Frederick Stroppel
THE ROOF OF HEAVEN
I
was sitting with Jim Coniglione in his office in Locust Valley a few weeks
ago. We were shooting the breeze,
ruminating on contemporary issues of varying import, when Jim came out with a
rather startling invitation:
“Hey, the pastor at St. Patrick’s wants me to clean up the pigeon shit
in the bell tower. Want to check
it out with me?”
The
question wasn’t entirely out of left field. Jim operates Scoopy-Doo, a pet waste removal service (or as
Jim more succinctly frames it, “I pick up dog shit.” ) He is often approached by folks
with momentous fecal challenges.
He’s cleaned up after geese, pigs, donkeys, horses, and the occasional
alpaca. And yes, pigeons, many
times.
But
this, among scooping opportunities, was unique: the bell tower at St. Patrick’s
Church - that iconic brick spire towering over the city of Glen Cove from its
perch on the hill at Pearsall Street, with the dragon gargoyles and the clock
hands that never moved. The belfry hadn’t been cleaned, Father Gabriel said, in
at least thirty years. Maybe
never. There were generations of church history up there, reduced and distilled
into stratified layers of white and green guano. Of course I wanted to check it out.
And
for a personal reason. I grew up a
member of St. Patrick’s parish, and served there as an altar boy. My parents were married in that church,
as was my brother, my cousins, lots of my friends. Many’s the time I stood outside the front entrance,
waiting for the bride and groom to make their grand descent down the stone
staircase, and looked up idly at the pigeons in the tower as they peeked down
at us through the curlicued clock lattice, judging how to best land a fresh dropping on the shoulder of some unwitting bridesmaid.
But more
than that – oh, much more - I attended St. Patrick’s School right next door for
eight years. Eight years of
nuns, and lay teachers with the souls of nuns; of rulers, blackboards, “SPS”
monogrammed ties and blazers, regimented mass visits to the bathroom (or more
properly, the lavatory), clapped erasers, May crownings, and a legacy of
parochial instruction, religious and otherwise, accomplished by dint of rote,
memorization, and terror. I
had endured eight harrowing years at St. Pat’s. I was a survivor.
That,
more than anything else, made me want to go up into that ominous tower. Driving with my brothers to school each morning, it would loom before us, stark and forbidding, a promise of the daily misery to come, and over the years it had become a symbol of hard times and liberation, struggle and triumph, grief and glory. To stand in that belfry now and look down with benign contempt at the school below would represent for me a moment of transcendence, a purging of demons, and, to use a term that didn’t even exist in my childhood, ultimate closure.
Anyone who hasn’t gone to Catholic school is likely to entertain a misapprehension of the experience. Outsiders might picture it as a brutal totalitarian system, run by zealots and maladjusted thugs, who use psychological manipulation and outright cruelty to force their helpless charges into a mindless acceptance of authority. Others may have had their gentler impressions shaped by Hollywood: the school in this incarnation a welcoming place, where the nuns are kindly and compassionate, singing cheery songs and playing baseball at recess, and where the wise, jovial priests dispense avuncular advice as they pat you on the head and nowhere else.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, of course - neither Devil’s Island nor Disneyland. But I can tell you this much, there were no inspirational, heartwarming movie nuns at St.
Patrick’s: no Ingrid Bergmans, no Rosalind Russells, no perky tomboys climbing
trees or riding motorcycles through the cloister, no future saints picking up
guitars and singing “Dominique” as the bluebirds circled round their
heads.
We
had instead Sister Carolus, Sister Cyrina, Sister Adrian, Sister Elizabeth,
Sister Leon, Sister Rosemary; all middle-aged, short-tempered, crabby brides of
Christ. Some of them were
dedicated martinets; others were just bored and clearly resentful of the roles
that the church patriarchy had assigned them by virtue of their lesser sex. As
a consequence, none of them lit up the room when they walked into it; and while
all were big fans of The Sound of Music and its positive, noble depiction of nunnery life, there wasn’t a one
in the bunch whom you wouldn’t imagine kicking the Von Trapps to the curb and
stopping up her ears with her fingers while the Nazis opened fire.
In
place of a kindly Mother Abbess chirping “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”, we had Sister
Gerarda, the burly humorless principal, who swaggered down the halls like a
longshoreman and had a crucifix and a Board-of-Education paddle hanging over
her desk. When you got sent down
to her office for disrupting the class, you could fairly expect it wouldn’t be
for a spot of tea and a cozy heart-to-heart.
I
had a couple of lay teachers in my tour of duty at St. Patrick’s, but they made
little impression. It was
the nuns who personified the spirit of the place, and none were more memorable
than my fourth-grade teacher, Sister Francis Jerome, who, among her other
virtues, was a narcoleptic hunchback.
She would drift off to sleep at her desk around 9:30 a.m., and wake up
maybe an hour later, at which point she would berate us for wasting the whole
morning: “Lazy – you’re all lazy
and worthless!” As for her posture – well, her back wasn’t so much hunched as
her head was shoved down between her shoulders, but either way, it was easy to
picture her swinging on the bells of the tower, yelling “Sanctuary!”
And
the resemblance to Charles Laughton didn’t end there. She had a thick fleshy underlip and heavy jowls: put a British naval captain’s bicorn on
her head, and she would be a dead ringer for Captain Bligh.
Sister
Francis Jerome was no nastier than the other nuns, but her physical aspect, a
reverse Dorian Gray-like outer assumption of the twisted soul within, made her
seem an especially vivid example of the stunted sadistic nun of popular lore. On the other hand, I knew nothing
of her private thoughts or her personal life; she may have been a
sophisticated, wine-sipping raconteur back at the convent. She may have even stood as
straight as an oak. It was the
school that weighed her, and so many of her colleagues, down.
And
believe me, I appreciate the plight of those poor women. While their male counterparts were
hogging the spotlight at Mass, handing out awards at CYO dinners, playing golf
with politicians, and chowing down at pancake breakfasts, the nuns were stuck in dank gloomy
classrooms, wrangling herds of bratty kids, day after day after day. Some of these women were bright,
intellectual, artistic, significant, with much to offer. Didn’t matter. They were in thrall to the church, and
they had to follow their orders.
Thoroughly miserable, they
were simply paying their misery forward to us, the only outlets available to
their suppressed rage. I get
that, and I sympathize - now.
But
at the time, I hated them.
Except
for Sister Judith Marie, my sixth-grade teacher. She was young and liberal (by 1967 standards), and
surprisingly attractive.
She did fun stuff with us, like bringing in a TV to watch the World Series
(Red Sox vs Cardinals) and teaching us modern songs like “Born Free” and “The
Lonely Goatherd.” She wasn’t
strict or unreasonable, and even her classroom was unusually bright and
airy. I probably had a crush
on her, like the rest of the boys and half of the girls. Why couldn’t they all be like Sister
Judith Marie?
Yet
she was the only nun I saw actually beat a student.
Corporal
punishment in Catholic school wasn’t as prevalent back then as the stories would have
it. Yes, all the nuns were expert
at smacking you on the back of the head, or cracking your hands with a pointer. And if you were having a hard
time at the blackboard, they might slam your face into it so that you could get
a closer look at the problem. But
any real serious discipline happened behind closed doors, and was usually meted
out by the principal. She had
first dibs.
Sister Judith Marie kept a metal ruler
on her desk, but she never threatened anyone with it. Every now and then she would whack it on the desktop to
get our attention, then slap it in
her palm, as if to say, “Oh, I’ll use it; I’ll use it.” But she’d do it with a smile, and
I don’t think anyone took her seriously.
There
was one kid, Joseph McGrady (not his real name, but close enough), who was kind
of a wise-ass. He wasn’t really a
tough kid like the Deasys - he didn’t bully anybody or start fights - but he was
fresh and insolent, and just smart enough to get under Sister Judith Marie’s
skin. Yet just dumb enough not to
know when to stop. He was
always pushing her to the edge. waiting to see if she’d blow.
And
finally one day she did. He tossed
out some snotty remark, and she came charging down the aisle at him. “You think you’re funny, McGrady? You think you’re funny?” She grabbed him by the arm, pulled him
in front of the class, and started
whacking him with the metal ruler.
It was a fearsome weapon in practice, wide and heavy, and in no way
comical; as it landed on his ass you could see his entire body flinch and
crumple. Evidently Sister
Judith Marie had been anticipating this showdown, and already discussed the
possibility with McGrady’s mother, because she taunted him after an especially
vicious stroke, “And this is with
your mother’s permission!”
Gee, thanks, Mom.
Soon
McGrady was screaming with each blow, twisting helplessly, his face splotched
and wet with tears; but Sister Judith Marie kept on, her arm swinging up and
down with the relentless beat of an
automaton. Everyone
in the room began to sense that the righteous administering of deserved
punishment had gotten way out of control.
There was no purpose to this now:
she was beating him because she was beating him.
Then
she stopped, suddenly, not out of weariness, but rather as if a heavenly voice
had just whispered in her ear, “what the hell are you doing?” She
shot an angry look at the rest of us:
“All right, everybody get outside, now!” We
scrambled out of our desks and fled. Nobody wanted to cross Sister Judith Marie now.
We
milled around in the parking lot, wondering what was going on in the room. Was she continuing the beating in
private, upping it to new levels of savagery, or was she comforting McGrady and
making him promise to keep this little incident a secret? When we were called back to the
classroom, Sister Judith Marie and McGrady stood together by her desk. His shirttails were pulled out, his hair
askew, and his face was still flushed and sweaty; he looked like someone who
had just made it through a death march.
She
looked stern but slightly worried:
“It’s all over, and we won’t talk about this again.” And she issued a very clear directive: “None of you are to speak a word of
this outside this classroom!”
This didn’t play as a threat; she was telling us that she could get into
trouble for this, and we would all suffer the consequences, because they might
replace her with some ugly old bat from the retirement convent who wouldn’t
give a damn about “The Lonely Goatherd”. So we all kept quiet.
Sister
Judith Marie left the nunhood the next year, and to our surprise she married
soon after. Perhaps her fury at
McGrady was just an upswelling of the gnawing frustration that comes with
uncommitted celibacy. A few
months later she stopped by the school, a happily-married woman; her habit was
gone, she was wearing very hip sunglasses, and her hair was a bright sunny
yellow. I never would have
guessed - a nun with blonde hair.
As I
entered seventh grade, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Deliverance was a mere two years away.
But first I had to navigate past the Scylla and Charybdis of Sister Rosarita
and Sister Angelica.
Sister
Angelica, the eighth-grade teacher, was a legend, the prototypical mean old
bitch of St. Patrick’s, the last
and thorniest hurdle you had to clear to gain your freedom. She was short and had a squished-up
pugnacious face, a cross between the older Jimmy Cagney and Popeye, although perhaps her true doppelganger was that middle munchkin from the Lollipop
Guild. She
relied on archaic phrases to demean us, and pronounced words like “creature”
and “nature” with a curious “y” in the middle: “You bold creat-yure!” she would bleat. “Woe to you, bright-light! I pity your head!” She never laughed, she never smiled,
she never displayed an ounce of warmth. She was basically a caricature, but a dangerous
caricature, a plague of pettiness to be suffered.
Sister
Rosarita, seventh-grade, was more of an unknown quantity: mercurial and unbalanced, you never
knew where you stood with her.
She was in her late thirties, I would guess, and she had thick glasses
which made her look cross-eyed, so you couldn’t tell if she was looking at you
or someone over your shoulder.
“What are the Eight Beatitudes?” she’d ask, and you’d swear she was
staring at the portrait of Pope Paul XI behind you. “Me?” “Yes,
you, Stroppel!” she’d snap back. “You think I’m talking to the wall?” She had a penchant for sneering sarcasm
that you didn’t dare reciprocate, or for sure she would clock you.
Sister
Rosarita was progressive in her way, teaching us about the terrible cost of the
Vietnam War, taking us to the “Harlem on my Mind” exhibit at the Museum of
Modern Art, making us memorize the words to Judy Collins’ “Both Sides
Now”. She also made sure we
understood the facts of life, even if by linking them to religious doctrine: I recall how she explained the Feast of
the Circumcision (which has since been repurposed into the Feast of the Holy
Family) by drawing a penis on the blackboard – I tried to block out the fact
this was putatively Jesus’ penis - and illustrating how the outer skin was cut
and then peeled back; her art skills were not impressive, but we got the
picture.
She
also gave us vivid descriptions of the Crucifixion, as graphic in their way as
anything in Joyce: “They pressed the crown of thorns down on His head, until
the thorns poked right through His eyelids, and the blood welled up in His eye
sockets....The nails were pounded into His wrists, not His palms, so as to keep
the weight of His body from ripping through the bones...When He was thirsty, a
soldier put a sponge on a stick up to His mouth, but it was soaked in vinegar
and it seeped into His dry cracked lips...”
She loved sports, and had a fondness
for the boys in the class who were athletes. As I was not athletic in even the most generous application
of the term, I assumed that she regarded me with indifference.
I
was wrong about this: apparently she couldn’t stand me. One of my classmates remembered years
later that Sister Rosarita was constantly harrassing me and treating me
badly. “She really hated
you.” Why, I don’t know. At the time I had no idea I was being
singled out. She didn’t seem to be
treating anyone else particularly well either.
But there was one classroom incident
that sticks with me. Kathy
Gavin, the smartest kid in the class, was doing a math problem at the
blackboard, and I was watching her work it out. Suddenly Sister Rosarita yelled at me: “Stroppel, stop
goofing off and do your own work!”
I
was annoyed by the unfairness of the suggestion, because I wasn’t goofing off;
I was learning though observation,
as most writers do. On the other hand, I knew there was no value put on
fairness at St. Patrick’s – they were right, you were wrong, end of appeal – so
I just shrugged and picked up my pencil.
Well,
something about my shrug, my attitude, the way I started scribbling in a
desultory way – it really pissed Sister Rosarita off. She stopped everything and snarled at me angrily: “You know, Stroppel, I’m getting
sick of that look of disgusted tolerance on your face!”
I
was taken by surprise. Disgusted tolerance? Me? True, the phrase did sum up my sentiments pretty well, but I wasn’t
aware that I was expressing it so openly. But the true revelation to me was that I was getting on her nerves - I was irritating her – without even trying! And what’s more, there was nothing she could do
about it. She couldn’t hit me, and
she couldn’t very well send me to the principal, just for being tolerant. As long as I kept quiet and did my
work, I could be as disgusted with her as I wanted.
So
the battle lines were drawn: I
didn’t like her, she didn’t like me. And this war of mutual antipathy lasted until the spring,
when suddenly one day she was gone.
We were told that she’d had a nervous breakdown, and went somewhere to
rest, and wouldn’t be coming back.
Just like that, no more Sister Rosarita. No one knew what made her snap, but I liked to think
that in my own tolerant way I’d contributed to her mental demise. A mean-spirited thought, I know, but at
St. Patrick’s you took your victories where you could get them.
For
all the negatives of the Catholic school system, I have to say that I had a
truly unforgettable eight years at St. Patrick’s, and I wouldn’t have traded
them for anything. Sure, it might
have been easier coasting through public school (we assumed it was a coast, in
that you didn’t have to wear a tie,
you didn’t have to take religion, the teachers couldn’t hit you, and you
didn’t have to give up recess for marching practice the entire month of May so
that you would be a credit to your school in the Memorial Day Parade).
But
there came a great sense of pride in graduating from St. Patrick’s. Just as Marines who survive Parris
Island emerge with an awareness of their own exceptionalism, so we St. Pat’s
graduates felt that we had achieved things and endured trials that the public
school kids could never even guess at.
We had been tempered in the great crucible of fear, and we were ready
for anything the mere world could throw at us.
And
Catholic school, it needs be said, was not the pure hell that some would
contend. Sure, some kids were
always in trouble, but that’s because they lived for trouble – that was their
goal, their irrational response to an irrational situation. But if you kept your head down and did
your work and made very little eye contact, you were okay.
Finally,
I never laughed harder than I did at St. Patrick’s. Everything was funny there. The frightening yet absurd visage of the nuns in their
habits, the solemn self-importance of the priests, the threat of punishment for
the mildest transgressions – it created an atmosphere that begged for mockery and ridicule. You couldn’t laugh out loud, of course; all humor had
to fly under the radar. You
had to go to Catholic school to appreciate the real joy of subversion.
And
because ritual and tradition informed every moment at St. Patrick’s, the
smallest lapse in decorum became instantly hilarious. For instance, no one dared let out a loud fart in
class – it was too rude and obvious, the nuns would come down on you like a ton
of bricks. So all the kids
would either hold tight or sneak one out. But every now and then, usually in a moment of
exquisite silence, a sharp pop
would erupt in our midst, and we all knew what it was.
Then
you’d share a quick glance with your deskmate, and you’d both start
laughing. Quietly - you
couldn’t let the teacher see you. Your shoulders would shake violently as you
summoned every effort to keep from making a noise. You’d pretend you were working, you’d hunch over your desk and hide
behind the kid in front of you, while your sides would ache from the muscle strain of holding it
in. Other kids would see you
laughing, and they would start laughing.
The whole back row of the class would be shaking with laughter, and the
nuns wouldn’t have a clue.
Although
in retrospect, I’m sure they did.
They must have noticed all that shaking and snorting, they weren’t stupid. No, I like to think that they let it go
- they just let us laugh - because they knew it was healthy and necessary. They knew deep down that we weren’t
devout soldiers of Christ, we were just kids, and we had to let all that crazy
energy out one way or the other.
So they turned a blind eye and feigned ignorance, and thought, Oh, for God’s sake, just let them
laugh.
I drove down
Hendrick Avenue and stopped at the light, and looked across the street at the
church on the hill. Forty years
later, it looked exactly the same.
The clock belfry was actually three-quarters of the way up the tower,
not at the very top as I remembered it, but there were still those dragon
gargoyles peering down from each corner.
Why, I often wondered, were there dragons adorning a Roman Catholic
church? What kind of odd symbology
was that?
There
were always things to puzzle over in the Catholic narrative. Why, if the church was so dedicated to
the poor, was it so damned rich?
How could Jesus be in Hell for three days if he died on Friday afternoon
and rose again on Easter Sunday morning? How is it possible that, as the Baltimore Catechism
claims, “God always was and always will be”? He had to start somewhere, right?
“No,
He always was.”
“But
there had to be a moment just before He was.”
“He always was, Stroppel!
Don’t be a fresh-ite!”
Jim
and I met at the top of the hill behind the church. On the right was the entrance to the school, which I
had passed through every morning for eight years. The principal’s office was inside the door, on the
left. You had to walk by it every
morning. It was a great way to
start the day.
We
were greeted by Tony, the church custodian, a middle-aged man with a gruff
Italian accent. “You gonna
clean the tower?” asked Tony.
“I
have to see it first,” said Jim.
He introduced me as his assistant, and we all took surgical masks from
the car. As Jim
observed, there was no telling what kind of nasty stuff you might be inhaling
up there.
We
walked around to the front of the church. “So how do we get in?” Jim asked Tony. Meaning, where’s the secret side
door that will take us up to the forbidden tower? I pictured a zig-zagging stone stairway, coated in dust and
webs, with a rat or two scurrying off into the shadows, and perhaps even the
rubbery O-shaped remnant of a disintegrated condom, commemorating a decades-old
tryst between precocious eighth-graders
during the intermission of the Mother’s Club revue “Hits and
Misses”. Or perhaps there
would be a metal spiral staircase like the one in The Haunting, or the rickety wooden staircase that led to the
Spanish bell tower in Vertigo. Any one of these would have
fulfilled my Gothic expectations.
But
as we turned the corner of the building, Tony pointed wordlessly to the church
entrance. Blocking that
entrance was a metal electrician’s ladder, which stretched up over the door to
the first roof; from there another ladder, wrought-iron and rusty, with
pencil-thin rungs, was built directly into the masonry, and proceeded in a
straight vertical up the outside wall to the open belfry, which was masked with
what looked like chicken wire.
Jim
and I stared at the treacherous jumble of ladders. We didn’t look at each other or say a word, but I caught a
vibe coming from him that one might charitably translate as “WTF?” I was having the same reaction myself. This was no charming Vertigo staircase;
this was more like the daunting sheer rock cliff in The Guns of
Navarone. We were going up there?
Not just yet, as far as Jim was
concerned. “Tony, what’s the story
here? Father Gabriel said there
were stairs.”
Tony
pointed at the ladder. “Stairs.”
“
That’s not ‘stairs’”, said Jim.
“That’s a ladder.” He walked up and down the church
steps to demonstrate: “These are stairs!” Then he stared expectantly at Tony, as if he could
produce a proper staircase at will, but Tony just shrugged. Sorry, cuz, this is it.
Jim
sighed. “Okay...well...” He started up the first ladder. Tony took a step back, allowing
me to follow Jim. After all, I was
his assistant.
I
wasn’t sure that I was going to follow Jim. The set-up looked about half-safe at best. I could picture
myself falling off one of those ladders and breaking my hip and my back and
everything in between, with very little effort. But there were two other custodians besides Tony
watching, and there was nothing in their attitudes to suggest that I had the
slightest excuse to back out. It’s
just a ladder - come on!
I
waited until Jim reached the second ladder – maybe he would stop there and
decide it wasn’t worth the candle.
But no, after a pause to steel himself, he climbed on.
So I
started up the first ladder myself, and as I got halfway up and felt my worn
sneaker treads sliding unsteadily on the metal rungs and a slight breeze
nudging me to one side, and as I looked out over the hill towards Glen Street
below and saw the tiny cars moving past, with their tiny drivers happily
oblivious to my fate, it occurred
to me: this would really be the perfect way to die (perfect in that
Greek-tragedy sort of way), tumbling from the tower of the church where I spent
my childhood, perishing in a misguided attempt to exorcise the saintly devils
of my youth. It was so
fitting and classically apt that I
had no doubt it was going to happen.
I was going to die at St. Patrick’s.
I
made it to the interim roof, carefully grabbing at the second ladder before
stepping off the first. I
stood on the slate roof, holding tight to the rusty handles of the wrought-iron
ladder, and watched Jim standing at the top now, staring through the wire mesh
at the belfry with the flashlight.
“Holy shit,” he said thoughtfully.
Maybe
he’d seen enough, so I waited; no point in heading up if he was heading
down. Jim poked at the
wire a moment. “How do I get in
there?” he asked. “Just push all
this wire out of the way?”
“Yeah,”
said Tony, right behind me. He had followed me up the ladder and was waiting for me to
continue. He gave me a
look: what’s holding up the works? Are you going or what?
I
looked at the vertical ladder above me, and I looked at the driveway below; I
thought about my family, and about hospital rooms and cemetery plots, and I
made a snap decision: screw this.
“Go ahead,” I said with a big smile, waving Tony through.
Tony
made no judgment on this. He
didn’t care one way or the other.
He climbed up on the roof and headed up the second ladder.
And
I started back down, a treacherous maneuver in itself. Take your time – one step – two steps –
no rush...
As
my sneaker slipped on one rung, I tightened my grip on the ladder. I felt for a
moment as if I were falling off,
as if I were being pulled away.
Was it the wind, that tiny breeze?
Or was it the spirits of St. Patrick’s - the ghosts of Sisters Angelica, Rosarita, Francis Jerome, pulling at me, trying to yank me to the ground? “Bold creat-yure....!” “Disgusted tolerance...!” “Sanctuary!”
I
recovered my bearings, and made it to the ground, and immediately congratulated
myself on the smartest thing I ever did in my life. The church might get me one of these days, but not today.
Jim
had disappeared by now, crawling through the hole in the wire. Tony hung on the top of the second
ladder, pointing out various problem areas. A few minutes later they were both climbing down the
ladder. Jim was shaking his head.
“There’s
two inches of pigeon shit on the floor up there, and all over the walls, and
there are some dead pigeons stuck on the ledges....It’s a friggin’ ecological
disaster.”
“Can
you do it this week?” asked Tony, who for all his stony gruffness had a
surprisingly optimistic outlook on life.
Jim
laughed explosively. “No way,
cuz. My guys don’t do this kind of
work. We’re Scoopy-Doo, we scoop things, off the ground.
You’re gonna need specialists. Human flies or something.”
Jim
went over to the rectory and gave the bad news directly to Father Gabriel. “Can’t do it, Father.
It’s a health situation.
You gotta be careful breathing all that fecal matter in. You could get toxoplasmosis.”
Father
Gabriel nodded with muted alarm.
“Toxoplasmosis...!”
(I
asked Jim afterwards, “What is
toxoplasmosis?”
“I
don’t know,” he said, waving a hand indifferently. ‘But it can really fuck you up.”)
We
went back to our cars, both feeling unfulfilled and dissatisfied for different
reasons. Jim tried to
salvage the moment: “One of these
days I gotta show you the Goosinator,” he said. “It’s a remote-control drone that flies over the golf
course, scares the shit out of the geese.” He laughed. “Now that’s fun.”
I
drove through the arch separating the church and the school and headed down the
hill. So that was it. My dream of scaling the heights and
touching the roof of heaven never came to fruition. Expecting a transcendent moment, I wound up instead holding
onto a rusty ladder for dear life as a flock of ghostly nuns cackled in my
ear.
You could always
depend on St. Patrick’s for a good laugh.
