My 1,637 Years of Plenary Indulgence

Forty years and 1,000 miles from Boston, where I live now, is Wooster, the small town in Ohio where I grew up. A dot on the map an inch south of Cleveland, it boasted the nascent Rubbermaid where my dad worked, the College of Wooster that raised the town's IQ, and the Agricultural Station, where you could view the internal workings of a cow through a glass tube in its side . . . if you wanted to.

Wooster's city limits enclosed a little more than 13,000 souls in the fifties; it was the largest town in Wayne county and bigger than the one-horse towns like Millersberg, 20 miles to the south, or Orrville, ten miles to the north. In fact, Millersberg was Amish country and accommodated many more than one horse with hitching posts attached to its downtown parking meters. To Greek philosophers the ideal city-state had 100,000 people, but they must have had more on their agenda because for me, 13,000 was perfect. You got to know who people were, and they knew you. I was 25 before I felt comfortable in Fenway Park-size stadiums with a capacity to seat my entire hometown, and everyone from Orrville and Millersberg, too. Not that the Amish cared much for baseball . . . let alone the Red Sox in an off year.

I attended a parochial grade school in Wooster taught by Dominican nuns. They wore white cassocks with black wimples and hung huge rosaries with beads the size of large olive pits from their belts. Sister Gerald was my teacher in fifth and sixth grade, and in those last years before the public junior high, she transformed my schoolwork from indifferent to fervent. She also set a high bar for personal growth, as happened the day Janie Halton came to school with two new pigtails.

Janie sat in front of me in fifth grade and we were good friends. She usually wore her brownish-blond hair straight to the shoulder, but on the day in question she appeared with two neat braids each about six inches long. At first, the pigtails were merely interesting.

"Don't you dare pull my hair," Janie said. There I sat innocent, but accused.

"What?" I answered in my usual articulate defense.

"I know what you're thinking." How could she know? Years later I learned it is the infinitesimal dilation in men's eyes, revealing their future thoughts, that betrays them.

"Poof." I knew just the right word to diffuse her concern. But the pigtails began to fascinate me, glossy and smooth and precise for their entire length. It made me wonder if a light touch at the very end could be felt. It could not. How about a little higher on one of the braids . . . it could.

"I told you not to touch my hair," she hissed over her shoulder.

"You said pull," I said, like an attorney mulling the fine print.

"Don't pull or touch!" she closed that loophole. I knew she was serious so I did not offer any further sophistry about pulling, touching, flapping, or flinging.

The intensity of her communication sobered me for 10 minutes, a long time by any standard, twice as long as Adam resisted a bite from the apple. I craved to hold just one smooth glossy precise blond-brown braid, and if I did it low enough on the tail, no one would know. For the first few seconds all went according to plan. Then Janie turned her head, the tail yanked out of my hand, she audibly "ouched," Sister Gerald inquired, Janie reluctantly reported, and Sister Gerald raised her eyebrow to me and said "No more." And there was no more. Later, I apologized to Janie, and then to Sister Gerald.

Sister Gerald took me by the shoulders and said, "I understand. It's all right." She paused and then said with certainty, "Bruce, someday you will be a great man." At the time, I had a sudden happy feeling of "Yes, I should be." and thought no more about it. Over the years I have found being great is a grand goal, but it is often a struggle just to show up.

We went to Mass every day before school and by second grade I had developed several strategies to escape the tedium of the droning Latin. The most spiritually lucrative of these schemes was to murmur short prayers, carefully selected, that would amass three years of plenary indulgences when said every day for a month. An indulgence was an early-release program from Purgatory to Heaven and by fifth grade I had a credit of 1,637 years. I began to slack off in sixth grade because I could not imagine depleting my spiritual cache. But then came the impure thoughts and, by junior high school, I saw those assets depreciate at an alarming rate. I hesitate to discuss my current balance.

Less than ten percent of Wooster was Catholic. It is not so unusual for a child to feel different, but I was different: my religion used an archaic language and had arcane practices, and I felt odd at times. When my friend's mother would inadvertently serve me hamburger on a Friday, I was embarrassed to tell her I couldn't eat meat on Fridays. She would become embarrassed herself and apologetic and then rummage in her cupboards for a can of tuna. Because the Midwest's highest expression of seafood cuisine was the tuna-noodle casserole, the future for that can of tuna was bleak indeed.

Friday meals wended one way or another towards mucilage, and the tuna-noodle casserole was no exception. The best tuna-noodle casseroles had bits of tuna snorkeling through 12 oz. of Campbell's mushroom soup and a package of Mueller's noodles. The noodles themselves often suffered from low self-esteem, perhaps boiled a little too long before they were baked. Potato chips, potentially nature's most perfect food, topped this dish. Their sogginess was in direct proportion to the hard-time the casserole served in the oven before it was paroled to the dinner table.

Although it could not redress bad fish recipes, the College of Wooster did give the town a Presbyterian harmony. It also injected a learned dimension to our small town culture, along with the Agricultural Station (its full name "The Ohio State Agricultural Experimental Station" changed later to the trendier "The Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center"). The lab employed dozens of PhDs. One of our neighbors was the world's leading expert on the spittlebug. The college's professors were also distinguished in their fields. The father of one of my classmates wrote extensively on Bach and became a celebrity by winning on TV's $64,000 Challenge. Between the two institutions, the number of PhDs per capita was as high in Wooster as anywhere else in America outside of Berkeley. Of course, growing up, we did not look to the college for its cultural dimension as much as the entertainment value provided by its student teachers.

I do not fully understand why student teachers bring out the worst in junior high school students; but I do know that I myself, a model of propriety otherwise, added to the anarchy when a student teacher came to class. Although compared to Howard Byler, Bernard Tagman, and Lance Massaro, I was a saint. Biology labs particularly had a mania about them, perhaps because of our unorthodox experimental protocol.

"And what is the transparent gel in the middle of the eye?" asked the twenty-one- year-old, grist-for-the-junior-high-mill student teacher, as she began to pass around a dissected cow eye.

"I know that, I know that." I waved my hand, whispering 'vitreous humor.'

"Let's see if anyone else knows," she said, encouraging broader participation than the previous ten questions, all of which I had over-eagerly answered.

"Howard's eating the cow eye," reported a classmate from the seat behind him.

"Howard, put it down and come to the front of the class," commanded the student teacher, in theoretical control of the classroom. Howard complied and stood at the front with some of the vitreous, or perhaps aqueous, humor oozing through his grin.

"May I go to the rest room?" Lois Adams, always a little weak on lab days, had turned visibly nauseated. Her request was granted and she gracefully retired.

"How about you, Bernard?" It was not clear at this point whether the teacher had asked him to classify the gel slowly descending Howard's chin or whether she simply had wondered out loud why Bernard had his hand raised with his index finger poised horizontally. It was, in fact, a perch for his imaginary parakeet.

"Eetcha-birdie." Bernard called to his invisible bird, with whom he conversed in budgie language whenever decorum was at risk. Meanwhile Lance sucked his huge stomach up into his chest and then let it collapse on the desk. A loud splat was broadcast every fifteen seconds.

There were no rules per se against over-eagerness, odd snacks, imaginary pets, and feigned flatulence. In fact, I found the freshness of our pedagogy its own reward. I did not notice a veiled venial cloud materialize, ascend, and drift slowly eastward.

Forty years and a thousand miles east from Wooster, in Massachusetts, I found myself teaching Sunday school in my local Episcopal Church. My reasons were few and simple. Although my kids were grown and gone, they had not yet produced any grandchildren for my amusement. Sunday school shared with grandparenting the pleasure of spending a little finite time with kids with no enduring responsibility for how they actually turn out. Also, as I grew older, I began to lose connection with preteen and teen culture. The Spice Girls waxed and waned before I even knew their names. As important, it took me a decade to realize that "No problem," had idiomatically replaced "You're welcome." Teaching and talking to forth-seventh graders kept me a little hipper and a little less dull than I was ordinarily. And, of course, I had altruistic theological reasons. I wanted to be certain that by sixth grade none of my kids would think God was an old man with a stern face and a long white beard, Michelangelo notwithstanding.

I was beginning this new Sunday school season with a group of kids that I had been working with for three years, since they were in fourth grade. If you do the math, you know that they had just begun seventh grade. It is difficult to describe how sweet these kids had been in fourth and fifth grade, and even in sixth they were still interested and interesting. In fourth grade we designed and built stained glass windows out of plexiglass, modge-podge, and hobby-putty leading. In fifth grade we planned and built a topographical model of Jerusalem in 67 AD. In sixth grade, we played Bible "jeopardy" with doorbell buzzers and fabulous prizes, like Snickers miniatures.

As seventh grade began, I was naively hopeful. We began to distribute a flour-based compound to model preliminary ideas for winter religious icons. Allan rolled big lumps of it up and began to swallow them. Bill feigned sleep on his chair, snoring. Jim began pelting Bill with wads of clay. . . . "I'm just trying to wake him up." And, to every question, Heather would raise her hand and say loudly, "I know that, I know that!" Everyone was squirming or giggling or egging others on. I knew then two things: that this was the beginning of a year in Purgatory and that my 1,637 years of indulgences had just run out.

Copyright © 2002 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Wed, Dec 18, 2002.