Memoir Experiment Part Two

By Patrick
09 May 14 at 11:51 AM
In: Micellanea

I vaguely remember—this must have been the late seventies—nuns trolling the neat pathways between our desks, doling out small handfuls of salted peanuts and little Dixie cups of orange juice. It was all very gulag like. I’m not sure what sort of program this was, as a Catholic school probably would not have been receiving barrels of government surplus nuts. I laugh now at the thought, since it’s a felony to even bring nuts within 50 feet of a school. I guess we didn’t have many allergies in those days. Or those who died of anaphylactic shock were buried in shallow graves behind the school playground where I lived out my daily hell of dodge ball.

But for whatever reason, we were given our daily ration, for a time at any rate. The program was short lived. Perhaps they realized it wasn’t caloric deficit preventing us from mastering our multiplication tables, but just stupidity, a condition immune to even the most intensive nut-and-juice-based treatment techniques. The Dominican nuns eyed us suspiciously, making certain we choked down the rancid nuts and bolted our little cups of astronaut-grade orange beverage. They monitored each aisle carefully, fastidious sentries, with their giant black rosaries like long strands of beetles, ready to come to life and devour us all.

And they monitored the lunchrooms too, perhaps on the lookout for obscure forms of dietary heresy. But of course they never really noticed when anything truly horrible was happening. One day a student—not a bully and not particularly mean, but something of a joker—launched his chair out from the table as I walked past looking for a seat. I went sprawling across the floor to great peels of laughter, my food scattered across the recently buffed floor. I don’t even remember now what kind of food it was that I would have eaten. I remember that for weeks I had a large green bruise on my hip, the size and shape of a turkey drumstick, a tattooed reminder of that humiliating episode. I also remembered that the student who pulled this prank wasn’t laughing. He looked sick.

I try to keep things in perspective and to remember instances like this when I recall the casual cruelties I’ve committed over the years.

My memories of school are mostly characterized by a distinctly dystopian feel. Perhaps this is because I attended Catholic school, though I think all institutions are essentially dystopian, school, prison, corporate workplace—not much to choose between. It turns out that school really does prepare us for the “adult world.” God help us all.