“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,

There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was a dearth of woman’s tears”

-from the poem “BINGEN ON THE RHINE” By Caroline E. Norton (1808 – 1877)

 

We stood at attention in our platoon formations, four or five abreast, ten ranks deep, all in uniform, on a crisp September morning. Our platoon leader stood in front of our formation, back to us. Other platoons were all around us, same uniforms, with their platoon leaders in front of them. We all faced toward the center of the large asphalt covered yard, toward the empty flagpole. In spite of the great numbers assembled, more than a thousand, it was utterly quiet. You could hear birdsong from the nearby park. Shortly, two drummers and two buglers and a lone uniformed young man came into view. The small detachment marched to the military tattoo being rhythmically played out by the drummers. When they reached the flagpole they stopped marching and drumming. The young man took an American flag from under his arm, unfolded it enough to fix the grommets on the flag onto the catches on the rope.

The buglers began to play and the drummers started a slow roll of backdrop as the flag slowly began to rise to its position at the top. The music stopped. We raised our right hands over our hearts and, all as one, recited the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished, the platoon leaders led us, formation by formation, into the nearby buildings. Once inside, we could hear John Phillip Sousa’s Washington Post March blaring over the loudspeakers as we marched to our assigned positions.

No, I was not in the Army, at least not yet. I was seven years old and beginning my first day of first grade at Resurrection School on Chicago’s west side.

It seemed a bizarre, scary place to this scared first grader. I came from a big family, but they were all in other grades. I was on my own. It didn’t seem at all like kindergarten I attended the year before at nearby Robert Emmett Public School; that school was only a few hours a day, and offered naps and treats and games and playtime. Not at all like today’s kindergarten programs, which feature foreign languages and in which you may be required to defend your dissertation. This was loud, and crowded and scary, with kids of all ages.

My platoon leader/ classroom teacher was Sister Mary Owen, RSM. She was young and pretty; at least I thought she must have been if you could see past the habit she wore. It showed only her face and hands, that pretty face encased in a framed white starched cardboard headpiece. Her dress was black and she wore a starched white breastplate and wore a large black rosary as both a belt and a sort of accessory running down one side. She wore a black veil over her head. This was the official outfit of a Religious Sister of Mercy. There were other flavors of nuns, I would learn, and they had their distinctive outfits, also. Sisters of Providence, Franciscans, Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who I always thought sounded like a ball club.

We were about fifty kids to a room (we had a class photo every year, and the proof of those numbers is there), the products of the post war baby boom, when millions of G.I.’s, sailors, and airmen came back with pretty much one idea in mind. And millions of lonely women thought it was a pretty good idea, too. Procreation was practically the national pastime in the late 1940’s and early to mid-50’s and it filled classrooms quickly.

Our uniforms were tan shirts and maroon ties for boys, tan blouses and maroon plaid jumpers for the girls. The girls’ jumpers also carried a patch with the Resurrection logo on it. If you were number one or two in the family birth order, you probably wore new shirts, or blouses and jumpers. Come later to the party and you were probably wearing hand-me-downs from an older sibling or a neighbor. Kids mostly carried their books in book bags or by hand, backpacks being reserved at that time for mountain men, soldiers, and Sherpa guides. When the Chicago weather arrived, you hung your coat in the “cloak room” which ran alongside the classroom and, as I recall, where discipline was sometimes distributed to children whose behavior was unacceptable.

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It seemed to this boy that I had entered into a world run by women, which I believe could be said of most elementary schools. The principal and almost all of the teachers were nuns. The few lay teachers were women. And in such a world those things that are important to most women come to define the rules of the day. Things like order. Things like having a plan and then processing in an orderly fashion. Things like discipline. Things like kindness.

I was scared that first day. So many strange faces, and when Sister Owen called the role, asking each student in turn to raise their hand and speak their name, I could only raise my hand, too scared to speak. She let me off the hook and we set about the business of learning our ABCs, mostly reciting after her.

At some point, my nervousness got the better of me and I had an accident, and not the kind any kid wants to have. Sister Owen was quick to spot it. She swooped me up and carried me to the restroom, then known as the lavatory,  dismissing two older boys with a glare, who knew better than to mess with “Sister“. Like a mother caring for her own child, this young woman cleaned me off, asked me if I was OK, soaked my soiled undies and wrapped them in cellophane (who the hell carries cellophane?) and brought me by hand back to the classroom. I was somewhere between mortified and grateful. I’m not sure the other kids even noticed.

At the end of that first day, she handed me a note for my mother, explaining my little accident and telling me to have a better day tomorrow. I joined the orderly procession out the door, feeling utterly miserable and alone. And that is when I saw my oldest sister Maureen at the top of the stairway. She had on her plaid jumper, her black hair in curls and was talking to the girl next to her. My sister was a “good eighth grade girl” as the nuns would say. “Good eighth grade girls” could be depended upon to perform any task from cleaning the blackboards to tutoring slower students, to probably running the whole school, if asked.

She turned her head and saw me at the bottom of the steps and broke into a wide, welcoming smile. It was the kind of Big Sister smile that says, “I see you. It’s going to be OK. I’ve got you.” And I knew then that I wasn’t alone and that there were people there who cared about me. I was going to be OK. She carries that same smile even today and she has always shared it freely with all who need it.

God bless all sisters, those who took vows to earn that title and those who were members of your family. We’re lucky to have had them.