Violence on the Playground

(Continued from last Wednesday, August 14 . . . )

Bloodthirsty cries overshadowed the laughter of the fifth graders surrounding me on the icy playground at St. Peter and Paul Grade School in Omaha, Nebraska, on Friday, January 15, 1960.

         “Kill ‘im, Ron! Kill ‘im!”

         “Bash his head!”

         “Looka’ that blood!”

         “Bill, break his nose!”

         “Kill ‘im, Ron! Kill ‘im!”

         “Go for his eyes!”

         “Bash him a good one!”

         “Kill ‘im, Ron!”

         The words shocked me into action. Alarmed, I rushed toward a circle of boys gathered in the shadow of the school building. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, three deep around a center I couldn’t see, shouting, punching the air with clenched fists. Frenzied, I tried to move them aside.

         “Excuse me! Let me through. I’ve got to get through.”

         The boys, in their thick winter jackets, seemingly unaware of anything beyond what was happening in front of them, refused to budge. Their churning circle tightened. Contracted.

         I shoved. Pushed. Tried to pull them apart.

         They shoved back. Snarled at me. Cursed.

         Struggling to pull them apart, I edged forward toward the center of the shouting circle.

         “Keep bashin’ his head, Ron! Kill ‘im!”

         Hearing those vicious words, I instinctively looked to the left. A boy, blond hair flapping over his forehead, stared avidly at the scene before him. His body moved back and forth to the thumps coming from the center of the circle. Saliva dribbled onto his dirty white shirt. Most of its buttons had popped off so that it gaped open over his stomach, which pooched out over his tight belt.

         I followed his maniacal gaze downward to where two boys struggled.  One atop the other. Blood matted the hair of the one on the bottom. The boy tabled above held his opponent’s head between splayed fingers. He bopped it up and down, up and down, against the ice. The boy’s head thudded. Blood spurted.

         The eyes of the boy on the bottom rolled back. His limp hands lay at his side.

         “Kill ‘im, Ron!”

         Those words galvanized me. My hands gripped the shoulders of the boy doing the bopping. I tried to pull him backward.

         He punched out at me. Grazed my cheek. Socked my eye.

         His own eyes were glazed, staring unseeingly at the force trying to stop his crazed battering of the boy beneath him.

         “It’s a nun!” the boy with popping buttons shouted. “Don’t hit her! You’re be excommunicated!”

         The shouting stopped. Silence.

         The boy on top fell to the side and lay panting on the ground. The boy beneath him opened his eyes, tried to rise, fell back.

         Just then Sister Julian came running from around the back of the school building. “What’s happening?” she shouted.

         The boy with the popped buttons tried to head her off. “Nothin’s happenin’, Sister. Just a friendly fight.”

         She stepped aside, avoiding him, and headed to where I stood, surrounded by boys, their eyes downcast. She glanced at the two struggling to get up, turned toward me, and asked, “Are you hurt?”

         “He just grazed me.”

         Julian ordered me to go over to the convent and ice my face. She’d get my fifth-graders settled in their classroom.

         As I walked away, I could hear her voice demanding an explanation from the boys. Wondering how that boy had learned the word excommunication and whose classroom he and the rest of the boys were in, I felt grateful that I hadn’t had to teach them for two weeks. The next day I’d travel to Walsenburg, Colorado, and never see those boys again. Thank heavens!

                                                      (. . . to be continued next Wednesday)

Photographs from Wikipedia.

Memories of a Classroom

(Continued from last Wednesday—August 7 . . . )

Not quite fifty-four years ago—on Sunday January 3, 1960—I, a newly vowed scholastic, boarded the train in Atchison, Kansas, and traveled to Omaha, Nebraska, a distance of 159 miles. I wore my Sunday habit and the black veil I’d exchanged for the white one worn for the novitiate year. My suitcase held . . .

·      my daily black habit made of seven yards of black serge;

·      my daily scapular, the long rectangular piece of black serge that covered the habit both back and front;

·      several flat white coifs of pleated linen, which, when shaped and worn, would cover my neck, head, and the sides of my face;

·      two heavily starched and rigid white linen headbands;

·      two voluminous one-piece cotton undergarments that encased the body from shoulders to thighs;

·      two floor-length cotton nightgowns;

·      an extra pair of black shoes;

·      two aprons;

·      my monastic diurnal from which I prayed the Divine Office, the ancient Latin prayers said seven different hours a day;

·      my St. Andrew Daily Missal for use during Mass;

·      and a collection of readings used for Matins, the longest prayer of the day.

          There may have been more in the black leather suitcase, which my parents had given me just two days before, but I have no memory of toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, soap, shoe polish, or the other sundries that I’d carry today.

          Nor do I remember the three-hour trip. Did I stew about entering a classroom the next day to teach when I’d had no classes on teaching? Was I curious about the nuns I’d be living with at the St. Peter and Paul convent? Did I already miss my classmates who’d been left behind to start college?

          Was the scene beyond the train window that January morning bleak? Sunny? Windy? Snow swept? Did grain stubble pierce through the frozen black soil of Nebraska? Were the dark skeletons of trees, stark against the prairie sky, foreboding? I don’t know.

         This is what I do remember about the two weeks that followed: The next day, I entered the fifth-grade classroom of Sister Nicole who was being treated for cancer in a nearby hospital. From a pole high above the chalkboard draped an American flag. Bookcases, with innumerable children’s books arranged in alphabetical order, nestled beneath the windows of the far wall. A globe stood on one bookcase. The room was sunny, filled with the children’s art and posters about reading and hygiene.

         The children within that classroom were young. Innocent. Welcoming. Concerned about their beloved teacher. They asked each morning if we could say special prayers for her throughout the day. I was eager to meet the woman whom these children treasured. Thoughtfully, she’d left me detailed lesson plans so I’d know how to proceed and what to teach.

         The only other thing I remember from her classroom is Stanley. A tall, hollow-cheeked child with sea-blue eyes and tousled chestnut hair, he sat mute in the back seat of the row next to the windows, staring blindly ahead while lobbing a hardball into his baseball glove. A sorrowful river of tears flowed over his pale cheeks and plopped onto his worn jeans throughout each of the ten days I spent in that classroom

          Another nun told me that Stanley’s father had died in an accident over the Christmas holidays. The children and I respected his grief—we were, I think, awestruck by it—and grew used to the thud, thud, thud, of the ball as it hit his first-baseman’s glove. Those thuds, which became the counterpoint to everything said in that classroom for those two weeks, still resound in my heart.

         It was on Friday, the last day of my sojourn in Sister Nicole’s classroom that I encountered a group of older children on the icy playground during recess. That encounter changed my life and may have taught me all I ever needed to know about teaching.

                                       (. . . to be continued next Wednesday)

Photograph by Jomphong from freedigitalphotos.com

The Monastery Sends Me Out to Teach

Hello to all of you who may have found this blog after my being away for eight weeks. During that time, I’ve finally completed a first draft of a novel and driven to Minnesota and back for a two-week vacation.

         Now I’m ready to resume my Wednesday postings on this on-line memoir. In the coming weeks, I’ll post about my three years as a scholastic at Mount Saint Scholastica Monastery.

         Way back in the fall of 2011, I posted a series of convent stories. When I ended those posts, I wrote the following:

This posting concludes the stories about my life in the novitiate. I’m going to turn now to stories about my growing-up years and my life with cats. In a few weeks, I hope to return to the convent postings and take up life in a Catholic grade school in Omaha, Nebraska.

Twenty months have passed since I wrote those words. What happened to those plans is that in January 2012 I read a posting by Manzanita on social justice. Her words sparked a six-month series of my own postings about my involvement in social-justice issues. Then for over a year I wrote about my childhood.

Many of you read those 2011 postings about my first eighteen months in the convent, but a number of you are new to my blog since then. If so, you may have some interest in a summary of my life in the novitiate, which I entered after graduating from college in June 1958. The following three posts summarize that time:   

Daily Life in the Novitiate: Part One

Daily Life in the Novitiate: Part Two

Daily Life in the Novitiate: Part Three

In addition to those posts, I did three on the difficulty of deciding whether to make first vows.

Preparing for First Vows: Part One

Preparing for First Vows: Part Two

Preparing for First Vows: Part Three

Finally, on December 6, 2011, I posted the story of my making first vows and the wonder of that day.

Joyfully Professing First Vows

I appreciate how busy your schedules are as you try to read all your favorite blogs. So I suspect that few, if any, of you will have the time or inclination to peruse the seven postings listed above.

However, if you do have a wee bit more time, I encourage you to read the final posting about vow day on January 1, 1960, as it sets the background for the scholastic postings.

This photo was taken on the day I made first vows 

and exchanged the white veil of the novitiate 

for the black veil of the scholasticate.  

 The outside of the college chapel in which I made first vows.

The inside of the college chapel in which I made first vows.  

On Saturday, January 2, 1960, Mother Alfred called me into her office and told me she’d planned to send me to Walsenburg, Colorado, to teach. However, a sister at the Omaha mission had been rushed to the hospital the day before, so I would take her place in a fifth-grade classroom for two weeks. Then I’d go to Colorado.

On Sunday, January 3, 1960, I boarded the train in Atchison, Kansas, and traveled north to Omaha, Nebraska. There, Sister Brennan met me and drove me to the convent next to St. Peter and Paul Grade School, Church, and Rectory.

The next day, I began to teach. I’d taken no teaching courses, but the state allowed me to teach on the condition that I take classes in the summer and work toward a certificate. The fact that I’d already graduated from college helped.

That’s the background for the upcoming scholasticate postings. Next Wednesday I’ll share with you a story of violence on an ice-laden playground in Omaha.

PS: Great news! Andi Hicks, a gifted artist, has narrated the audio of A Cat's Life: Dulcy's Story. She's given me an Irish accent so as to distinguish my voice from Dulcy's. Sure and I sound like a true Dubliner! The audio is now available on Amazon. Click here if you're interested.

The Kindness of the Mount Community: Part II

Today’s posting is the last one I’ll write for this blog or my writing blog for the next several weeks. However, I plan, except for a few vacation days in July, to continue what I began yesterday: reading and commenting on your blogs.

            Why relinquish posting until sometime in August?

            Because I’m storied out. Writing, editing, and polishing stories about my life has lost some of its urgency for me. I’ve mulled and found meaning in so much of my early life and your comments have helped me put everything in context. Now I need to move on to the convent years again.  So when I begin again—in August, I’ve let go of my first twenty-two years.            

            Instead, I’ll share with you my Scholastica years in the convent. That is, the three years—1960, ’61, and ’62—for which I made temporary vows. During those years, which are a tapestry of color woven with both dark and light thread, I began to teach.            

            Today’s posting will also be about the convent, specifically the recent sesquicentennial. 

          Five members, including myself, from our class of eighteen returned to the Mount for its celebration of being home in Kansas for 150 years. I didn’t get to visit at any length with any of them because the entire day and a half was taken up with meeting and greeting and hugging and laughing with so many nuns who are still in the convent and so many who have gone on to other lives.

            We ate and prayed together and took tours of the cemetery—where so many friends of my youth are buried, nuns who taught me in college and enriched my life in the convent—and also the fourth floor of the monastery where we used to sleep in large dorms. Now these dorms have been converted into rooms for individual nuns along with recreation rooms for viewing movies and television.

            One of the things I missed in the convent was stretching out on a couch or putting my feet on a hassock and snuggling down into the comfort of an easy chair. Now the fourth floor nuns have all of that: couches, easy chairs, hassocks. O joy in the morning!

            So many changes: a large library, eating at whatever table one chooses, a nursing-home section that ranks as one of the top ten in the nation, talking in the halls, a cafeteria instead of a refectory with novices trundling in the food on carts and then later washing the dishes in the scullery. So many changes from the life I knew.

            But one thing hasn’t changed: the hospitality of the Benedictine nuns. St. Benedict, some 1,500 years ago, wrote in his Rule that we are to welcome the stranger as we would Yeshua/Jesus. And so the nuns, who are steeped in graciousness, did all they could to embrace our return to roots.

            I’m ending today’s posting with a poem about what being back at the Mount monastery was like. The poem, written by Sister Barbara Ann Mayer, OSB (Order of Saint Benedict), conveys the celebration much better than I can. She has spent more than fifty years as a nun and has witnessed many changes. One of these is that she can now pursue her love of writing. Barb’s poem captures the joy we all felt—both the nuns who have stayed at the Mount and those of us who have journeyed elsewhere.

Coming Home

We hugged, laughed, cried,

to see faces from long ago

etched with wrinkles and lines,

strong, intelligent women who

faced their uncertain future

with courage and hope. They

came to share their lives, their

stories, their memories, and

we felt blessed by their coming.

As they placed flowers at graves

of those they had loved, prayed

the psalms with joyful voices, we

felt a bond never really broken

by distance and time, a sister bond

of friendship that survived the years.

“It was like coming home,” one said,

“I feel like I left part of my heart here.”

Barbara Mayer, OSB

June 2013

Have a lovely summer. I hope to see you back here in August. I’ll be visiting your blogs in the days and weeks ahead. Peace.

PS: The Mount has published Shadowboxing,  Sister Barbara Ann Mayer’s first book of poems, and it is available at the monastery gift shop. Please click here if you’d like to contact the gift shop about Barbara’s poetry or about other books written by the nuns as well as their crafts—from iconography to embroidered tablecloths to place mats to pottery.

All the photographs are from the Mount web site. They are used with the permission of the prioress, Sister Anne Shepherd, OSB. Click here for the web site.

An Unexpected Letter of Kindness

My last random-act-of-kindness posting tells how Sister Madonna reached out to me a few weeks after I left the convent on December 24, 1966. It will make more sense if you’ve already read the following three stories, which I posted in August 2011. They explain my leaving and the confusion that swirled within me.

Seeds of Doubt Amidst Great Joy

Why I Left the Convent

Where and What Is Home

         I know that, like me, most of you are too busy to read so many postings, so I’ll briefly summarize why I left the convent: During the eight and one half years I lived there, I became more and more depressed. By the end of that time, I was hallucinating three nagging personalities; I quaked under the expectations I thought others had of me; I felt like a fake because my inner thoughts weren’t consistent with my outer actions.

         I knew I was experiencing a nervous breakdown but I was such a fine actress that I faked being normal. No one seemed to realize just how emotionally bruised and mentally ill I was. Yet I knew I couldn’t keep up the act infinitely. I was sure that if I stayed I’d end up in the mental institution in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where “crazy” nuns spent the rest of their lives.

         My letter to the Mount community asking for permission to leave was, I think now, probably rambling and disjointed. But I remember that one of the things I stressed was that Mount nuns taught and I was a poor teacher.

         In January 1967, I began working at a publishing house in Dayton, Ohio. Faking normalcy took its toil, and I’d fallen into a deep malaise. But once again, no one realized this because of my acting ability. I knew what normal looked like and I feigned it. My one certainty was that I’d failed in everything I set out to be as a nun. 

         Several weeks after I left the convent, Sister Madonna, who taught in the psychology department of Mount Saint Scholastica College, sent me a letter. She was older than I and I’d never taught with her. In fact, I knew only her name and her reputation as a woman of great graciousness, wholeness, and learning.

         In her letter, Madonna explained that she’d recently interviewed all the seniors—about 70 students—at the Mount Academy because she was writing a paper for a psychology journal. The fall of 1966, I’d taught English literature and religion to these seniors.

         Madonna wanted me to know that each and every one of them had said I was the finest teacher they’d ever had. She went on to tell me some of the things they’d shared about me and about my teaching.

         Her letter, an unexpected act of kindness, was water in the wilderness in which I wandered lonely and lost.         

         Madonna wanted to assure me, she said, that if I left because I didn’t teach well I could put that reasoning aside. I was an outstanding teacher.

         I shall never, ever, forget the kindness of this woman. She was the Good Samaritan who came upon the beaten and bruised wayfarer and cared for her. I remember taking a deep, gulping breath when I read her letter. I hadn’t totally failed. My life hadn’t been a wasteland. I’d done something well. I felt . . . peace.

PS: Next Wednesday I’ll post Part 2 of the sesquicentennial reunion. Then I’ll return to my convent postings that ended in December 2011. Also, tomorrow—Sunday—I’ll post news about my manuscript entitled “The Reluctant Spy” on my other blog—wordcrafting: a writer’s blog.