Angry? Me?

The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things

by Hieronymus Bosch

with anger at bottom of circle.

(From Wikipedia)

Last week, I shared with you what an exceptional listener the second Dayton psychiatrist was. I also wrote about my feelings toward my mother. I plan on writing more about that, but for today, let’s stay with Dr. C. I remember four things he said that startled me and yet continue to help me. Here’s number one.

         Sometime in the fall of 1967, after I’d talked about how  I’d responded with a silent treatment when someone criticized me, Dr. C said, “Dee, you’re the angriest woman I’ve ever had as a client.”

Angry? Me? I never shouted. I never even raised my voice. I never told anyone what I felt when something had been said that hurt my feelings. And I'd been very rational, very reasonable when talking about my mom and dad. Surely these were traits of a peace-loving person. Maybe a saint.

I mention saint because upon entering the convent, I set out to become one. Throughout life, I’d sought love so no one would ever again desert me. If others saw me as a saint, they’d surely love me. Who could resist loving a saint? Who’d abandon a saint?

I protested. “I’m not angry. I don’t yell.”

“You are angry. You’ve suppressed it for years.”

“Suppressed it?”

“Pushed it down inside yourself. When we suppress anger, we dam it up.”

“You think I’ve done that?”

“Yes.”

“What do I do that’s so angry? I don’t hit people or say unkind things.”

“It’s more passive than that, Dee. You walk away from confrontation. You avoid people who’ve displeased you or criticized you. You hold it in, afraid of losing others’ respect and love. It’s passive, but it’s still anger.”

“No one's ever said I was angry.”

“You’re a great suppressor, Dee. You’ve dammed your anger all your life. But ultimately, it’s going to swamp you if you don’t learn to channel it.”

“Anger’s one of the seven deadly sins.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “anger can be deadly. But it’s all in the way we express and use our anger.”

“I don't get it.”

“Think about it. There’s a righteous anger about injustice. But even that needs to be channeled.”

“I don’t understand this ‘channeling.’ I’ve been taught that feeling and expressing anger is wrong.”

“Emotions aren’t right or wrong, Dee. They just are. We get into right and wrong when we talk about the way we express them. Whether we do it hurtfully. And when we suppress as you have, we end up hurting ourselves pretty deeply. I see before me a time bomb.”

“You’re saying I’m so angry I could explode?”

“Yes. One day you won’t be able to suppress the anger any longer. You’ll either explode at someone or your health will suffer. You need to deal with this.”

“What do I do?”

“It’s what we can do.” I must have looked confused, for he continued. “Together we’ll find ways for you to channel your anger. To express it in a way that won’t hurt someone else or yourself.”

So we began. I came to understand that feeling anger wasn’t wrong and wasn’t hurtful. That expressing it in an unhealthy way by word or deed was.

He helped me realize that letting people know what I was feeling was a more honest way to live.

It took years for me to learn how to channel anger and how to be honest with others when something they said or did hurt my feelings or seemed out of line or invaded my boundaries.

Years.

And the truth is that my journey toward embracing peace within and without continues. Peace.

2009

Visiting with a friend with whom I've always tried to be honest. 

Two years before beginning this blog. 

The Second Psychiatrist in Dayton

As you know, I had three sessions with the first Dayton psychiatrist. Really only two because I began the third session by telling him that his Catholic bias was destructive. Then I walked out. 

        I do not remember whether someone recommended the second psychiatrist—Dr. C.—whom I saw from May 1967 to July 1969 or whether his was a random name I found in the yellow pages.

         However the name came to me, it proved fortunate because he helped me take the first tentative steps into adulthood. You may wonder what I mean by that. I hope to begin an explanation with this posting.

         This second psychiatrist was a large man. Broad of chest. Tall. Groomed. He never wore casual clothes. Always a suit and tie. His hair always neatly combed. His face clean-shaven.

         When I first entered his office and he rose to greet me, I thought he looked sturdy. Assured. Stable. As time has passed, I realized he looked like a CEO of a vast empire. An executive who’d been financially and professionally successful.

         I do not know how much money or fame he amassed, but he surely had his share of wisdom. In our two years of twice monthly sessions—I couldn't afford weekly—I found him straightforward. Perceptive. Discerning. He listened in a way that made me feel as if he’d roamed the world and found me its most interesting inhabitant. Never glancing at his watch. Never yawning. Never fidgeting.
          In that room, for those fifty minutes, he patiently helped me sift the patterns of my life and decide which I wanted to retain and which I was ready to relinquish.

         What he didn’t do was react to my being an ex-nun. That I’d been in the convent was simply one fact about me. That fact didn’t define the entirety of me. I was more that just one definition. As the poet Walt Whitman said back in the nineteenth century, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Walt Whitman

         Dr. C helped me realize that and realize also that these “multitudes” jarred up against one another. Contradicted one another. Tormented me. Pained me. I needed to find the source of that pain, forgive it, and perhaps even be grateful for some gift it had given me. I needed, as Joseph Campbell has so famously said, "To find my bliss." 

         That was the task on which we collaberated. Of course, in those two years, I didn’t accomplish that. In fact, nearly fifty years have slipped away as I've examined those multitudes and come to peace with most of them.
          Nearly fifty sometimes difficult years have arced my life as one by one I've embraced those fears. As you've seen in this on-line memoir, I've come at length to embrace the whole of my life. Fifty years. Half a century.
          But with Dr. C's help, in Dayton's summer heat and winter cold, the journey began.

        A few years later, I realized that I'd never told him about the three personalities I hallucinated. Nor did I tell him about my adult neighbor molesting me for three months when I was ten. I’ve asked myself why I didn’t talk about those two things. I don’t think I purposely held them back.

         What happened, I think now, is that I was intent on one thing: blaming my parents for my insecurities and for my needing to please everyone because if I didn’t they’d cast me aside like flotsam.

My dad on a fishing trip with friends in the early 1930s.

         And yet, that was another thing I never told him—that my parents had moved to Parsons, Kansas, when I five and that my grandmother told me they’d deserted me. That they’d never come back for me.

         The truth is that I had blocked that episode in my life, just as I had blocked the molestation. Remembrance came only later. And perhaps there is a further truth—that I was too ashamed of hallucinating and being molested and seemingly 

abandoned. I don't know if that's true, but it may be so.

         What I blamed them for and what I talked about with Dr. C. was Dad’s drinking, his violence when he drank whiskey, and Mom’s unwillingness to leave him, despite all my begging. I faulted my mother for enabling my dad. She’d chosen him over her children.

Mom and I feeding the heifers on Grandma O'Mara's farm.

         Please understand—I was young. Callow. I’d never truly considered her life. Her needs. Fears. Regrets. Expectations. Dreams. I’d never tried to understand her. Only later did I begin to step into her shoes and view her perspective from the depths of her having lived through the Depression, of her having been raised a devout Roman Catholic, of her undeniable love for my father.
          Only later did I appreciate how much she loved me.

         At thirty-one I didn’t realize that. I placed more blame on my mother than my father. I think now that I truly believed she had betrayed my brother and me.

         I was young. Is that excuse or explanation? Perhaps both.

The Mysterious Arc of Time . . . And Love

In the school year 1972-73, six years after leaving the convent, I taught high school juniors in Claremont, New Hampshire. Their syllabus included Look to the Mountain, a historical novel written by LeGrand Cannon, Jr. It is an engrossing story about Whit—a taciturn pioneer with great good sense, strength of mind and body, and a tenacity bred by a hardscrabble upbringing.

Entering the wilderness with him is Melissa. Together, they canoe far up river to claim land near Sandwich. The novel, which takes place between 1769 and 1777, captures the background in which these two—Whit and Melissa—settle and raise a family as a revolution begins to brew in far-off Boston.  

I enjoyed the book, which was new to me, as much as the students did. We were thunderstruck by the paucity of “things” on the frontier. We empathized with Melissa as she longed for the companionship of another woman; we were impressed by Whit’s know-how. A few students had seen that area of New Hampshire so they could describe the differences two hundred years had made on the landscape.

That summer, while visiting Dad here in Missouri, I told him about the book. “Your mom always enjoyed a good historical,” he said when I’d finished my long-winded summary.

He got up, left the room, and came back carrying two of Mom’s books: The Spider King, a historical novel about Louis XI and . . . you guessed it! . . . Look to the Mountain. I’d had no idea my mom had read it.

“Here, you take them,” Dad said. “You enjoy a good read just like your mother did.”

For thirty-eight years the two novels sat on a bookshelf in Stillwater, Minnesota. When I moved back to Missouri, I shelved them again. I’d read neither since the day Dad gave them to me. To be truthful, I didn’t even think about the fact that Mom had handled and read both of them.

Then this past Monday I wanted to read something about the Revolutionary War. All these years—forty-one—since I left Claremont, I’d remembered two scenes from Look to the Mountain: the mowing contest and Whit going off to war, carrying his prized rifle.

So I removed Mom’s copy from the bookshelf and began, once again, to read the words that so compellingly brought to life the inhabitants of Kettleford and Sandwich, New Hampshire. After all these years, they sprang forth from the pages to greet me as an old friend.

In the quiet after midnight, as I entered Whit and Melissa’s world, I idly looked at the copyright page to see when the book had been published. 1942. Then it was that realization unfolded within me: My mom must have bought the book brand new in Parsons, Kansas, where she lived in a refurbished chicken coop with my little brother while Dad worked at the nearby munitions factory. I was in Kansas City, attending kindergarten.

Last night I saw my mother—my brother and Dad asleep while she read late in the night, missing me, I believe, and hoping that my asthma wasn’t acting up.

She had turned the pages of that book just as I was turning them. Both of us—night owls—found solace and retreat in a historical novel. Both of us felt the heft both of the story and the hardbound book with the mountain on the cover. That mountain encouraged Whit to venture into the wilderness.

Seventy-two years ago my mother completed that book and sat within its story. She, too, had left her home and entrusted her life to another.  

Early this morning, seventy-two years later, I laid the book aside with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Partly from the story and partly because I knew that Mom had reached out across a vast space of time with its arc of love and had spoken to me of the ties that bind us together as One. She spoke; I listened.

There is much to be grateful for as we age. This is one of those things. Peace.

All photographs from Wikipedia except for book cover, which is from Amazon. 

Rediscovering the Art of Discourse

Thirty days after I left the convent, I began to work at Pflaum Publishing. The day before, I’d flown from Kansas City to Dayton. Looking back I realize that the normal reaction to the possibility of a new job might be both anxiety and eagerness. But all I can remember is feeling passive and emotionless. I remember also that my parents had mixed feelings about my taking the job. On one hand, I’d have work and could then support myself and evolve a life. On the other, I was emotionally stunted.

         Both Dad and Mom worried about my well-being. After all, I would be living nearly six hundred miles away where they couldn’t watch over me. Yet they’d always wanted their children to be independent. As I was growing up, they both often said to me, “Dolores, you can do anything you set your mind to.” They always believed in me.

         But they’d never seen me in the state I was in when I left the convent. During the following thirty days, I had, however, improved somewhat, and as I started to climb out of a deep abyss of unease, I was able to relate again. The “acting normal” became almost second nature and by mid-January, I could engage in conversation with my relatives and talk with salesclerks when Mom and I went to a store together. But always it was an effort to do so and I relapsed into silence when I was with only my Mom or Dad.

         Growing up, I’d found that talking with others was both interesting and enlightening. Yet, not only was I mute when I left the convent, I also lacked any spark of interest in others. I was encased in ice. 

          Fortunately, during those thirty days between leaving and starting my first post-convent job, I decided, subconsciously I suspect, to reenter the human race. I relearned the ebb and flow of conversation. The give and take of it.

         I mention this because on Sunday, January 25, 1967, my future boss—Bob—and his three children, who ranged in age from four to eight, met me at the Dayton Airport. It surprises me still that those children, in their fifties now and living in Spain, Texas, and Kansas, still remember picking me up and what we talked about on the drive from the airport to the Loretto Guild where I was to live for the next five months.

         And what did we talk about?

         Baseball.

         I inherited my love of baseball from Dad. Every summer evening while I was growing up, he, my brother, and I would sit on the front stoop and listen to the radio broadcast of the Kansas City Blues, which was a Triple A minor-league Yankee farm team. I’d followed baseball until I was twenty-two and entered the convent. I’d known all the names, positions and teams of the American League, and the changing stats for the Blues and the Yankees. I was a true fan.

Joe Kuhel was the Blues' manager in the early fifties.

         Of course, in the convent we didn’t listen to the radio or read the newspaper, so I was nine years out of date, but Bob’s adult children have told me more than once how fascinated they were that a “nun” knew so much about how to play the game and about the players from the forties and fifties.

         And that, truly, is the first conversation I had after leaving the convent in which I was, for a space of time, myself at my best. Not acting or playing a role, but simply enjoying the exchange of facts and childhood dreams and ideas with other human beings.

         Children have always had the gift of calling forth from me the essence of who I am.

Photographs from Wikipedia. 

Today's CTCL Appointment

This morning, I’ve sat in my red-upholstered chair here in front of the computer and thought and thought and thought some more about what aspect of my life to write about today. This on-line memoir offers three possibilities: growing-up, convent, and post-convent.                  

         Of the years between birth and entering the convent after college graduation, I’ve reconnoitered only my childhood up to sixth grade at St. Mary’s Grade School in Independence, Missouri.

         I’ve shared with you the convent novitiate years as well as my first two years on mission in Omaha, Nebraska, after making first vows. But there are other stories yet to tell about teaching in Seneca, Baileyville, Atchison, and Kansas City, Kansas.

         Back in 2012, I spent several months posting about getting involved in social justice issues when I was in my thirties. That leaves four decades yet to explore of my life as a single woman who established a career after leaving the convent and then retired to write and enjoy friendship.

         And yet, I find myself simply thoughtless today—lacking any stories to tell. So I will simply reflect on this day here in Independence where the sky is overcast and the day chilly. It’s gray, threatening drizzle.

         Back on Thursday March 6, I posted about the CTCL—cutaneous T-cell lymphoma—that has cropped up again. I have an appointment today with the dermatologist who diagnosed CTCL and who prescribed the light treatments I’ve been doing for the past five and a half weeks. Yesterday I went to the clinic for my sixteenth treatment. Today the dermatologist will assess how my skin is responding to treatment and where I am in the remission cycle.

         When the cancer goes into remission, the skin color changes. For me, it goes from pale pink to a blushing pink then to a dull gray and finally to a darker gray that is a sign of remission. I can already see that several of the blotches are beginning to change color. So that is an excellent sign.

         Because my skin has twice burnt with these recent treatments, I am up to only two and a half minutes a session. Back in 2011, when I went for treatment three times a week for nine months, I kept burning and so never got up to more than four minutes a session. So these sessions are never long. However, I find myself tired afterward. Recently I asked the nurse if other patients got tired, and she replied, “No one’s ever said so.”

         So perhaps this tiredness is of spirit. Or it’s because I do an errand or two after the treatment. Or it truly is that I’m aging and I just don’t have the resilience and energy I used to have. Whatever the cause, I’ve decided that going three times a week is too arduous for me.

         So I’m going to reduce the treatments to twice a week. I suspect the dermatologist will simply remind me that fewer sessions a week mean more weeks of treatment than in the past. But right now I’d prefer to enjoy each week, despite having to go for a longer period of time.

         Also today I’m going to cancel my appointments for tomorrow (Friday), next Monday, and next Wednesday because two friends are coming to visit for several days, starting tomorrow.

         I’m looking forward to taking time off and being with friends. Winter here refuses to admit Spring. I’m hoping that my friends and I will experience together the arrival of its balmy days. Peace. 

       

Snakes in the Outhouse

Today’s story for my on-line memoir is one that amuses me. It shows just how trusting and naïve I was at age seven. Adults and children also were always pulling practical jokes on me because I could be duped so easily. This particular story is about an outhouse joke.

         When Grandpa Ready died in March 1943, he had completed much of the work on the retirement home he planned for himself and Grandma Ready. She offered the house, which still needed plastering, painting, window framing, flooring, electrical work, to my family for $25 a month rental.

         For the next two months, while I finished first grade at Courtney School, Dad worked in the evenings on the house. He plastered and painted the walls and completed the flooring in every room but the kitchen.

         Dad lived there until his death in 1975. I lived there until 1954, when I went away to college at Mount Saint Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas. I came home only for the summers, and then left for good in 1958 when I entered the Benedictine convent in Atchison.

         Dad never completed the house. No painting of the shingled one-story house, no window framing on the inside, no finished flooring in the kitchen. And no indoor plumbing until after I was in the convent and the city brought water out into the countryside. Every few months, a truck arrived at our home, carrying a supply of water to fill our well.

         Without running water, of course, we had no indoor bathroom and so used a slop bucket, which my brother emptied each morning through the hole in the outhouse seat. It’s that outhouse that Grandma Ready picked as a subject for teasing.

         “Dolores,” she said. “Be careful when you use the outhouse.”

         “Why, Grandma?”

         “Snakes live in the muck. They wait until they see a person’s bottom on that seat. Then they jump up and bite you!”

         I shivered at the thought.

         “They’re poisonous.”

         “You mean they can kill me?”

         She walked to the outhouse with me, opened the door, and pointed to the hole. “They’re hiding down there. Waiting to leap up and bite your butt. They’ll kill you lickety-split and you’ll fall into the muck.”

         From that day forward, I never sat on the hole. I’d put my hands on each side of me to support myself as I held my bottom up above the hole. I figured that if I were three inches above the hole, the snakes couldn’t reach me. They were able, I thought, to jump just to the edge of the hole. That far; no farther.

         Three inches assured no poison. But I was doomed if I sat on the hole.

         Until I was nearly eleven, I continued to do this. The story always rang true to me. Then one day Mom opened the outhouse door, not knowing I was inside. She apologized and then, noticing my position, said, “Dolores, what are you doing? Why are you holding yourself like that? Why aren’t you sitting on the seat?”

         I explained about what Grandma had told me. “Mom, it’s not safe to sit,” I said. “I hope you don’t sit. You’ve got to be three inches higher. The snakes can’t jump that far.”

         “On, Dolores,” Mom moaned. “Your grandma was just joshing with you.”

         “She meant it, Mom.”

         “Believe me. If there ever were any snakes inside there, they’re long since dead.”

         “Really?”

         “Really.”

         From then on, I sat on the outhouse seat. Much more comfortable, believe me. And Grandma? She said, “Really fooled you, didn’t I?”

         Yes.

         

Making Heaven Interesting

For me, fear and desperate planning filled the first three months of Grade 5. I had to somehow avoid Mr. Jackson’s groping hand when he drove me and his sons and daughter and my little brother to and from school. Grade 6, however, went well. No trauma that I can remember except for Dad’s drinking and the loud arguments between him and Mom. I kept hiding the hammer, axe, and knives for fear that during one of those drunken arguments he’d try to kill her again.

         In fact, I remember the fall months of 1947 with enjoyment for it was then that I first studied ancient history. One November day, while reading about the Grecian city-state of Thebes, I had a déjà vu moment and roamed the streets leading up to its ancient citadel. The present merged with the past and I became Theban. That experience led me to visit Greece in 1993 and work on a Bronze-Age-Greece novel.  

  

    Remains of Cadmea, the central fortress of ancient Thebes.

         The other vivid memory I have of Grade 6 concerns heaven. Over and over in religion class Sister Mary McCauley talked about the afterlife.    

      Dante and Beatrice gaze at the highest heavens.

         “What will we do in heaven,” I asked one day.

         “Why, Dolores, you’ll praise God for all His glory and beauty and goodness. You’ll sing, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and Earth are filled with your glory!”

         “That’s it?”

         “Yes. Isn’t it glorious?”

         Clearly, she thought so.

         I didn’t.

         The truth was that hell, despite its flames, sounded much more interesting. No mealy-mouthed humans there.

Medieval illustration of Hell 

in the Hortus deliciarum manuscript

of Herrad of Landsberg—about 1180.

         So I thought. And thought. And thought some more about how to make heaven appealing. After alighting from the school bus one afternoon, I ran up the rutted driveway, into the unpainted house, and called out, “Mom!”

         “I’m here. In the kitchen.”

         Dumping my books on the divan, I hurried to the kitchen where Mom stood at the range, stirring a steaming pot of macaroni. 

         “Mom!” I shouted. “You know how heaven being boring bothers me?”

         “Yes.”

         “God seems so conceited. All He wants is to be praised all the time. And it just goes on and on and on with no ending. It scares me. Everything ends. What’s the end of heaven?”

         “It’s the end of life I know about, Dolores. We die and we’re with God.”

         “But just saying, ‘Holy, Holy,’ all the time gets monotonous. I’d like talking with people.” I paused and then confided that God simply wasn’t enough for all eternity.

         “He’s pretty wonderful,” she said.

         “Well, if dead people have been telling Him that since the Neanderthals”—we’d started our study of ancient history with them that year—“then He must be sort of tired of it all by now. Wouldn’t you think so?”

         “Possibly.”

         “So here’s my idea! When I get to heaven I’m going to ask God—as a favor—if He’d show me a movie of every person who’s ever lived—even those babies in Limbo. Going all the way back to the Neanderthals.”

         “Sounds interesting.”

         “Yes," I agreed enthusiastically. "And that’s not all. I’ll ask to see not only the people but also what they thought and what they said and what they dreamed about! And I’ll see and hear their conversations when they were alive. I’ll watch their whole lives! The life of every person!”

         As Mom drained the macaroni, she summed it up. “So you’re going to see a long movie?”

         “The longest ever, Mom. It’ll go on and on because people keep dying and I’d keep seeing movies of their lives. Maybe God will even give me popcorn! Buttered!”

         I went to bed content that night. An eternity of stories . . . and buttered popcorn.        

All photographs are from Wikipedia.

         

Anklets, Saddle Shoes, and Droplets

Last week you learned that I pee when I laugh too much. This happened a lot in grade school. In fifth grade I began my friendship with the bus driver because of blotches left by pee. He found a way to deal with the problem without embarrassing me.

         In seventh grade I also met gentleness with regard to my peeing. But this time I knew real embarrassment.

         The incident began when Sister Mary McCauley, our seventh grade teacher, asked our class to speak for three minutes about something that interested us.

         One by one we walked resolutely up to the front of the room. The boys mostly talked about wars and westerns. One of them had been to Yellowstone and described Old Faithful. The girls related how she’d learned to play the piano. Several talked about their favorite movie stars. One classmate had seen the Atlantic Ocean and talked about the thunder of its waves.

             

         When my time came, I hurried down the aisle to the front of the room. Already a history buff, I’d chosen to talk about the Liberty Bell that hung in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia.

         The boys knew my weakness because we’d all gone through grade school together. So as soon as I started talking, they crossed their eyes and tried on their most grotesque faces. I started giggling.

         Then it happened: pee trickled down my legs. I tried holding them tightly together, but that only made the boys redouble their efforts.

         More drips and dribbles.

         I stood in a spreading puddle of pee.

         I had to talk for three minutes to get a good grade, so I forged on with facts and dates.

         More seepage.

         The pee wet the tops of my white anklets.

         The puddle kept spreading around my white and brown saddle shoes.

How much pee does a kid’s bladder hold? I wondered.

Finally, I finished and raced down the aisle to my desk. Maybe when I sat down, the pool of pee would magically disappear.

         Sister Mary McCauley’s voice brought me to a halt. “Dolores, there seems to be a wet spot on the floor. Would you please get a rag and wipe it up. I’d appreciate that.”

         The boys guffawed; the girls tittered.  

         I got a rag from the closet, wiped up the puddle, trashed the sodden cloth, and sat down quietly at my desk. Behind me, a classmate who was sweet on me whispered, “I liked your speech best.”

         Well, at least it was the most entertaining. A real show-and-tell.

The Busdriver and the Blotch

The fifth grade holds many memories for me. During its first three months—September, October, and November of 1946—a neighbor daily molested me in his car. This happened as he drove my brother and me and his own children to and from St. Mary’s Grade School. In January, I wrote three postings about Mr. Jackson. To read the first of those three, click here.

            The fifth grade, however, also holds wonderful memories for me. Sister Mary McCaulay began to teach us how to craft sentences. Late last year, on my writing blog, I shared three stories about how she began with prepositions, then introduced the building blocks of sentences, and finally helped us construct paragraphs. Thus began my love affair with words and writing.

            My introduction to the memorizing of poetry also enhanced fifth grade. I mentioned the joy of this in my posting last Wednesday.

            A final memory from fifth grade always brings a smile to my face. I hope you, too, will enjoy this story.

            After my parents confronted Mr. Jackson, I rode the city bus to school. Its route brought it out into the countryside. Each morning I’d climb aboard the bus at the juncture of Kentucky and Dickinson roads.

A 1930s school bus that came before the yellow ones we’re now used to.

            When school ended each day, I could either board the bus by St. Mary’s or walk down Liberty Street and hail down the bus whenever it came by. I mostly chose to do the latter because that meant I could walk several blocks with my best friend: Barbara Ann.

            I shared two stories about Barbara Ann way back in October 2012. The first had to do with preparing to receive First Holy Communion. The next concerned the mishap on that day of celebration. We were in second grade then and we remained fast friends throughout grade and high. Our friendship endures and she called me for my birthday on Monday.

            By the fifth grade, Barbara Ann and I had become connoisseurs of giggling. Gigglers par excellence. Anything and everything could make us giggle. And did.

            Daily we walked down Liberty Street giggling about what Jackie had said when Sister Mary McCaulay asked him to pick his favorite preposition. Giggling about what John Tom had for lunch. Giggling about what an astounding jump-rope jumper Judy was. Our giggling itself made us giggle.

            And as we giggled, the pee began to dribble down my legs, wetting my cotton panties. I’d walk nine blocks with Barbara Ann, giggling and peeing all the way. Then she’d turned left to go down the street to her home and I’d wait for the bus to wheeze to a stop and pick me up.

            The seats in this bus were leather or something that seemed like leather. Maybe naugahyde. So of course, when I sat on them with wet panties, I left an imprint—a large wet blotch. And since I mostly sat in the same seat each day, that blotch got bigger and darker and more obvious as the school year went on.

            Finally one day in early April, I boarded the bus, greeted the welcoming driver, and started down the aisle. Before I could go more than a step or two, he called me back. “Dolores,” he began in a whisper, “I can’t let you sit down on the bus anymore.”

            “Why?”

            “The boss said so.”

            “So I can’t take the bus?”

            “Oh, you can ride. You just can’t sit down." He paused and then whispered more softly. "Do you know why?”             

             “Did I do something wrong?”

            “It’s the spots you leave behind.”

            Oh.

            “Do you want me to walk home?”

            The road out into the countryside was narrow with one lane going each way and deep culverts along the side. Cars came barreling down that country road. In truth, I was a little scared to walk those three miles home.

            “No, Dolores. As I said, you can ride the bus home, but you’ll just need to stand up here instead of sit.”

            “Stand here by you?”

            “You can stand in the stairwell. And we can talk.”

            During those final weeks of fifth grade, the bus driver and I became fast friends. I told him about my classmates and what we were learning. He told me about his two preschoolers and the funny things they did.

            We talked about the Blues—they were the Kansas City Triple A baseball farm team for the Yankees. And we talked about reading. He liked Zane Gray and I liked fairy tales and books like Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland and Peter and Wendy.

Hans Brinker tying on his sister Gretel’s ice skates.

            

The friendship between the bus driver and myself continued throughout all the years I took the bus home because that stairwell became Dolores' throne. The truth is that I never stopped giggling with Barbara Ann . . . and I never stopped peeing!

All photographs from Wikipedia.