yep! Monday. Here’s a huge secret. I LOVE Mondays…I think they are the greatest day in the world. New. Bright. Shiny. With all kinds of possibilities. The Monday morning of my memory. It would be a cool California morning; dew on the lawn, a nip in the air. Crisp blue sky. No clouds. Me wearing polished Buster Brown oxfords, white socks, a baby blue uniform with white collars and cuffs and two pleats down the front on either side of the zipper, a matching belt with a silver buckle. Glossy brushed hair. A barrette holding back my recalcitrant bangs. Coming off a weekend of laughing and talking and playing and visiting. Monday. A whole new start. Never mind what the week would bring. Monday was the beginning. Time to anticipate. To relish the start. To find joy in the possibilities.
Monday’s at Villa Cabrini Academy, gone now, but vivid in my memory. We’d line up, by class, in rows of two, by height, smallest in the front, tallest in the back. I was always near or at the front. Then the martial music of John Phillips Sousa, the March King, would begin. Piped into the quadrangle over the loud speaker. We’d begin marching in place, then the two in the front would peel off, reversing, and we’d come back down in fours, then back up again, coming down in two, marching in place, then class, by class, by class, we’d move to our rooms. This was California, after all, the classrooms opened into the quadrangle, the Angeles bell tower half way between fourth grade with Mother Rosario and eighth grade with Mother Bartholomew. The school administration door just under the bell tower, the dark black of the screens as imposing as the small metal netting of the confessional, the dark pink brown bricks cool to the touch, double wooden doors at the library. Windows in the upper portion of the classroom doors, hazy, opaque. The nuns in their black on black habits, the sliver cross large in the front.
There are those who would disparage the fervor of those nuns today. There are those who would find them passé. But they had ready laughs, pockets of candy, and the sense to know when to discipline and when to love. They gave me a life of possibilities, and gazillion Mondays…