PREPOSITIONAL CLAUSES ARE NO RELATION TO SANTA CLAUSES

"Learn to Listen and Listen to Learn"

About, above, across, after, against, among, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beside, between, beyond, but, by, down, during, except, for, from, in, into, near, of, off, on, over, through, to, towards, under, up, with.

          If your chest just tightened because you recognize those words are prepositions, then there’s a good chance you had Sister Lawrence in the fifth grade at Holy Trinity School in the Coytesville section of Fort Lee. And if you had Sr. Lawrence, you will not only be able to diagram every sentence in this entire column, but you will also have been through, or are in desperate need of, deep psychoanalysis or rehab. The emotional scars she inflicted for your inability to retain and repeat the memorization of said prepositions as she paced up and down the standing line of your class in an exercise of terror makes the stories of  Guantanamo Bay seem to pale in comparison.  

          For me, as well as the many others whose older siblings brought home the horror of experiencing the fifth grade, entering Sister Lawrence’s class was a ritual akin to moving from the general population to death row. The actual physical move from the fourth grade classroom to the fifth grade classroom required that you relocate to a new corridor and enter a world known as the “upper grades” with the eighth grade standing at the very end like a winning spot on a game board.  

Sister Lawrence’s philosophy was to strip you down forgetting about the building up side, which many of us found through alcohol or drugs in the ‘80’s. The result of her reign of terror was that you became bonded to your classmates in a way that only those who are in a hostage situation understand. There was no “cool,” “jock,” “weird.” We were all equally capable of incurring her wrath.  

The only thing that gave anyone joy was the wall of windows that looked out across the front yard of a rogue house that came before the building of the school and onto the curve of road that leads cars from 9W to Linwood. I used to spend entire mornings staring out those windows imagining a life without fear. My best friend Rosie used to stare out the windows dreaming of becoming a truck driver as she envied the18-wheelers as they tipped around the bend of road.  

That year was also the year that my mother became the school secretary. This tidbit of vital information came directly from a disliked classmate who took great glee in informing me of this during the summer before entering fifth grade. I nearly started a fist fight with her for telling such a lie, but when my mother confirmed it to be true, but had not yet told me, I knew it was a portentous beginning to an already discouraging year.

          As luck would have it, my mother became very good friends with Sister Lawrence, much to my horror. I not only had to suffer through the school day with her, but off-hour visits to the convent and more-than-the-once-in-a-while-occasional drop-ins at my house. The first time my mother dragged me to the convent and I saw Sister Lawrence out of her habit, wearing a snappy housecoat and slippers it was like seeing porn. I couldn’t look, but I also couldn’t look away. There was something so unholy about it, yet oddly fascinating. Add to that her terse conversation informing me she was intentionally harder on me because of her friendship with my mother and didn’t want the appearance of playing favorites. Fantastic!

          So each day in school I had to balance the horror of withstanding her class with the uncertainty of when our social circles would intersect and I had to pretend I didn’t want to run screaming. 

Which brings me back to prepositions. As she stopped in front of me and barked the order to recite, my mind went blank. I could feel the discomfort of my classmates who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me on the line before the window. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, she screamed, “Idioms are a dime a dozen, but idiots appear to be free in this class!”     

           If you’d like to take a trip down prepositional memory lane, Holy Trinity is having reunion for all classes at the school on April 30^th at 8pm following an alumni mass at the church at 7pm that will be celebrated by Father Dominic Lenoci, class of ’78.  If you know of an alumni, please pass it on and contact me for more information.

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (BABY JESUS IS GONE)

On the road to a lifetime of therapy, my 5th grade class at Holy Trinity 1975 with the little nun who broke us all.

She paced before us, her black orthopedic shoes screeching against the institutional black-and-white speckled tiled floor. We were four months into our nine months sentence with Sister Lawrence in the fifth grade of Holy Trinity School in Fort Lee. There was still a brutal six months ahead of us. If we survived tonight.

 “Where is it?” she commanded. Her four-foot eight-inch frame striking terror into us. “Where. Is. Baby. Jesus?” her clenched jaw deployed the lever that made her fists curl into dangerous balls. She stopped in front of Rosemary costumed in a long dress, her head veiled by a beautifully hand-embroidered sheet.

          How could Sister Lawrence be yelling at Rosemary? Rosie was the ideal Catholic! She was on the “A” string for Team Jesus! She was chosen from all the other girls to play the role of Mary in the Nativity Scene for the annual Christmas Concert, but she had forgotten her Baby Jesus, a.k.a. Tippy Tumbles, at home. We held our breath as Sister Lawrence rained insults down upon Rosie. No one could strip you of your dignity with such skilled precision like Sister Lawrence. Her meticulous dissection of the ego is still studied in some convents far, far, away.

“Did Mary forget to bring Baby Jesus to Bethlehem? NO! But YOU apparently think it’s okay to forget our Lord and Savior and deny us the pleasure of his blessed birth! Do you think that Baby Jesus grew up to die on that cross (our eyes automatically turned towards the crucifix she was pointing at) just so you could forget him at home?! Your sister didn’t forget him last year when she was the Virgin Mary!”

I felt dizzy with faint. I’m pretty sure the boy next to me wet his pants. For the last half-hour as we waited for our class to go on stage and perform for our parents, Rosie had been holding her arms to her chest as if she was cradling a baby hoping that Sister Lawrence wouldn’t find out she left Baby Jesus home. Now I could hear her sniffles and knew that Sister Lawrence had reduced her to tears. Like all my other classmates, I thanked God it was her and not me. Sister Lawrence already got her licks in with me earlier in the day.

That morning, she chose me, Mary Lutz, Helena Toledo, and Lia Bizzaro to stay behind at recess to wrap Christmas gifts for the retired nuns at Convent Station. (I always pictured Convent Station as a town with train-fuls of old nuns waiting to go to Heaven.) Feeling privileged to be hand-picked by her, she directed us on how to wrap presents. My euphoria of having been chosen quickly faded when, upon wrapping my first gift, she jerked it out of my hands and intentionally ripped the paper from the box, her face a blooming shade of apoplectic red.

“Look at this!” she bellowed. “What is this?”

I did look at it. It was a ripped open present. My sarcasm, being in its nascent stages, I kept to myself.  

“Look at all this paper you wasted to wrap this gift! You didn’t need all this paper! Are you so rich that you can afford to use all this paper on one tiny gift? Look at the size of your side-triangles! You only need enough paper to barely cover the box and no more. These nuns have NOTHING and you’re going to show them how little they have by wrapping their gift with all that paper! Go sit down. You disgust me with your waste! You’re going to grow up to be a waste!” As instructed, I sat down wondering if these wounds would ever heal enough to have scars.

Despite Sister Lawrence’s wrath, we appeared on stage and sang to an empty manger while our Mary fought back her tears.  Whenever I hear “What Child is This?” I think of 29 ten-year olds singing to an empty cradle while our parents snapped pictures capturing a moment we would spend years in therapy trying to forget.

But despite the long divide of years, each Christmas I can't help but think of Sister Lawrence and the legacy she left behind: Rosie’s anxiety attacks whenever she sees a nativity scene, my strong feelings of inadequacy whenever I see beautifully wrapped presents, and knowing that somewhere there’s a boy who just wants to wet his pants.  Merry Christmas!