OLD NUNS

Okay, I'm admitting it: I've been working on a new novel that features childhood characters I haven't thought about in decades. Not the traditional bullies and dead dogs, but real boogie-men and complicated adults who peopled those years. Since I spent my childhood roughly along two parallel streets in a very small town, those adults were stamped into my subconcious as surely as the railroad car imprints on the pennies we left on the tracks. Chief among these individuals were the Sisters of St. Joseph.

My Irish Catholic upbringing (even though I am also a quarter French and a quarter Norwegian) centered around the "Irish" Church, at one end of the street, and the affiliated Catholic School, at the other. The priests anchored the church, in their comfy "rectory" (complete with garage), while the nuns lived in a convent donated to them by the richest founding family in the town. The convent was a Victorian mansion. Tales of a secret wine cellar and sub-sub-cellar, where God-knew-what was stored, abounded. (I never saw either.) However, there was no garage. And unlike the priests, the nuns didn't have a housecleaner or a cook or anyone but themselves to do the laundry. Our house was smack dab in the middle of these two communes. (They became the epi-center of my life.)

Also on the street were other families: some frequented the "French" Catholic Church, across town, which had way more money and was considered "a cathedral". They also had an affiliated private school. My best neighborhood buddy attended both, even as her family lived directly behind mine. Other neighborhood kids went to the"Polish" Catholic Church, in the southern suburb of our own suburban town. The Polish clans attended "my" school, by default. So it was a mixed group of ragtag runts who biked, roller skated (before blades), and blasted our way up and down the streets, terrorizing older residents on a regular basis. Some of those older residents just happened to be nuns.

The nuns had their own daily services, at the convent. However, once a week, they attended the Sunday mass at the end of the street. We kids were supposed to attend that same mass. It was dubbed "The Children's Mass". I remember the nuns walking in a serious two-by-two file, down Lincoln Street, like a military operation,(or a march of giant ants), towards church. I could see them from my second story bedroom. We would leave the house,always, after the nuns. When my family entered the church, the parents would peel off and sit on the side pews,with the other adults. But my siblings and I were shunted towards the pews headed by each nun. There was a definition in not only hierarchy, but also in color. As if each pew had a punctuation mark with it's nun sitting on the end. We didn't mess around when we were at "The Children's Mass".

After mass, the nuns would march back up the hill, through the neighborhood, towards their Sunday dinner. We wouldn't see them again till Monday morning, first period class. After our own Sunday dinners,we kids would vanish into the yards of our friends.

Some would ride skateboards over the lumps and bumps of the schoolyard, up the street, right outside the convent walls. We'd keep one eye open for nuns, but rarely heard so much as a peep. (What did they do, once inside those high walls? Some kids believed they hung in their closets, like bats, so as not to wrinkle their clothes or knock any of the holiness off..we were an unenlightened bunch....) Sometimes we'd shoot baskets in the yard, but those games tended to be fast and subdued. (There was always a sense of being watched...)

A few older kids would hit tennis balls against the pale brick wall of the front of the new building of the school--until they knocked the tin letters off the wall and into the street. Usually they'd place the fallen letter against the glass doors and run away, fast as Hell, denying anything. Always, the next day, the letters would be gone, replaced on the front of the building, (though we never saw who took them inside or who rehung them...)

Rarely would we play down in the priests' neck of the woods. Perhaps because we'd gone to mass, there, only hours earlier? Perhaps because it was a "holier" destination? I remember that
there were no good rides in the church yard...only a tarred path that led to the basement doors. And if the priests, (who were always coming and going from the rectory), saw you out there, they'd join you. The whole feeling of mystery was missing. (Real thrills lived uphill, behind convent walls and eerie silence.)

I'd like to tell some of the nuns (who must still be alive--in the convent-- or escaped) that I've written this book. Some of them appear, disguised, in its pages. Most don't, but all influenced the writing. For the few who share the adventures I remember, I'd like them to know I salute them--in my own weird way. They populate my imagination, still, as surely as they used to populate my neighborhood. Though they often terrified us, they also enriched our young lives, spicing up a very vanilla existence. Their biggest "scandals" were hanging their laundry behind a high wooden fence, letting it out to dry...