My Holy Family: Fear and Foreboding in Elementary School

The oldest child of Paul Palof and Josephine Palof, I turned five in the summer of 1955. Judging by my parents’ attitude toward me, I thought it apparent that I was a celebrity genius who was entitled to play endlessly and be catered to. But in the fall of that year something very disturbing happened. It was called kindergarten.

The first day, the kindergarten teacher took out a stick and directed our attention to a pointy object on the end of it. “This is a nail,” she told us, “If you don’t behave, I will hit you with this stick.” A hush fell over the crowd. It was a lesson that deeply impressed itself on me, and for the whole school year I lived in fear of inadvertently misbehaving and feeling the wrath of that nail. At the end of year, she showed the class the stick again, and this time she pressed a thumb against the so-called “nail,” showing that it was flexible, made of rubber, and not really a nail at all. She laughed. I didn’t.

That day I was happy when my mother picked me up, and I expressed relief that the whole schooling thing was over. That was when she broke the bad news: next year I would start first grade and school would be a full day. So my formal education began, the kindergarten teacher striking a chord would be the leitmotiv of my elementary school experience: fear and foreboding.

My mother was Protestant; my father Catholic. He decided that I would be going to a parochial school, Holy Family in Parma, Ohio. It was there I encountered the concept of an all-knowing God who, in addition to judging your behavior, could peer into your mind, spot your errant thoughts, and condemn you to eternal damnation for them. This was a fearful prospect, especially for a child. The embodiment of punishment in this world were the nuns, clad in black, usually sour of countenance and often large in girth. I was more immediately afraid of running afoul of them and being sent to the principal’s office to have my knuckles rapped.

I often dreaded just going to school. Getting to there involved a bus ride, and I was prone to motion sickness. This illness was compounded on the holy feast days when we began the school day by going directly from the bus to attend mass. The service was held in the church attached to the school. During a long portion of the mass, you knelt, with your back straight. The nuns watched so that your butt didn’t sag down and rest on the edge of the pew. As you knelt the priest would swing the incensory that disbursed the pungent scent of incense into the air, a scent that further roiled my stomach. In those days, the alienating strangeness of it all was reinforced by the priest droning on in Latin. Dominus Nabisco cracker.

Even the Lord’s Prayer seemed strange to me, ending with “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I knew from my mother’s instruction that we kids shouldn’t go onto other people's lawns. That was trespassing. But why God should be so concerned about this particular infraction was puzzling to me.

During lunch, they turned students loose to gather in unruly mobs amongst which, I discovered, being small and timid were not advantages to me. You were forbidden to reenter the building until the bell rang, ending the break period. On hot days, this meant that a long line formed for the one outside drinking fountain that emitted a weak bubbling flow of water, necessitating that it be suckled like a rusty nipple. You didn’t want to have too much in your bladder, though, because the rest rooms were beyond closed doors which would be guarded by a nun who looked like General Patton in a wimple.

The buildings lacked air conditioning so on hot weather days we felt the heat, particularly us boys with our clip-on blue ties, part of our school uniforms. I remember one boy complaining and the nun retorting, “It’s a lot hotter in hell.” Usually, the standard response to complaints was to tell us to offer our suffering to God. We never questioned why God would want our suffering. In every classroom, his Son, Christ, looked down from the cross, as if to say, “So you think you have problems?” No matter what your personal ordeal, it seemed that Christ could always play the crucifixion card and trump your pain with His pain, pain taken on voluntarily to save you from hell, you ungrateful little shit.

These early school years corresponded to the time of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As children, we didn’t understand the politics, but we picked up on adult worries about nuclear war. There were nuclear war preparedness drills, where we, students and staff, lined the hallways, kneeling on the floor with our butts up in the air and our hands covering our heads to shield us from flying debris from the nuclear blast. I remember one day, on the playground, a kid told me that the Russians had a nuclear bomb the size of a nickel and that, before the school day was out, they would drop it and destroy all of America. I spent the remainder of the class time awaiting incineration and inwardly sobbing that I was going to die away from my mother.

In addition to fearing the discipline of nuns, mob rule on the playground, thirst or the call of nature occurring during lunch break, nausea and torment in the pews, sweltering classrooms, and impending nuclear annihilation, I was also afraid of my own depravity. The Church made a child’s natural curiosity about sexuality seem like an opening to Satan, the beginning of slipping into the pit of hell. But these kinds of thoughts seem to be constantly popping into my mind: “What did that one young pretty nun have beneath all those black clothes?” I imagined pulling at the rosary hanging from her waist belt, and it being a chord that would draw back her skirt like a curtain, revealing her naughty, knickerless nether world. Surely these impure thoughts, like an open book to God, would get me tossed into hell.

Of course, there was always the sacrament of Confession, where telling the priest your sins and making a good act of contrition could save you from eternal damnation. But I also feared having to confess the extent of my depravity to the sternly disapproving shadowy figure of the priest hidden from full view in the confessional booth. As a credulous child, just as I accepted all the other teachings of the Church, I accepted that I was supposed to count my impure thoughts. They could have at least supplied me with a clicker counter. Mercifully, the priest would never ask for details.

I had a crush on a third- grade teacher, one of the few teachers who were laity and dressed in civilian clothes. One nuclear war drill, we filed out of our classrooms, and students and teachers alike, we got down on our knees, and, crouching over, practiced covering our heads with our hands to protect ourselves from flying debris from the explosion. I found myself behind my teacher, staring at her derriere up in the air before me. Thus, I managed to combine two of my great fears. If the bomb had struck then, with my sinful thoughts unconfessed, it would have been hell for sure.

THE END