It’s been a while since I’ve posted on Tuesday.
Give me a bit to get back into the groove. (I’ll let you prove your love to me.)
Tuesdays were always worse than Mondays when I was a kid, mostly because of Religion class that extended the day for an extra hour of Catholic chaos. At 2 PM we’d ride the bus to the old St. Mary’s school, and walk into a dusty room where everything – the carpet, the walls, even the chalkboard – felt frozen in an amber glow of outdated travesty. An ancient copier was put to further shame thanks to the pile of copied prayers – a hand-written version of the ‘Act of Contrition’ on the weird paper where if you scratched the print with your fingernail it would come off in the most grating and upsetting fashion – a variation of fingernails on the chalkboard.
We went through prayers and Bible stories as the sun moved slowly across the floor. I remember watching the dust fall through the sunbeams as the minutes slowed in excruciating fashion. Sometimes when the teacher left, the boy behind me would kick my chair, then look around with a stupid grin when I turned around. From an early age, I found religion to have an inescapable air of torture to it. While a nun headed up the program, it was usually a student’s mother who did the actual teaching. I was too young to understand that my (and others’) non-enjoyment of the classes might have been due to the poor field of candidates from which the church chose to appoint as teachers. Not that there were any cruel or mean ones – these were Catholic people for Christ’s sake – but there’s a different kind of menace that comes from supposedly-well-meaning people.
I was never a badly-behaved child, and most of those teachers doted on me since they knew my parents. That didn’t ease the drudgery of having to stay in a dull and dank classroom while our sinful, non-Catholic counterparts got to run outside and play. It ruined religion for me, even more than being forced to be an altar boy a few years later, but it also ruined Tuesdays.
I don’t suppose this post has helped anyone as far as the latter goes.
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