DAVE'S ORIGIN STORY -- Episode 5

Saint Cecilia's Parochial School

Dave and Jane and Nuns

Jane and Me the first day of second grade for me, first grade for Jane. Jane hated wearing dresses,

How Jane preferred to dress.

Even better:

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With a little help from my sophomore year autobiography:

How one nun was able to teach two classes simultaneously in one room was this: she taught something to one class and gave them an assignment to work on while she went to the other side of the room to teach something to the other class. She taught all subjects.

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Sister Roberta

Sister Roberta was a nurturer who could see into the hearts of her students. She knew that Dave loved drawing and she sensed that it was a lifeline for him. Every few weeks she would ask him to stay after school to help her “clean out the art drawer.” And she would give him construction paper and drawing pencils and pieces she had cut out of greeting cards or decorations she had made for her seasonal bulletin board display. When he was in second grade Sister Roberta asked him to help her teach the first graders how to draw a jack o’ lantern for the Halloween art project and he did and then she asked him to help them draw a turkey with fanned-out tail feathers for Thanksgiving and he did.

When Sister Roberta learned that the woman Dave's Aunt Helen kept house for had given them an old upright piano, she offered to teach him to play the piano. And so after school on Tuesdays he would go to the convent across the playground from the school and he would knock on the big door and a nun he did not know would let him in and he would walk down a narrow oiled wooden hall to a stairway and it would creak as he went up to the piano room. He would sit at the piano and look at the wall above it to the framed print of Saint Cecilia sitting in transports of ecstasy before an organ, her eyes gazing heavenward, her hands poised mid-air over the keyboard. Sister Roberta would come in and he would say, “Praised be Jesus Christ,” and Sister Roberta would answer, “And his mother Mary Immaculate” and they would get down to the week’s lesson from John Thompson’s Modern Course for the Piano.

When the first through fourth grades performed their own version of the Christmas story in the small social hall next to the school, Dave wanted to play Joseph and though he hadn’t said a word, Sister Roberta knew. “Joseph doesn’t say much,” she told him, “but the narrator does. He tells the whole story to our audience. We need someone who can learn all the lines and who can speak loud enough for everyone to hear and who will make people want to listen. We need you.”

Second grade was also the year I wrote my first autobiography. Here’s the first page:

[Photo courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives]

[Photo courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives]

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Sister Cosma

Dave and Jane and Sister Cosma

Sister Cosma had a pink face, a long narrow nose, and fish-blue eyes. She seemed taller and thinner than she was in her black habit and white wimple. Whoever she blamed for her unhappiness existed beyond her reach and so she punished those within her reach.

Sister Cosma had a rule: You go to the toilet during recess and you are not excused to go to the toilet during school hours.

In fourth grade Dave sat in row two of Sister Cosma’s classroom and Jane sat in row four with the third graders. Late one afternoon Jane raised her hand and asked Sister Cosma if she might be excused.

“Why?”

“To go to the toilet.”

“Why didn’t you go during recess?”

“I forgot.”

“You may not be excused.”

That afternoon, Sister Cosma was teaching the fourth graders when Dave heard giggles coming from the third grade rows. He looked over and saw Jane sitting with her arms folded on the top of her desk and her head bowed down onto her forearms. She was crying as a puddle spread on the floor beneath her seat.

Dave said, “You son of a bitch!” at Sister Cosma and she pulled him out of his seat and took him to the front of the room and she beat his knuckles with a ruler. And then she told him to take Jane to the toilet.

The toilet at Saint Cecilia’s was an outbuilding in a corner of the schoolyard next to the swing set and against the wire fence that separated church property from an adjacent field. There was something other-worldly about going outside the school building and onto the playground when no one else was there. Their feet crunched on the gravel and the crunching echoed across the empty playground. Dave waited outside the girls’ side of the toilet while Jane took off her underwear and dried herself.

When they got back to the classroom, Sister Cosma told them to go home. And when they told their mother what had happened, she frowned for a minute and then said from now on make sure you go to the toilet during recess.

Sister Cosma did not allow Dave to do art projects for the rest of the year.