OUR LADY OF LORDS

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my parents must have been angry at us kids because they sent us to a reform school called Our Lady of Lourdes, for a good Catholic education. Both my sisters went along with me, but I think it was my Mother’s way of getting even with us for all the aggravation we caused.

The school was run buy former members of the Third Reich, and continued their practices right out of Nazi Germany. There was the daily accounting of all prisoners on the stalag “School yard” where we were lined up and marched in groups to our different “classrooms”, where attendance was retaken again incase one of us might have made a break for it. On Sunday, we were expected to report to church at the 9:00 a.m. Mass, where we were to sit with our fellow classmates. After Mass we were required to report to our classrooms once again, and attendance was taken. The only day attendance wasn’t taken was Saturdays, where we were to go to confession, and give the priest all the sordid details of our private lives. God help anyone who didn’t go to communion.

A line in the cement that divided the grounds of the schoolyard separated the boys from the girls. Our job was to do your homework, remember your catechism, and stay on your side of the line.

The “nuns” were former Nazis who by way of Brazil found their way to Brooklyn and assumed new identities. There was Sister Mary Himmler, Sister Mary Eichman, Sister Mary Goebels and the like, all proud former members of the SS.

In first grade I was arrested on trumped up charges of talking in the classroom, and thrown into the cooler for half a morning. The cooler was built to look like a walk in coat closet with a door on either end, and a long shelf that contained reams of paper. Once the doors were closed on me, it took a while for my eyes to adjust. Once they did, I discovered the reams of paper and opened one of them, and removed a hand full of paper.
Meticulously I balled up a sheet of paper and stuck it in all the pockets of all the coats but mine. About 2 minutes before the lunch bell, I was escorted to my desk. The bell rang, and we all in an orderly fashion marched to the cooler to go home for lunch. How proud I was to see the puzzled look on the innocent faces of my classmates, as they stuck their little hands into their pockets, and pulled out wads of paper.