I Was A Boarding School Brat... Part 4

In order to reach my destination of Ursuline from Aspen, I had to fly a puddle-jumper called Aspen Airways (which we not so lovingly referred to as Gasp & Scareways) from Aspen to Denver. From Denver, I had to take a big old jet airliner to St. Louis. Once I reached St. Louis, I took a taxicab from the airport to the main train terminal. From there, I caught the train to school in Arcadia/Ironton/Pilot Knob (which was one stop for all). It was always a fun train ride in spite of all the stops along the way. There was always either a worker from the school or a nun, at the station, to drive us the three miles to school, with our trunks and various other forms of baggage in tow. I always loved the train ride and the dining car and the porters. I also didn't mind that there were always lots of cute guys headed back to Kemper Military, to flirt unmercifully with. The train had an air that seemed more like the 1950's than the 1960's and it was always an adventure. For some reason it always made me feel sophisticated. I wasn't. I always tried to act sophisticated and order a martini, but they were always on to me, no doubt.

Upon arrival at Ursuline my junior year, I discovered that I had a *newbie* roommate. Apparently the newbie girls from Mexico did not have to spend their first 6 months in a dorm of completely dorky freshmen. I assumed that they were in enough of a culture shock as it was. I was deflated when I found out that she was from Mexico and spoke no English. Great, I thought. However, when I did finally get to meet my roomie, Lucia Begonia Guttierrez, we embarked upon a lifelong friendship. Her father was a diplomat in Guanajuato. I soon learned that girls in Mexico graduated from high school at 15, then the better Catholic families would send their daughters to Catholic boarding school in the States, to learn English and math. Ursuline had been educating girls from Mexico since the 1920's and the procedures had not changed much since then.

As it turned out, Lucia was a quick study & learned English fairly well, while I was basically sucking at my development of speaking Spanish. She did, however, teach me all the cuss words in Spanish. Those have always come in quite handy. Also, we could could cuss in front of the nuns (most of them) and they didn't have a clue.

There was one girl from Italy, one girl from Buenos Aires, and around 15 or so girls from Mexico. Each one was assigned an American roomie so that they would be forced to use the English they were learning. I used to think was so harsh, but now I realize what a wise decision it was. Too bad it didn't help me. Caca. Chichis. Chingado. Puta. Yup, there it is. Almost my entire repertoire of Spanish words, aside from the obvious ones like Mucho gusto. Buenas Dias. and Tardes. and Noches. Por Favor. Gracias. De Nada. El Banyo? (this is a very important one) Aqui. Aque. Loco en la cabesa. La Cocina. The days of the week. I can count to 20. (kinda) And a lovely little song my roomie taught me before she could speak English. I still know it to this day and can sing it almost all the way through. Since we were in the same room, we used to work on it after *lights out*, which was 9:00 pm. Sometimes when I'd screw up the words she would giggle till she was in tears.

Slowly, we became friends and I learned what a jokester she was. For the entire first six months since we were roomies, she would receive *care packages* from her mother, filled with cans of huge cheese stuffed jalapenos, cans of tuna stuffed jalapenos, and all sorts of gourmet delights I'd never tasted, much less heard of. Since I was always hungry (now I know it was an emotional hunger) we ate her goodies from home every afternoon before study hall. Which had me in a fiery hell of pain that tortured me all the way until dinner. Oh, how she giggled with the delight of her scheme, while I suffered FOR SIX MONTHS. I guess she at last decided I was a worthy friend, therefore letting me in on her secret. She then finally told me that salt was the remedy. After watching me freaking out over the pain of the heat I'd had to endure for six months. Which actually cracked me up. That she had done that to me for six months & I was so dumb, I let her. Lessons learned, baby.

Lucia was also my partner in crime on many of the nights I would listen in on the chapel, via the stained glass window, with my trusty glass. There were times that we got the insane giggles so badly, that we thought for sure we were busted or else going to pee in our pants. Thankfully, most of the nuns were pretty much deaf or someplace really close to that. We somehow escaped being discovered. We also avoided peeing in our pants. Little did I know that somewhere in my distant future I would some day have to wear Depends. (Not yet. But I see it in my future, lol) When the giggling got reeeeeeally bad, we fled back to our room in total hysterics, convinced that we would be discovered at any moment. Once we got back to the room, we'd jump in our beds, pull the covers over our heads and PRAY like crazy. I now have no recollection of why it was so funny, just that it was.

Now, during the Winter months the Ursuline nuns always wore full-length black habits with crisp, white around their faces. However, when it warmed up in the Spring, they would all change to their Summer whites. I can't begin to express to you how creepy it was to see one of them coming down the hall at night. Especially if you were out of bed and if it was a week night. If caught, you received a *pink slip* and after so many pink slips you got to do a TOUCHDOWN. You know how I feel about Touchdowns. Pink slips could also prevent you from getting to go town on Saturdays or Teen Town (a dance everyone wanted to attend, held on the first Sunday night of every month). All of the nuns carried little pads of pink slips around in their deep, hidden pockets, ever at the ready. Like it was a six-gun or something. Believe me, they could have out-drawn any bad guy in the Old West. They were fast and they were sneaky. Well, not really sneaky, now that I think about it from the adult mind's eye. I suppose there were so many of them that it merely seemed that way. Just like penguins, I tell you.

Mexican families were very strict, but my roomie's family was particularly so, which meant that Lucia was doomed to stay weekends at the school, with with Poor Pitiful Me. The other girls from Mexico were busy going home with friends for the weekend. Which made it much less lonely on weekends & holidays. Her use of the English language always cracked me up and still does. Although I'm certain my misuse of the Spanish language gives her far more entertainment value.

There was one senior girl whose parents lived in Thailand my junior year. They were American, so they sent their daughter Anne off to America to school every year. Anyway, one weekend we were the only three at school and Anne wanted to trek over to behind the gymnasium for a smoke. Lucia & I looked at each other with eyes wide, then our grins got even wider. We were definitely game.

Now, there was this one nun named Sister Assumpta (who was my *dorm mother* the first year) who would occasionally slip out to join us in a smoke behind the gym. It's a miracle that she wasn't with us that day. It was a well known rule that if you were caught smoking @ Ursuline, the punishment was bad. Which is why it was always so hilarious that Asuumpta came with us. Anyway, so there we were acting like we had the habit reeeeeally bad and just puffing away. All three of us still had on our uniforms because it was Friday of the weekend and we'd just gotten out of classes, bid our friends goodbye and saw that the nuns were off to vespers before we launched our excellent smoking plan.

We were talking about something brilliant, I'm sure, when Anne whispered "Shhhh!" She said she thought someone coming, so we all three stubbed our cigarettes out and put them in our blazer pockets and started walking around the corner of the gym with purpose, as if we'd all just been on a brisk walk together. We ran into, and almost knocked down, Mother de Lourdes. Crap! Shit. Caca. She was the one nun that could see through ALL of us and our deviously executed schemes, no matter the brilliancy. She was a real spoil sport, let me assure you. I guess she was just as shocked to see us as we were to see her, as it seems she was saying her prayers outdoors that day. She stopped, looked at us with those eyes, and continued on. It felt like we stood there with our gaping mouths hanging open for an eternity, but I believe it was more like a couple of minutes.

When the 3 of us recovered from our blinding initial shock, we burst into laughter and ran all the way back to the dorms cackling like a bunch of little witches. We had escaped Sudden Death. Yes! We were triumphant and quite pleased with ourselves. Oh yes we were. By the time we reached the main building we were still laughing and almost gasping from being out of breath, and as the Dinner Bell was being rung. Which gave us approximately 7 minutes to run upstairs and drop off our blazers, because we were afraid they'd smell like smoke. Lucia and I met back up with Anne in a couple of minutes & went in to eat.

Roughly about 20 minutes after we had gone in to eat in the student's dining room, we were finished with dinner and ready to hit Rec Room, where we were allowed to play table tennis or listen to records & dance or occasionally watch an approved television show or two, in black & white, of course. There were lots of board games (that no one ever wanted to play) as well. I'll never forget that we were just getting ready to watch The Fugitive when the BIG Fire Alarm went off. We all knew what to do and headed back upstairs in order to reach the outside, groaning because we were going to miss a rare opportunity to watch TV. Most of the nuns in the main building (floor mistresses) were out on the lawn, where we joined them.

A minute later you could hear the fire engines on their way from town out to the school, so we were fairly certain it must be serious. I believe it was around 30 minutes before the firemen finally loaded back up on their truck and disappeared into the darkness and toward town. We were all being allowed back in, so we said goodnight to the nuns and to Anne and went our seperate ways. It was obvious to me that it must not have been too bad because we didn't smell anything and no one was revealing to us what it was. Must have been a false alarm.

The next morning we got up to our usual routines and when the Breakfast Bell rang, we headed to the dining room to meet up with Anne. Anne didn't show up, which was odd. Had she overslept, her floor mistress would have been in to give her a nudge. Maybe she decided she wasn't hungry. As soon as we were finished we headed up to Anne's room to see what the deal was but were cut-off by the Posse... her floor mistress, Mother Monica. She informed us we weren't needed on the senior floor and that we should immediately find somplace else to be.

Hmmm... So, Lucia & I went in search of Sister Assumpta. She'd know where Anne was & what was going on. We found Assumpta in her little cubicle in the freshman dorm and when she heard us, she came out to greet us. It looked like she'd been crying. She told us that Anne had evidently not exstinguished her smoke entirely, before putting it in her blazer pocket. When she'd gone back to her room to leave her blazer, she hung it on the back of her door. Apparently, it ignited with the dry cleaning fluid, caught the door on fire, then damaged about half her room.

This is how Lucia looks today, with her hubby. She hasn't changed a bit since high school. The Bitch.

Anyway, Anne had been expelled. No arguments. No protests. No goodbyes. She was just gone. Lucia & I never smoked on the school grounds again and I highly doubt that Sister Assumpta did either. Only in town. At the Cozy Corner Cafe. I did not need that kind of trouble with The Brown Recluse. No indeed.

I Was A Boarding School Brat.... Part 3

The first year I was sent away to boarding school I was placed in the *dorms* which is where all freshmen & newbies lived. You had a bed, a dresser, a wooden locker style closet (which held maybe 5 hangers of clothes) and a privacy curtain (that was just like a hospital room curtain). Not that we needed that much space. We wore uniforms 5 days per week. Still, you had to learn to mesh with all the other girls that you'd really rather not mesh with. Especially freshmen, when I was a sophomore. But those were the *first year rules*, degrading as they were. The *first year rules* made making new friends from my own class difficult, because they had all already been together for a year. They also had semi-private rooms which meant only one roommate instead of 10 to 15. Unlike me, the newbie.

So, I chose the next best thing. I became the *pet* friend of all the senior girls and many of the juniors, my first year. I don't think there was ever a graduating class bigger than 15 and mine was only 11. Anyway, life was grand and I was *in* with all the cool girls, the older girls. I could always go hang out with them in their private rooms (like Heaven to a Dormie), listen to records (yes, those big black plastic looking thingys that we used to play on Hi-Fi Stereo Systems, lol), and talk about boys. Mostly them talking about boys. That's what I was there for. To listen. To soak up all their infinite wisdom, for whatever it was worth. I paid attention.

We also rolled one another's hair on orange juice cans or beer cans, depending on the length of your hair and what you were able to sneak in without notice (beer cans). I also had a friend pierce my ears, without asking permission from my mother (because I knew her answer was going to be the same as always: "Only sluts have pierced ears, wear ankle strap shoes, wear ankle bracelets and have tattoos. Are you a slut?") This is a teensy glimpse into my mother issues. Welcome to my world. So, I brazenly paraded around the dorms with clothes pins attached to my ear lobes for more than an hour, in order to deaden them. Then after my friend had sterilized the threaded needle with a match she'd stolen from Cozy Corner, I became a full-fledged, bonafied, pierced ears, street-walking slut. I had pierced ears. Whoooo... I knew that the caca (shit) would soon be hitting the el fan-o.

Unfortunately, my lobes became infected, which meant a call to the Brown Recluse because I had to take some penicillin. She cut me off financially except for the bare neccesseties and instructed me to learn to live with it. She always was a softie, The Brown Recluse. Which meant I was not able to go on any of the field trips & excursions. Nor was I allowed to go home with any friends for a weekend. I had willingly defiled my own body by piercing my ears, became a full-fledged slut & then let the ears get infected, which cost her more money.

However, being the clever boarding school girl that I was, I found strength in the strangest places on those weekends when everyone else was gone. When I became bored I wandered around the school until I found the kitchen (oh yeah, there's a surprise), where I soon became friendly with the nuns in the kitchen. Most of us had never seen who worked in the kitchen, much less cared. The nun who actually ran the kitchen was Sister Herman Joseph, which I always thought was weird because she had a man's name, lol. She was a very large woman with a really stern looking brow. Until she laughed. Then, she looked like Mrs. Santa Claus and I adored her.

A couple of the kitchen nuns were postulants, meaning that they were still in the early stages of becoming a nun and had not yet taken their final vows, so they were more friendly. One of them spoke broken English with a German accent (Maria Katarina) and the other had a kind of Yankee drawl to her speech (Mary Francis) and she wore the most gawd-awful black horn-rimmed glasses with the thickest lenses I had ever seen. They were both wonderful to me on those lonely weekends and were major contributors to my weight gain in the long run. They always wanted me to eat for some reason, and I was all too happy to comply. Sometimes I just sat on a stool to the side and watched everyone work in the huge kitchen. Just because the students were gone, didn't mean there weren't still meals to be prepared. So, I watched and I ate until I wanted to barf, returning to my room just in time to yell "Timber!" as I hit the pillow.

I'm not really sure how many nuns were actually there at any given time. Although we went to Mass every morning, the nuns all filed silently into their pews & kneeled in the back of the chapel, as always. Vespers was the same, as was Benediction. Unless you were late, you might not ever know how many penguins were really there. That's how I found out, and it took my breath away. Some on walkers. Some on canes. Some in wheelchairs. There was one reaaaaally old nun who was hunched over, wore a hearing aid and walked with a cane. One day when I was late for Chapel, she was just going in too. She had the sweetest little grin on her face and a twinkle in her eye that truly caught me off guard. So, I asked her if I could assist her and she actually let me. Her name was Sister Appassionata, which I decided was the perfect name for her, in agreement with whoever gave her the name after she married God. She always reminded me of a little Leprechaun, Really! I'd be willing to bet that many years ago, under that black & white Habit, red hair grew in massive curls upon her Blessed head. She was always such a sweetie.

The other one I remember is Sister Carmelita. I remember her because she was the only one in a wheelchair then and I was so surprised that she wasn't Latino. You know, because of her name. I was young & un-Catholic, ok? She didn't want anyone helping her, as I soon found out. Feisty old Catholic nun broad. I stayed away from her at all costs.

Since students (especially non-Catholic students) were not allowed in many of the vespers conducted during the holidays, I was always hell-bent on finding out what kind of strange rituals they carried on with. I was convinced that they danced around in the moonlight @ night without their habits, but that simply wasn't so. These were deeply religious, good, kind women who loved God and I was always in awe of their dedication to their religion as well as their profession as teachers. I know this because at the end of every floor of students' rooms there was a huge, gorgeous stained glass window. On the other side of that stained glass window was The Chapel. I listened many nights with a cup to the glass. All I ever heard were the dedicated chants & prayers of good Catholic nuns. I found great solace in that. For a whole year I was convinced that I wanted to become Catholic so that I could be a nun, like them. Even though I wasn't Catholic, these women had a profound influence on me and in helping to shape me into the woman I am today. I didn't know it then, but I am immensely grateful to all of them.

To be continued...

I was a boarding school brat... Part 2

When I was younger (much younger) and still attending my beloved Ursuline Academy (cough! cough!), my mother decided it was time for me to learn the piano. From Mother Monica, the same nun that attempted to teach my own mother piano. At the same school. At the same piano. The woman was ancient. Since I am now in serious danger of approaching ancient myself, I can't help but wonder what in the world she was doing still teaching piano. I never learned a thing. Wait, I did learn the high end of chopsticks.... TA DA! From one of my friends. No, actually, I learned & performed Fur Elise for my second recital, which was the second recital I had no one in attendence for me. I'm sure I must have been brilliant because Reverend Mother Margaret Mary suggested to my mother that she find a more suitable piano teacher for me.

Oh, and I also learned how to clean blood off the ivories. Mother Monica's fingers were so old & dry & cracked, that they actually used to bleed when she was giving me my lesson. She was like in her upper 80's at the time. Sheesh! Guess the Diocese didn't pay for frivolous items like skin cream. They just covered for pervert priests. Wait, did I say that? Ooops, guess I did. My bad?

Actually, Mother Monica was pretty cool as a teacher of history... when she was able to get her memories straight, which wasn't all too often. When she was able to drift off into her own world (which we soon learned to allow), she spoke of Nazi Germany and the many atrocities that they suffered as nuns in that country, during those times. The stories she told were gripping and horrifying and yet, I still don't think that any of us were really able to grasp the horrors that she spoke of. Many girls thought she was just crazy. But I think she would have been a totally brilliant writer, maybe. Had she not chosen to marry God. Had she not had the *calling*.

I believe she was a fiercely brave and intelligent woman. So, I dutifully cleaned the piano keys whenever she happened to bleed on them. I felt that it was my Spiritual Duty. Even though I wasn't Catholic, nor was anyone in the entire history of my family.

Mother Monica had taught my mother piano, only my mother was young and so was Mother Monica and my mother seemingly learned enough to be entertaining at dinner parties. She was good to go. However, I remember something of a rumor about Mother Monica when she had first entered the Order. The scuttlebut was that she had been a gifted concert pianist before comitting to the Ursuline Order. I'm sorry I didn't know her then. However, she sucked as a teacher when I was at Ursuline 40 years later, thank you!

As horrible a thing as this is to say, I was always secretly glad, because that meant my lesson was over. I was a kid, okay? I wanted to chow down. As in hit the *Snack Bar* and all of the emotion soothing junk foods that it offered. Which I never failed to partake in. We're talking a dream come true for a lonely, miserable girl who was far from home. Away from her skis and her mountains and her snow, that she so totally adored. Bring on those Twinkies! By the time I graduated, I was beginning to look suspiciously like a Twinkie, and nothing like the girl who'd had Olympic Dreams just a few years earlier. Thanks Mom! Job well done, as always!

Ursuline closed a couple of years after my class graduated. (I was always secretly worried that it was because of us... our Class of 1970.) But, actually, I think it was just the signs of the times. The changing of the guard. Life goes on. Now, the old dormotories have been restored and converted into a Bed & Breakfast. Another part of the school was bought and turned into an antique shop. There are still weddings held in the Chapel, which is still as beautiful as I remember it. Here is a link to Ursuline:

http://www.arcadiavalley.biz/civil_war_historic_sites/index.html

To be continued…