Back then, at least I got to work on my storytelling
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- October 30, 2019
- 1027
As eighth-graders we were expected to set an example for the other, more impressionable children in school, but sometimes there was a disconnect.
Well, at least there was for me.
Take, for example, cafeteria duty.
It wasn’t like working in a coal mine or baling hay for 12 hours at a stretch, but it was onerous, nonetheless. I’m probably guilty of gilding the lily a little, but it always seemed to me a waste of time to convince kids they had to eat everything on their trays.
Who cared, really?
Oh, we were all taught there were starving children in Africa or Central America or the Far East and other remote places on the big map that the teacher would pull down, using a pointer to indicate trouble spots.
And there was value in understanding that we had it better than most anyone, anywhere.
But there was something underlying the urgency of the message, something public school students didn’t have to deal with; I refer, of course, to religion.
In parochial grade school, it wasn’t enough just to care.
You had to believe God would be disappointed if you didn’t.
That’s a lot of pressure for a kid who already had to go to confession twice a month, to get down on his knees and recite aloud the litany of sins, reeling off a series of failures so rank and so abhorrent that one was almost glad he’d screwed up so badly.
There was something quite liberating about just letting it flow, saying stuff like, “And then I knocked my brother’s glasses off, but I didn’t step on them, which I could have, but I thought about those kids in Asia who can’t even get glasses.”
Yes, I was a storyteller even then.
I’ve talked with priests about the privacy of the confessional, and they’ve always maintained its integrity, but part of me wonders about that, human nature being what it is.
I mean they had to know some of us by our voices, right?
“That oldest Dewey boy, you know the one who’s always arguing with this teachers?” I imagined one saying. “Man, he’s a handful.”
And it was true.
I remember once when the entire class was being punished for something only one of us had done and the nuns employed a strategy that never worked, not even in POW camps.
“If the guilty party doesn’t step forward and admit his sin,” she would say, brandishing her steel ruler like a broadsword, “you’ll all pay the price.”
So no one said squat, and we were ordered to maintain absolute silence during lunch.
“Not so much as a belch,” we were told, “not a sound.”
And so, being someone who obeyed the rules, mostly, I held my tongue until I’d turned in my cleaned-off tray. Then I sprinted from the cafeteria, up the steps to the playground and yelled my head off.
“Yeah!” my defiance echoed off the factory walls across the street, and I felt so good, so righteous, that I didn’t even mind the inevitable appointment with the board of education.
Yes, there was corporal punishment in those days, though it was used sparingly, so I was kind of disappointed when the principal sentenced me to a week of tray-scraping duty rather than just getting it over with a swift swat or two across my backside.
“A week?” I asked, incredulous. “A whole damn week?”
“Watch your language, young man,” I was warned. “This could get much worse for you.”
And there was wisdom in those words.
In Catholic grade school, you learned things could always get worse. After all, we’d been taught all about Abraham.
And it resonated all the way to the playground, where we’d kick around all the ways men of faith were punished for no reason.
“Well, not for no reason,” the bespectacled smart guy said. “God was testing his faith.”
“By telling him to kill his son?” I shot back. “That’s crazy!”
“That’s part of being Catholic,” he said, spreading his hands in a “what’re you gonna do about it” gesture of schooled acceptance.
I had no immediate response because it was my turn to bat and there was a guy on second and I knew I had to get him home.
But it stayed with me. What’re you gonna do about it, indeed.
As it turned out, I liked tray-scraping duty.
I liked it a lot.
For one thing you got a chance to talk to some of the girls, which hardly ever happened, and even if all you said was, “Pretty good sloppy joes today, eh?” that counted for something.
But beyond that, I could see the shame in some of the kids’ eyes as they handed me their barely touched lunches, and it made me feel bad because some days I didn’t feel much like eating either.
The world was coming apart, literally, what with soldiers being shot in Vietnam and nuns being murdered in the Congo and men like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy getting gunned down.
Back then in the 1968-69 school year, being an eighth-grader meant there was a time of reckoning coming soon. You might only be 13 years old, but in five years you could get drafted.
Five years wasn’t very much time, I reflected as I scraped another blob of green Jell-O into the receptacle. Only five years earlier JFK had been assassinated in Dallas, and that felt like yesterday.
I’ll say one thing on behalf of a Catholic education.
It had a way of turning something as simple as an everyday lunch into something way more complicated than wasting tater tots.
Was that a good thing?
I guess that all depends on how you’ve moved on since then.
Me? I still wish I’d screamed even louder running up those steps.