Once upon a time in seventh grade....

This is a tale of two nuns.

Sister Robert was my seventh-grade homeroom teacher.

Sister Clara taught eighth grade.

Sister Robert was fairly young, short and chubby, and generally good-humored. If the word had existed in 1967, you might well have also described her as “ditzy.”

Sister Clara was middle-aged, tall and thin, and definitely not ditzy.


Sister Robert taught most of our seventh-grade classes, and Sister Clara taught us English. Every morning at an appointed time she’d come into our classroom, and Sister Robert would leave and teach another class elsewhere. (Apparently the principal didn’t want the hassle of moving students from room to room.)


For maybe twenty minutes after lunch, Sister Robert would read to us. I don’t remember all the books she read — “The Yearling” was definitely one of them, and maybe “Bambi” — but her literary choices had one thing in common: They were maybe a bit too young for us seventh-graders. Sister Robert’s classroom also had a small bookcase against one of the walls, below the windows.


While Sister Robert was usually in a good mood, you never knew what you were going to get with Sister Clara. When she came into our classroom I could instantly tell, just from the look on her face, what kind of session we were going to have.


If her face was pleasant, placid and even borderline smiling, I knew things would go well — or at least not badly. I might even learn something.

But if she came in with a scowl — the Reverend Mother of scowls, the kind of scowl you could see from the Sea of Tranquility — I knew we were in for trouble.


(Fortunately I myself was seemingly exempt — it helped to have two aunts who were members of the same order.)

One day as she entered, Sister Clara was almost frothing at the mouth. She had assigned us all to choose a book, read it and then write a report on it, and now she had read the reports and for the most part was almost violently not pleased. What really set her off was that one of us had chosen to report on “Homer Price,” a humorous opus about a boy who, among other things, has a misadventure with a doughnut-making machine.

She must have blown a gasket and a half as she told us what a stupid, asinine and infantile choice “Homer Price” was for students as old as we were. She spent so much time, energy and pure rage telling us how incompetent we were that after she finally stormed out of the room at the end of class you could almost smell ozone in the air.

A few hours later — I can almost swear it was that same day — we seventh-graders returned from lunch, and as we began to settle in, one of us, whose name was Nick, was examining the contents of the bookshelf below the windows.


“Hey, Nick,” Sister Robert said, her voice bright and innocent, “why don’t you try that book about Homer Price and the doughnut machine? It’s really funny!”