Insight: Irreconcilable and parochial

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

If I had to do it all over again, there would be quite a bit that I’d do differently if I was back in Catholic grade school again.

Ed Pierce in fifth grade at Our Lady
of Lourdes Catholic School in
Brighton, New York in 1963.
COURTESY PHOTO  

My father had been hospitalized for a broken leg after falling off a ladder while hanging outdoor Christmas lights on our house and when a priest came to visit him, he told him about me. With my birthday falling one day after the established date for public school kindergarten, my father thought I could excel in first grade instead of waiting a year to go to kindergarten, and the priest agreed and enrolled me at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School.

From the age of 3, I was reading books that were intended for students in Grade 3 and so when my First-Grade teacher, Sister Felicitis, started lessons to learn the ABCs, I was uninterested and bored. She passed on to other teachers at the school that I was a problem student, and it created a reputation for me there that followed me from year to year.

The school itself was on three levels and the stairwells were on each end of the building. You could climb the stairs up to the third level and look down at the people coming and going from the school entrances unobserved, unless someone happened to look up.

One day when I was in third grade, my friend Patrick O’Brien and I climbed to the third level before school started. He dared me to lob a gob of spit down from over the balcony to see how fast it would travel. Unfortunately for me, I did this while a nun who taught at the school was entering the building. The nuns were from the Sisters of Saint Joseph order and wore traditional black habits and a headdress with a flat top.

My gob landed on top of her headdress with a thud, and she immediately looked up and saw me. For my wrongful action, the principal assigned me a month’s duty of raising the U.S. flag each morning at the school flagpole and lowering it after school every day. I also had to apologize to both the nun and my classmates for my thoughtless action.

In fifth grade, I was involved in another incident and my parents both had to attend a meeting with the principal. When the quarterly report cards were issued, I was given a C in math, and I knew that my mother would throw a fit seeing that grade. I never showed it to her or my father and paid my younger brother 25 cents to sign my mother’s name acknowledging that she had seen the report card.

The nun teaching our class suspected the signature was a forgery because it was done in blue ink while all the previous report card signatures were in black ink. She asked if I had forged my mother’s signature. I said no. With that, she turned me in for disciplinary action to the principal. The principal asked me repeatedly to admit that I was the one who forged my mother’s name and since I physically did not do it, I denied it every time.

During the meeting with my parents in her office on a Saturday morning, she said I had lied time and time again to her about signing the report card. She painted a bleak future for me to my parents and insisted that unless I admitted that I had signed the report card, I was in danger of being expelled.

My father took me out in the hallway and asked me to be honest and tell him the truth. He asked if I had signed the report card, and I told him I had not done that. When he asked that if I hadn’t signed my mother’s name, who did? I explained to him that I had paid my brother a quarter to sign the report card, but the principal wanted me to admit to physically doing something I hadn’t done.

We returned to the principal’s office and revealed the facts. I told the principal that she had not asked me if someone else had signed the report card and if she had, I would have admitted that. She gave me a month’s chore of sweeping the hallways after school and picking up litter on school grounds when I was done with that.

The next year I inadvertently broke a window while trying to unlatch it and even though it wasn’t my fault, I was back on flagpole duty for a week as ordered by the principal. That same year I was given a classroom job of maintaining the classroom aquarium filled with tropical fish.

One Friday before a blizzard was supposed to hit the area, I bumped the fish tank heater up what I thought was a just few degrees to try and keep the fish warm during the snowstorm. Back at school on Monday I was sickened to discover I had made a mistake, and the heater was set on high, and all the tropical fish had died.

My Catholic school experience is not something I fondly remember, but without it, I wouldn’t be who I am today. <

Andy Young: Solving a cold case reveals a new mystery

By Andy Young

Last summer my oldest child and I traveled up to Newfoundland, where we camped and hiked in Gros Morne National Park; trekked up to L’Anse aux Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where Vikings established a settlement more than a millennium ago; and explored the town of Gander, which houses the airport where most of North America’s airplanes were grounded in the days following the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Our expedition was unforgettable for all the right reasons, save for one thing: the puzzling disappearance of a recently acquired family heirloom, the Yachats, Oregon (population 1,010) cloth tote I had purchased as a souvenir of a one-day visit to the picturesque Pacific Coast village a few summers ago.

I had taken it to Newfoundland not only for use as a handy, environmentally responsible shopping bag, but also so I could take a photo of it and myself overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and send it to the friend who, in addition to being the primary reason for a memorable luncheon in Yachats, is one of the town’s 1,010 most prominent citizens. My son snapped the desired picture on a clear, sunny morning on a cliff at Cape Spear, North America’s easternmost point. Mission Accomplished!

But then, tragedy struck. When I dropped my son and his gear off in Orono at the tail end of our journey, there was no trace of the Yachats bag anywhere. We tore through his belongings and mine but came up empty. Even the reassuring thought of my lost tote being used by some ecologically conscientious Newfie was of little consolation.

The mysterious disappearance of an item that was attractive, practical and likely the only one of its kind in the state of Maine was distressing, but thanks to the passage of time and also to two special angels, each of whom went to the trouble of obtaining a brand new Yachats tote bag and sending it to me as a gift, the palpably paralyzing grief I felt began to slowly recede.

What brought the Yachats bag to mind last week was my son’s cat, who currently has permission to live in my previously animal-free residence for as long as my son does, but not a moment longer. Normally a healthy eater, Marina seemed a bit reluctant to consume her supper one night last week, and a closer inspection revealed why – a swarm of tiny food ants, the type that seem to show up at this time every year, were scurrying around her bowl of kitty food.

Clearly steps needed to be taken, so I decided to temporarily relocate the couch that was adjacent to the cat’s food dish in an attempt to discover the source of the insect convention.

Thankfully there wasn’t a swarm of ants (or any other vermin) beneath that couch, which clearly hadn’t been moved in quite some time. There were, however, some dust curls, several sheets of poster board, and … the original Yachats bag that had disappeared in Newfoundland last summer!

While unexpectedly solving this particular cold case is equal parts rewarding and delightful, I now have an even more baffling mystery on my hands: how did an inanimate object that wasn’t anywhere to be found in my son’s effects, my own luggage, or in our car when we returned from Canada last June end up reappearing in the dust beneath a couch 11 months after it had seemingly vanished forever?

I may never learn the answer to this newly discovered enigma. But it’s nice knowing I now possess what are likely the only three Yachats tote bags in the state of Maine. <

Rookie Mama -- All along the Apple Watchtower: A hostile takeover

By Michelle Cote
The Rookie Mama

Here’s one to file away in the “I just can’t make this stuff up” folder.

And boy, 13 years into this boy-mama life, that folder will soon become an entire file cabinet.

Because every time I’m confident I know my cabinet of sons and the ways of this inner circle, it’s in that moment my day quickly goes from a well-oiled “ah” to awry.

And here was a first, orchestrated by my last-born.

A recent Saturday morning began with all the makings of a rainy day with no sunshine in sight.

I’d just successfully hosted a teenage sleepover extravaganza for my oldest, and the morning that quickly followed included timely meal prep tasks, errands and so forth.

In a busy household with six kids for the moment – two of them pals – I quickly felt myself needing a moment to just take five.

Dave Brubeck would agree.

But alas, five became 20 minutes.

I’d laid down on my bed, face-first, arms out, with full intention to rest a mere moment.

As I dozed, I felt my 4-year-old climb up and snuggle next to me a bit.

And that, my friends, is about all I remember.

Because precisely 20 minutes later, my husband exclaimed from the other room, “What does this text mean?”

Curious, I turned my head to see my littlest still perched atop my back, sitting up now, and tapping at my wrist.

He looked at me, smiled that impish, sweet grin, and sweetly exclaimed, “I made your man run.”

My what now?

Then I froze.

Instinctively, I looked to my Apple Watch, where my littlest dude had somehow managed to click the “running person” icon and thus activated an outdoor run workout.

Time had elapsed; mileage had not, of course.

I was bleary-eyed, but my mind was spinning with other possibilities of what he could have accomplished in those few minutes.

And what had my husband just exclaimed about a text?

To my horror, I scrolled through various text conversations to see my kiddo had done more than just make my “man run.”

He had managed to “dislike” comments from friends and family with a thumbs-down icon and sent various emojis of taxicabs followed by autogenerated messages like “BRB” to a selection of group conversations.

I don’t even know how to do any of that from my watch.

Fortunately, the recipients of these mysterious memoranda were kindred enough spirits that I didn’t need to backtrack too much on my damage-control mission.

All it took was a “My 4-year-old took over my watch. I can’t make this stuff up.”

I sensed the understanding, sympathetic nods through their replies.

A 4-year-old’s unwitting sabotage.

But what big power the little guy wielded, for 20 little minutes.

And there’s just no 90s-kid experience I can equate to such a thing, because we all lived the analog life. Only Penny from Inspector Gadget had a smart watch.

If you know, you know.

We’re all just learning as we go and working to keep up with tech as quickly as our kiddos do.

And on this day, I learned there’s no such “you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all” approach to having a fourth little one. Because each of them is a different flavor, and each flavor certainly keeps me on my toes.

And as for today, folks, no harm done.

So, while I’m on my toes, I think I’ll dance to some Dave Brubeck and just take five.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time!