As I carry my tray to the table where my Aunt Dorothy and my sister Mary have begun to eat lunch, a woman who has stopped by to chat with my aunt looks at me.
When I get to the table she tells me we’ve never met and introduces herself.
And I wonder whether I will be guilty of a mortal sin if I contradict a nun.
We are in the dining room of St. Joseph’s Provincial House, near Albany, about 15 years ago. Aunt Dorothy lives there with other retired sisters. My great-aunt, also a nun, also lived there. Some younger sisters, like this woman, work there. Mary lives in Albany, and when I visit her we often visit Aunt Dorothy.
I am not offended that the younger woman doesn’t remember me — it’s a nice change. I have visited the Provincial House many times since childhood, and years ago it was not unusual for some really old nun to come up and tell me she remembered me as a baby. One nun told me that once, when she visited my family’s house with one of my aunts, my mother was giving me a bath in the kitchen sink. “Oh,” I think I said, as if I could have politely said anything else.
I tell the younger woman that she and I have indeed met, and that there was a time in her life when she saw me every day.
This puzzles her until I provide her with the time and place: 1969 at St. Vincent de Paul High School. I wonder whether she has suppressed the memory; I suspect it was her first assignment, and it was a badly run school that would close after my sophomore year because a newer public school was siphoning off so many students. I think there were maybe 25 kids in my class, and the young sister served as our homeroom teacher in addition to teaching biology.
Or, rather, trying to teach biology.
Her teaching style wasn’t exactly polished, and she wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. The kids in the class weren’t nasty, but a fair number of them liked to joke around most of the time, with one exception: During the sex-education part of the curriculum you could have heard a zygote drop.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she tells me in the dining room, her tone indicating that she now has a sense of humor about it — or is trying to pretend that she has one. But I can still remember one afternoon when it was my turn to stay after school — along with Louie Morelli, Class Cut-Up No. 1 — and clean the chalkboard erasers. He and I got silly about something, and while I was chuckling I noticed that she was quietly crying. I didn’t know why, and we never found out; she told us to go home.
After my final exam at St. Vincent’s I left without getting to say goodbye to her, and over the years I sometimes wondered how she was doing; was she still a nun, or did we drive her out?
After the internet came along I looked her up and was happy to find that she was still a nun but not a teacher. She became a pastoral life minister for a rural church where a priest wasn’t always available, leading communal prayers and other services when necessary. Good for her.
Yesterday, after writing most of this, I looked her up again and found out some other things:
Her ministry included service in parishes in rural Tennessee.
She was also a hospital chaplain.
She died almost two months ago.
Yes, it does startle me to learn that her passing just about coincided with my decision to write about her. Is that a coincidence, or Something Else?
I’ll leave that question to more theologically qualified minds. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me, I have a memorial check to write.
