ch 4 excerpt
To
get to school, we had to drive north into Livonia: we always drove over the Newburgh Lake bridge at the
Nankin Mill crossing, where the lake dammed and emptied into the foul-smelling Rouge, then cut through the subdivision where Jim Rund
lived (later we’d carpool to school together) towards Mies Park on
West Chicago. From there we made a left onto the street adjacent to
the football practice field where I’d spend my chilled Autumn
afternoons with tobacco-spitting men who coached JV and Varsity CYO
football autocratically
(St. Mike’s had won 5 straight in the CYO when I started playing),
the first indication of the St. Michael’s campus. Hanging another
left onto Hubbard, we soon came upon the blacktop playground and
parking lot where I spent thousands of recesses playing
two-hand-touch football with my playmates, where I would get my heart
broken by Jenn Bechard in fifth grade; an eight-foot chain-link
fence enclosed the blacktop playground like a prison yard, stretching
to the smaller playground structures and to the school itself – a
three story redbrick structure straight
from the 1970’s in tan
concrete trim, with tall windows under ugly mint-green
panels.
Two large stone crosses jutted up from either end of the school. The
gymnasium and middle school were adjoined in the back of the main
structure – the elementary school building – and
a wood-fenced garden separated the convent/rectory from our curious
eyes behind that. At the northernmost end of the campus, St.
Michael’s Catholic Church – the church where I vomited in fourth
grade from the incense fumes of Benediction, where I spent every Friday
morning Mass in imaginary realms, where I confessed my sins to Father
Bondi and genuinely prayed in silent kneeling introspection –
pointed its steel rooftop cross towards the heavens, a stone
statue of St. Michael the
Archangel watching over the corner of Hubbard and Plymouth. It was a
world of rigidity and linear thinking that appealed far less to me
than the woods of my summers.
“I
love you!” Mom
shouted from the van on the
school blacktop,
traitorously deserting us
there to another school
year at St. Michael’s, that redbrick prison of our
collective youth. In
our matching cross ties and loafers Patrick
and I would walk thence disconsolately, in silence, towards our
respective school lines and school doors, where a chaotic frenzy of
activity and eager chatter awaited
us. If we were lucky, and
had drawn a younger,
non-religiously-inclined
teacher like Mrs. Chelowa or Mrs. Salley, that
final march to school might be bearable, perhaps even anticipatory,
but if
we were among the sad lot
assigned to one of St. Michael’s notorious nuns, we
knew we were dead men walking.
