Back To The Beginning

The green dress is at home once again, having spent a number of years hanging in my sister's house in rural Lancaster County, PA. I lied to get it back. I don't know why I lied when there was no need. Perhaps the lie just sounded like a better reason for wanting the dress than just "gimme what's mine". I told her that I was on sabbatical, and I was reviving an old solo of mine that used the dress as a costume. This was partly true. I was on sabbatical, and I was reviving an old solo. But the dress for that dance is red, making two-thirds of the reason true which, in my mind, makes it okay. I won't go to hell, although technically I gave up my Catholic faith at the age of six, when the nuns at my school took away my book because it espoused evolutionist views instead of the required creationist ones. Never mind that I was reading at that level at that age.

The Sisters of the Holy Cross, whom we called the "paper plate nuns" after the shape of their wimples, taught at Calvert School in Washington D.C. Calvert School was the K-8 school attached to St. Matthew's Cathedral. This is the church where I remember meeting and shaking the hand of President Eisenhower on the steps after the service. I told my mom that I thought Ike was nice and that because of that I would become a Republican. I did not become a Republican, but then again, I did not become a Democrat either. I am very happy as a registered Independent. I am happy to report that the last time I visited our nation's capitol, the school was surrounded by a chain-link construction fence, in preparation for its demolition. Good riddance!

I attended the first grade at Calvert School, and it was to the paper plate nun in charge of the first grade that I brought a book to our weekly show-and-tell. It was by far my favorite book, "The Sea Around Us" by Rachel Carson. This book was full of exciting stories like the great volcanic explosion of the island of Krakatoa, and the resulting wave that measured 112 feet high and nearly swamped the ship "Ramapo" that was in the area and reported the event. I remember wanting to read that section aloud in class. I was six. I was in the first grade.

Instead of reading my passage aloud with fervor and fire and gusto, my classmates' eyes and mouths wide, I was summoned to the desk and thence to the Principal's office. I remember standing, very small, between my teacher and the Principal, smelling that nun-odor of Jean Nate and hearing the rattle of the long rosary beads that hung down the sides of their habits. I often wondered why their rosaries were so much longer than everybody else's.

My parents were summoned, and they were told in no uncertain terms that this book, with its evolutionist theories, was inappropriate reading for a Catholic, and especially for an impressionable Catholic school child. They sent me home without either nun picking up on the fact that a six-year-old kid could actually read that book. I went back to school the next day, having had breakfast sitting on my dad's knee, reading to him from the New York Times. I'll bet the paper plate nuns never read the Times, and they also didn't know that they had lost a sheep from the fold on that fateful day. I was only six years old, and I never considered myself a Catholic again. I just figured that any organization that could be so narrow-minded and dumb was not the place for me.

Back to the point. The green dress is home again and hanging on an open rack in my warehouse artists' live-work space. Most days when I walk by I do not notice it at all, which is another reason why I wonder about myself for wanting it back, much less for taking the trouble to lie about it. And to my sister, no less, who hasn't spoken to me in almost two years!