second but she couldn’t possibly have not SEEN me! Was this another ceremony I didn’t know about? Some kind of order to things that would make sense later? No, wait, she’s given them to everybody. Except me! It seemed like forever while we waited for that bell. I know I gingerly nudged my paper plate out so she could see that I was missed, like Oliver Twist asking for another plate of slop. I was an orphan left INSIDE in the cold. She ignored me in the most obvious way. She gave Father So-and-So the rest of the plastic bags to hold. He hovered over us saying nothing. No one was supposed to say anything. My pinecone fell over. It was no longer jutting out from the plate welcoming Christmas. I put it upright, it fell over. Put it upright, it fell over. Sister Mary Ratched paced up and down the rows, hands clasped behind her back, watching my breakdown out of the corner of her wrinkled brow. I started to sniffle and then tears just rolled down my cheeks uncontrollably. I could FEEL Father So-and-So watching me, standing there with a handful of bags, doing nothing. All of a sudden Sister Mary Ratched was beside me, shooting me an evil eye, spinning towards Father So-and-So spewing in her worst Tom Waits-in-a-giant-penguin-suit whiskey voice, “Ah, give the little brat a bag!”
*
After that it was a blur in a blizzard. The next thing I remember I was at our new home, in the new neighborhood in the middle of cornfields, going into my mother’s sewing room in the back of the house where she hid from us all. She’d probably deny it, but wouldn’t you have a sewing room in the back of the house if you if you had six kids? No complaints here – I got a lot of really cute clothes out of it. So there I was pleading with her however sheepishly, to not send me back to Catholic school – I was HER little lamb, not theirs, after all!
I’m sure the cute factor was on my side, but that wasn’t the only thing that got me into public school the next year. My next older sister was pleading the same thing from the hallows of fifth grade suffering Sister Mary Witch-Of-The-West. My oldest sister was creating havoc at Rosary High School, soon to be kicked out for coming to school in jeans and bare feet and possibly other indiscretions we weren’t told about. My oldest brother was also soon to transfer over to public high school from Marmion Academy. I guess I was their last holdout of pious hope. They didn’t even try the religious route with my younger brother – he went the way of the latest trend back then, Montessori.
Only a couple years ago I was having drinks with a male friend that went all the way through Holy Angels and then we met up again at high school. He claims to remember me from that year in kindergarten and thinking to himself, “oh, she’s not going to make it.” And I didn’t. I never had First Communion or got Confirmed and I never went to Sunday school. All along I figured the only thing I missed was the fancy little white dress and the pictures of the ceremonies like my siblings had. And now, looking back on this Fortieth Anniversary of the death of the pinecone centerpiece and the birth of my first rejection - I have to wonder if Sister Mary Ratched knew what she was doing, however inexcusable. Did she have a sense that I was going to grow up to be an artist and constantly face rejection for my art? Did she have a sense that I would grow up and move to a town that is based on rejection and serves up thousands of doses of it a day? Did she have a sense that I needed some toughening up? A spine? Little lambs can’t become sheep without a little unsympathetic shepherding?
Sister Mary Ratched gave me my first bitter pill and it has left an everlasting gobstopper of an aftertaste. I can honestly say that I wasn’t a brat back then - but no, no angel am I now, it’s true. I don’t suffer fools gladly and maybe Sister Mary Ratched didn’t either. Maybe she was just setting me up for a lifetime of rejecting the rejecters.
From now on, I like to think of Sister Mary Ratched in her penguin suit, ice-skating in her heaven - I hear her exclaim, ere she flies out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all brats, and to all a good-fight."
Posted by nora murphy at December 25, 2005 09:08 AM | TrackBack|