In grade six, the year before my family moved from tropical Chicago to freeze-your-rear-off Minnesota, I was slung into a new parochial school easier to reach but no less strict than my old one. I can’t say I either liked or hated Catholic education. Like a great many young approaching puberty I was neither astutely savvy nor overly rebellious. I’d adapted to a system I would later find left me well prepared (not that I did much with it) for advanced high school level learning. I’ve decided now that education too focused on promoting self-esteem misses the point if the subjects are left feeling good about their state of ignorance and unpreparedness. In my day the aim (through discipline) was to make the student pay attention. How they felt was irrelevant. A cosine is not about feeling. It’s something you either know or do not.
But, I have strayed, something the good Nuns knew I was good at and sought to prevent by often scaring the pants off me while keeping me entirely and decorously clothed. A Nun’s displeasure could leave a boy feeling more naked than in the bathtub. One look could strip to the bare soul. For grade six my Nun (Sister Mary Teresilda) was one of the pretty and petite sort before whom no boy of sensible mind wished to appear compromised in any fashion. I thought it nice having an attractive Sister; quite a contrast from the norm at my old school where half the Nuns showed signs of moustache development rivaling that of my Grandpa Joe. Sister Teresilda was cute and lively, but not less strict in her own way which I found included inking out selected words in our dictionaries. Giving each of the forty classroom dictionaries individual treatment could not have been very entertaining, but it does show the good Sister’s dedication to protecting the morality of her charges. I assume it was moral armor she had in mind, not that God himself could have kept us from our appointment with puberty and the convulsions thereof. We were doomed, but it was presumably Teresilda’s hope we’d be less vulnerable to ruin if we didn’t know certain words.
The brightest boy in class (by any stretch not me who hid behind manners for safety) deduced the forbidden word in the A section was abdomen. It’s hard to see much risk in knowing the word abdomen, but presumably the abdomen’s nearness to other bodily areas was enough to get it onto sister T’s list of words to be kicked out of the dictionaries used by young minds. The theory was sound except that young minds wondered ever-the-more about what we were not supposed to know and why and etcetera until the censored words were (except at quiz time) of greater interest than any other. It became an intellectual and social challenge to be among those “in the know” regarding forbidden words. The ability to speak with authority on words missing under P or V became most highly sought even though our sure or practical knowledge was weak as the tenth cup of tea form the same tea bag. I give an example.
January 1 is normally known as New Year’s Day, but in my St. Joseph’s Daily Missal that date showed up as Circumcision of Our Lord. The school dictionaries, each with an inked over area in C-I-R, were no help. Our dictionaries jumped from circulation to circumference. That doesn’t leave much clue, does it? Similar words gave interesting angles or suggestions, but if the Missal meant Circumspection or Our Lord why didn’t it say so? My personal favorite (until learning the truth by tracking it down in a dictionary not pared down to suit supposed pubertal innocence) was the celebration of January 1 was in honor of the Lord going around the world. His beat the circumnavigation Magellan did by a long shot, and I wondered why no mention of this early feat was made in history where surely some crowing could be done. Having circumvented Sister Teresilda’s precautions to face the truth on its bare-faced own I experienced a moment of sweaty realization accompanied by crossing my legs and wishing I’d never known. Why had I risked this knowledge? Now that I knew I felt a bit like one of the Holy Innocents celebrated only days before on December 28.
As I look back at the good Sister and her charges I see, among other things, an unusually high ranking for the power of words, as if word and thing were the same. Neither the Latin word nor the expression “male member” is in any way comparable to the grossness of Michelangelo’s eye assaulting David. Words are not things or acts. They are emblems. Intellectually we know this, but on some base level the concept of ‘the word” has such power we react to it in larger-than-life ways. Here we are in Century Twenty One where a world wide web of information whirls constantly around us and yet there are those today managing no better than Sister Teresilda in the dark days when an IBM card sorter was the technological marvel of its day. The Sister’s efforts aimed at easing her charges through puberty were a dismal failure. Nothing short of sleeping through it (and would value would that be) can make the life changing experience of being torn apart to emerge adult an easy process. Growing up is difficult in body and emotion. You can’t protect people from it or from the pain that is a necessary part. If it wasn’t so sad (and tragic) I’d smile more warmly at those Teresilda’s of today crusading to keep sex education out of schools so children can remain innocent. The innocence (naïve type) is not on the part of the children but comes from those who believe that young people won’t discover sex if they’re not told about it. This morally pure notion is denied by high teen pregnancy rates in states where information is withheld. Innocence, especially the false kind, is a costly concept to maintain. No matter how many words are inked over or fall under divine protection it will never be enough to satisfy an impossible aim.