“Forgive Us Our Trespasses…Or Not!”
In the late summer of 1966, it was my first day of first grade. I took my seat at an ancient desk with a hole in it for an inkwell. (It was 7 years later that I discovered that the hole actually once had that purpose.) A very old but very sturdy nun, Sister Roberta Ann, stood in front of the class, demonstrating a demeanor that made it very clear that SHE was God’s representative, and we’d better not forget it.
First matters first, she taught us how to say the Rosary. If we didn’t have one with us, we got a letter to take home, telling our parents what bad Catholics they were, and where they could buy us a Rosary immediately.
So I learned to say it. I also learned to do it quickly, since speeding through it was the only way to avoid falling into a hypnotic sleep. In fact, I started a little game in my mind that I was racing everyone else in class. I got pretty good too. Mary Formentini was on to me though, and she was quick — quicker than me. I suspected that she regularly skipped a bead or two to beat me, but I refused to cheat like that, as I figured that would REALLY tick Jesus off.
Mary was absent one day, and I raced along with no competition at all. It felt great. When I finished, I slapped that Rosary down so hard that everybody knew that I was DONE. To emphasize the point, as they all worked their way through their countless Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s, I sat back in my desk and started playing with my school supplies. I took the wooden ruler that some older kid had left in my desk, set the middle hole on my pencil point, and spun it like a helicopter. I got it going pretty fast too. All the others looked up from their Rosary. I thought they were really impressed with my invention, but I quickly found out that it wasn’t my ruler they were looking at.
With the skill of an international spy, Sister Roberta Ann snuck up behind me. Our classroom was in the basement, so the windows, which were at the ground level from the outside, were actually high up on the inside wall. To open and close the windows, Sister Roberta Ann had a round wooden stick with a hook on the end of it. But opening and closing those windows was only the secondary use of that stick. To Sister Roberta Ann, that stick served mainly as her weapon for defending proper Catholicism.
“Whack!” Right on the top of my skull. I had no idea what it was, or who did it to me. I knew that whenever the Russians would strike us with a hydrogen bomb, we would have little notice, but at least we would have enough time to hide safely under our desks. So it couldn’t have been the Russians. I dropped the pencil and ruler and instinctively put my hands on top of my head. This was a huge tactical mistake. With the second whack, I learned that the skull could take a hit much better than the bones of the hand.
“Don’t spin the ruler on your pencil,” she screamed as I checked for blood in my hair. “You could hurt yourself.”
The worst part of this whole assault was that after the two whacks, she made me do the Rosary again, to seek forgiveness from God for spinning the ruler on the pencil.
Several weeks later, I learned in a similar fashion that spinning a Rosary on your finger is not acceptable.
