STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE

STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 7, 2008

“Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.”

Edmund Burke, English Statesman (1729 – 1797)

THE PROGRAMMATIC PROCESS

When we were sixth graders and twelve-years-old, we had already been programmed to be polite, obedient, to speak when spoken to, to mind our manners, to respect our elders, to do our chores, complete our homework, to stay out of trouble, and be little embarrassment to our family. We were directed not to lie, cheat, steal, or covet the possessions of others; and to respect their privacy. We were also trained to look up to authority figures, trust their commands as they had our best interests at heart, and to believe a man’s word was his bond.

We were also expected to honor and be faithful to the culture of our parents principally reflected in our religion: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, some other religious persuasion, or no religion at all. Whatever were the views of our caretakers and caregivers became indisputably our views, which were to be echoed in our speech and conduct with a consistency to give proof of our virtue.

Consequently, our learning of geography, history, English, arithmetic, social studies, and science paled in comparison with the importance of being polite, obedient, punctual, disciplined, well groomed, humble and submissive. We learned at an early age to fit in rather than be disruptive, to follow instructions rather than to vary creatively, to behave rather than to challenge. To earn high marks in school and enjoy the approval of our elders, we conscientiously gave answers to our examinations consistent with our lesson plans convinced they contained unassailable truths.

Yet, despite this programming, inconsistencies were noted. We were told to pay them little mind. They were exceptions to the rule. What we thought we saw was not what we actually observed, but a figment of our immature imagination. We didn’t see people lying, cheating, stealing, talking ill of their neighbors, or doing something contradictory to what we were told to believe of our elders. We simply lacked an appreciation of the complexities of what was happening.

We were, as sixth graders and twelve-year-olds, an amorphous mass of protoplasm that could be molded and shaped, pushed and shoved, badgered and beaten, pinched and tweaked, criticized and consoled, flattered and cajoled, nurtured and neglected into what we were told we were with little input from ourselves. .

By the end of the sixth grade, we had learned what we should do, should be and should become all of which were still beyond the light of our comprehension. We had been leavened into pleasers of others with little attention directed to pleasing ourselves. But something was happening. The inconsistencies were mounting. We couldn’t conceive of rebelling against it, whatever “it” was, but were increasingly forced to be other directed while being told to be self-directed and self-controlled. In this confusion, we worked hard to be what we were expected to be with little sense of success.

We came to realize our parents lived through our exploits. They found it socially acceptable to brag about us to give themselves a backhanded compliment. Whatever our distinction: beauty, brains, talent, athleticism, gregariousness, or popularity was all about us while not being about us at all.

By the sixth grade nothing was for the fun of it anymore. Life and learning, play and sport were now serious business. We must be the best at what we did and what we were before we knew the difference. We had already been regimented into organized sports and supervised activities by our parents long before the sixth grade playing football, basketball, soccer, and hockey. Now we were expected to excel. The same was true for ballet, ice-skating, social clubs, and extracurricular activities. Our time was organized, no longer free. Our lives depended upon being involved in something constructive every waking moment. We were to be all we could be before we had had a chance to catch our second breath.

Kudos came our way if we stood out in sports or schoolwork or school activities. We were conditioned to accept these accolades with modesty with only our parents and relatives having the luxury of bragging rights.

We didn’t get it by the sixth grade, but it was seeping into our souls that life was not all about us but all about them; not all about living in the world but in conquering the world, as our parents hadn’t. We were brought up to make restitution for their mislaid plans and misspent dreams, for their failures and slights, their fears and doubts, their demons and devils, none of which were ours, but they had become ours by proxy. There was little room to find our way because the place in which we found ourselves had no room for us. It was fully occupied by them. It was theirs not ours. And since we were living their lives as if our own, attempting to find what they had lost and not what we could discover, we were lost almost from the get go.

We were told to be competitive, to stand up for our rights, while being conditioned to be submissive and obedient to the demands of others. What made this conflicting was seeing our parents acting assertive over the powerless and subservient to the powerful. We were instructed to learn the hard lessons of life when we often witnessed our parents being crippled by them. Parents complicated this further attempting to be our best friend rather than our parents. Little learning took place when they excused our foul ups and relieved us of the consequences of our actions. Exaggerating our strengths and understating our weaknesses was forgivable because it was out of unconditioned love.

Parents and elders expected us to behave differently than we saw them behaving. We saw them drinking and smoking, swearing and lying, cheating and stealing, and delighting in the misfortunes of others as coffee table talk. It was natural for us to sample their liquor, sneak a smoke, practice swearing and lying, making fun of those less fortunate, and even shoplift for trinkets in dime stores. When caught and reprimanded, we wondered why it was all right for them and not for us to do. We displayed our angst by punishing others with our schoolbook knowledge or athletic prowess to make them feel small and us big. We justified our petty deceptions as we saw our parents trying to get us into movies and ballgames as our being “under twelve,” when we were already going on thirteen.

Our parents told us to clean our room, and when we didn’t, they cleaned it for us. They told us to do our chores, and when we didn’t, they did them for us. They told us to do our homework, and when we didn’t, they did it for us. They told us to be home on time, but never asked us where we had been or with whom. They grounded us for misbehaving but forgot about it by the next day. Then they wondered why we were always waiting for them to do for us what we could best do for ourselves. We had never been given our own moral compass and therefore had trouble finding our way.

THE IMPORTANCE OF REBELLION: A PERSONAL ODYSSEY

Something is happening in our chemistry as we move through the sixth grade, something that we are discouraged from allowing to happen because it carries the pejorative, “rebellion.” Rebellion is as necessary to finding out who and what we are as the importance of learning the three “R’s.

We know the story of the prodigal son who rebels and leaves home only to return to find out how wise his father has become. There is truth in this, but remember the prodigal son did rebel, did experience the world as it is, and we are programmed to skip that step, and move from adolescence to adulthood without the maturing process.

As a consequence, there is a good chance we are protected from knowing ourselves and therefore experiencing life directly. We are as a society suspended in terminal adolescence with the emotional maturity of an obedient and submissive twelve-year-old. This is evident in our arrested development and counterdependence on society and the workplace as surrogate parent, caretaker and caregiver for our total well being.

Society is not comfortable with an adult perspective or the mindset and behavior of adults. Adults have their own minds, are confrontational, do not accept things simply on the authority of others, or at face value. They are discriminating, self-directed and self-motivated, and do not need the approval of others to approve of themselves. They don’t need managers to tell them they are doing a good job. They know in their bones the quality of their work. They are professionals.

We leave the leadership of our lives up to others who are as lost and confused as we are, and then wonder why we have our foot to the peddle burning up rubber and going nowhere.

I

My personal odyssey has been to go against the grain to create another possibility, which has not been smooth or trouble free or especially exemplifying. It has been a struggle, but it has been my struggle, which has given me the courage to write these words.

If you were like me, reared in Irish Roman Catholicism, where your religion was your lone security, you would grasp it as if an anchor in a raging storm. My first five years of life were traumatic and lonely as I was without my mother and father. I was instead shuttled, along with my little sister, from relative to relative and foster parent to foster parent. My da was attempting to discover his adult legs as a parent, while my mother’s emotional and physical health were constantly in jeopardy as she was confined to care giving birth to three children in four years.

By the sixth grade, you realize there is a difference between you and other children even in a Catholic parochial school. You now have your mother and father, your little sister and little brother, and baby sister all in your own home. It is years since those difficult early days, but you witness daily your parents struggle to make ends meet. You see how the lack of education cripples your da in his job and sense of self-worth. You cower from his temper flare-ups, and retreat into yourself. Some of your classmates are well off and have bright new clothes with all the valued accessories, which are not available to you. This causes a peculiar reaction. You don’t envy them for their good fortune, but look at them more critically and see they are not any brighter, more athletic, or better looking than you are. You discover arrogance in yourself that is not always becoming to your pastor or the good Sisters of St. Francis, who teach you at St. Patrick’s School.

II

At home, I find myself living in a climate of psychological abuse as my da has a violent temper constantly painting the air blue with his shouting, swearing, and woe is me self-pity. This is compounded when his Irish railroad buddies come to drink coffee, eat fudge cake and smoke cigarettes, which is every week. They don’t notice me as I have become indistinguishable from the furniture as I listen to why they have failed to make satisfactory progress in life.

The men are in the living room and their wives in the kitchen, all smoking, laughing, and decrying their sad status. It is hard for me to breathe in this little house and I invariably get a migraine headache. All these men claim to be Irish Catholic to the core, but not one of them attends Sunday Mass, only their wives.

My mother is a devout Catholic, and I find myself nearly as devout as she, thus maintaining my anchor. That means I believe unconditionally everything I have learned about my faith in the Baltimore Catechism. I learned later that my faith had been sanitized to a consistency that left little room for doubt or skepticism, and therefore even less room for truth.

One day I wander into the public library when I am in the sixth grade, and happen on a book on the “Inquisition,” something that I had never heard of before. The pictures and accounts in the book are terrifying. It shows people being tortured on the rack and burned at the stake for being heretics. I tell myself, it can’t be true.

When I ask Sister at school, she tells me it doesn’t concern me. When I ask Father, he says, “What gives you the idea there was an Inquisition?” When I ask my mother, she says, “That was a dark period in our church history.”

Here I am sixty years later reminiscing about that period. I thank my mother for her candor. No one else conceded it was true, that the church is, indeed, a human institution with buried skeletons, as do we all.

Later, I ask my da, and he confesses he has no idea what I’m talking about. My great aunt Annie laughs and slaps her leg when I tell her. I lived with her and my uncle Mart when I was four.

“Your father is not well acquainted with his catechism,” she says with a knowing twinkle in her eyes. “One day when your father was only seven, he rushed home from St. Patrick’s shouting with joy to his grandmother, ‘Granny, granny, I learned a new prayer today.’”

“What prayer was that, Raymond?”

“Across the Street.”

It was “The Apostles Creed.” His religious insight was pretty close to “across the street,” that is, until the final innings of his life when he was dying of bone cancer. Then he received the Last Sacraments of the Church, and Holy Communion nearly every day.

III

In the sixth grade, all of these moments coalesce into one nature. Yet it is natural for the human spirit to attempt to stretch beyond these parochial confines. What helps to get me out of my introspective nature and unto the playground of life is not actually a playground at all, but an expanse of lawn between the Clinton County Jail and the Clinton County Courthouse. Four streets border this rectangular block. I live only three doors down and across the street from this set of buildings.

Here we play baseball from sunrise to sunset on a diamond laid out by the deputy sheriffs with a wire mesh screen backstop provided by the county sheriff. Our team is known as the “Courthouse Tigers,” named by a deputy for his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers.

In the fall, we play tackle football on this lawn but without shoulder pads and helmets, or goal posts. A regulation basketball court is also laid out at one end with two basketball hoops on an earthen court. In the winter, the lawn is turned into a bowl and filled with water, which quickly freezes into ice, and becomes our ice skating rink. Music is piped out of the sheriff’s garage that is situated next to and north of the jail.

That place and space is my haven and heaven, and a defining feature of my youth through the sixth grade. There I meet a boy, who lives across the street from the county jail. The first sentence of my novel (In the Shadow of the Courthouse 2003) attests to his influence: “The first day of my life was when I was eight-years-old and met Bobby Witt.”

As sixth graders, we are both starters on St. Patrick’s eighth grade basketball team. It is during World War Two. Bobby is a boy that inspires other boys, lifts them up to be better than they are, not by word but deed. He is fun and funny, a good student, and a better friend, but most of all, a devout Roman Catholic, who cherishes his faith with no need for proselytizing zeal.

Things that disturb me do not bother him. I fail to understand why. I confess my concerns as we walk to school, which is only two blocks away, or downtown to a movie, which is less than a mile, or to an Industrial League baseball game in Riverview Stadium, which is only four blocks away and close to the Mississippi River, or to the municipal swimming pool, which is parallel to the river and only a couple blocks south and east of the stadium.

This is our world, all in the shadow of the four-sided courthouse clock that chimes every half hour. We are in our cocoon, a safety net that, unbeknown to us, will protect us all our lives for having experienced it. Bobby listens to me on these walks, and says, “Why do you bother your mind about these things? You don’t know what you’re talking about anyway.”

It is true. I don’t but that doesn’t seem to help. I wonder why all the Negroes live in a one-block area of Maple Street; why I never see them at the municipal swimming pool, or rarely at baseball games; why they don’t come over to the courthouse when they live only three blocks away; or why I never see them at the movies. No Negroes work in the factories or the department stores downtown. I wonder where they work. None of them go to school at St. Patrick’s. Aren’t any of them Catholics? I go on and on beating my concern to death, until Bobby becomes totally bored and puts his hands over his ears.

IV

It slowly registers that there are good people who are content with what is, but for some reason, I’m not. Through the sixth grade, for instance, I play on a basketball team at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and Bobby never plays there. He doesn’t even come down to the Y. That puzzles me.

“You know what Father says. It’s not a good place for Catholics to be.”

“But it’s just basketball, Bobby.”

“Father says it can corrupt our minds; that’s good enough for me.”

Why isn’t it good enough for me? I can’t explain it, nor can I tell Bobby I attended a YMCA Conference. It must be a mortal sin. Several ministers talk about athletics and moral commitment. I don’t understand it all, but they are so eloquent. They don’t mumble their words, or have a lot of “ah” pauses. Their voices are music to my ears. They talk in complete sentences, and when they pause, it is like they are allowing time for the thought to sink in. They don’t talk in the monotone way Father does when he reads the epistle and gospel in Sunday’s Mass.

His sermons after the gospel seem to cause him pain, but not as much as they give. I wonder why ministers speak so well and priest so poorly, that is, parish priests. Oblate Fathers who travel across the country giving Novenas speak like ministers.

I conclude that priests are not taught how to give sermons, but left to wing it, while ministers are well schooled in the theatrics of delivery, and that is the reason for the difference.

Father seems so bored when he reads the gospel and only passionate when he is asking for money. His money sermons, though, always make me squirm because my mother puts twenty-five cents in the envelope every Sunday, and then Father reads at the end of the year how much the 200 families in the parish have given.

He starts with the highest contributors and ends with the lowest, reading every single family name in the parish. The lawyers and doctors and businessmen are always at the top with $300 - $400, while my family is at or near the bottom with $10 - $12, sometimes even less. It never seems to total the $13 it should, and I know my mother never misses a Sunday Offertory.

Thirteen dollars isn’t much in 2008 but it is a good deal more when you multiply it by a factor of ten, which would make it $130 in 2008 dollars. Nonetheless, I have never outgrown the humiliation of having my family’s poor financial status broadcast to the world. Bobby’s family never gives anymore, but he could care less. It isn’t his problem. It is still my problem more than sixty years later.

The upside of this is we don’t have to pay tuition to attend this private Catholic school. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport wants to be sure we are fully indoctrinated in the faith. With this mainly subliminal programming, we automatically regurgitate the correct responses to matters of faith and morals:

Question: What is the true Church?

Answer: The only true Church is the Holy Roman Catholic Church established by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and no other church shall stand before it.

That Q&A gets me thinking. I share this with Bobby. We’re a minority religion in this country, I tell him. It is even worse in Clinton where probably only one in ten is Roman Catholic. “So?” he says. “What of it?”

“What is going to happen to all of them, Bobby, where are they all going to go when they die? Surely not hell, especially if they’ve been good.”

“Ask Father,” he laughs knowing my touchy relationship with our pastor. That shuts me up.

V

At twelve, I am already five-nine, and tower over Father. It is my job to ask him for the key to the school gym on Saturdays and Sundays during the winter, and always when Father is having his breakfast after saying his second Mass of the morning.

His housekeeper comes to the door, and says Father is eating breakfast. I always say the same thing, “Ma’am, it’s cold out here,” stamping my feet for emphasis, and then smiling. “All we want is the key to the gym to play basketball.”

She closes the door without a word. A period of five or more minutes passes, then Father comes finally to the door with a white napkin hanging from his Roman collar, contempt in his eyes, reminding me I am interrupting his breakfast, which is getting cold. I want to say, ‘Father, why not let your housekeeper give us the key?’ But I don’t; I just think it. Perhaps he can read my mind.

The routine never varies. I stand there, looking down at the top of his thinning silver hair, say nothing, return his stare, and wait. His nostrils flare, he mumbles something under his breath, and abruptly shuts the door. It is as if he thinks that is enough rejection to move me off his porch, but I don’t budge. I wait until hell freezes over, and think it will. But always, he returns with the key, gives me another practiced glare before handing it to me, moans a complaint I don’t understand, but later wish I did.

Once I have the key, I am off jumping from the back porch, landing on the sidewalk, and racing across the backyard before he can change his mind. With the basketball in my hands, I promptly forget about the whole ordeal, until the next week, when the same histrionic ritual is repeated, that is, until my mother goes to confession after one Friday Novena.

She is always the last in the confessional as she is very hard of hearing, and nearly yells out her sins, as Father shouts his penance and instructions in return. If your penance is five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, your sins are clearly venial sins. But if Father gives you the rosary to say, well, then you are in mortal sin territory, and heading straight for hell. Father routinely gives me the rosary to say, but never my mother.

It is Father’s thoughtful idea to have my mother be the last confessor. They always chat with each other after confession for a few moments as Father locks the church doors. But this night is different. Father claims he is at his wits end.

“You’ve got a problem child, Dorothy, a real problem child in Jimmy. God only knows how he’s going to end up. I’ve thought many times of expelling him.”

My only run in with him is the gym key thing. He reads all our report cards to each class every six weeks, and always praises my academic performance in front of my classmates, while taking the opportunity to say I need work on my conduct. That is it.

But this is different. Now my mother is hearing her golden boy is irrevocably bad and on the brink of being expelled.

My mother comes home from church crying, barely able to talk. “Jimmy, how could you do this to me?” Her face is a blanket of pain, which only confuses me. I feel strangely calm because it has to be a misunderstanding. My life is great.

Not my da. He leaps out of his chair in combat mode with his bulging arms ready to land on my person. I back away. “Jimmy, what did you do now?”

“Nothing. Who says I did anything?”

Wrong question. “Father says you’re imperious, disrespectful and spiteful of his authority.”

Imperious? I have no idea what that means. I expect it is close to spiteful. Much as I don’t want to admit it, I can see where Father may have a case. Maybe you don’t have to say it, just think it; maybe priests can reads minds. If they can, I’m in real trouble.

Through tearful sobs she explains her conference with Father after confession. My da is inches from my face. “Get out of my sight, Jimmy, or I swear I’ll hit you so hard you won’t stop at the first wall.”

Stupid me, I stand my ground, and try to explain that Father is a jerk, and that he is the problem, not me. Wrong strategy.

“There, there, you see, Ray, see why Father resents Jimmy? That’s the kind of son you’ve raised, a hot head just like you!” Now I am “his son,” not hers, which is new. I have no ally. Now, I am afraid.

“My son, huh? I’m a hot head, am I? That’s rich. Now this is all about me, is it?” I think he is going to swallow his cigarette. “You call him ‘my son’? You’ve made him special. Not me! You treat him like he’s goddamn perfect. He’s not our only kid you know. Goddammit, Dorothy, we’ve got four kids, not one!”

Thus the battle lines are drawn, and I am safely out of it, so I go quietly upstairs to my room, knowing that I am the topic but no longer the problem. His voice rages on for an hour at decibel levels that make the glassware quiver, but then the house is quiet again.

In the morning, my mother says. You could have nipped the problem in the bud if you had apologized to Father. Why didn’t you, Jimmy?”

The reason is so stupid I can’t tell her. It never occurs to me. My mind can only think about the words Father used to describe me. I need to get to a dictionary to see if I agree. When I look up the words, I feel somewhat vindicated. I can use the same words to describe him. He must see in me what I see in him. Maybe that’s why he hates me. Do I hate him? No. But it is true I don’t like him very much. I wonder how much damage he does to other kids that he doesn’t like. I wonder how much I do.

Father doesn’t damage me because I can see maybe he is right. I am arrogant, but not malicious. I never knowingly want to hurt anyone, but I do think I am sufficient on to myself. I just do. Then again, maybe people I respect, like my mother, can hurt me. Yes, she can hurt me. I hurt her by how I treat Father. I never thought of it that way. Life is so complicated I don’t understand any of it. Maybe Father is on to something; maybe I should pay attention.

VI

It is strange to live in an insular Irish community of like-minded individuals and then to step outside that community, and realize you are a minority. I sense this when called a “Mick” because I am Irish, a “cod cruncher” because I am Catholic and eat only fish on Friday, and a “catlicker” as a bastardizing of Catholic. I am taller than other boys my age so people call me “beanpole,” or “whitey” because of my blond hair. Bobby calls me “duffus” because I am always asking questions that have no answers.

My mother puts this in perspective. “People are threatened by difference. Don’t bring attention to yourself by flaunting your difference. Use your ease at doing things, take pride in it, but don’t punish people with it.”

I didn’t know it at the time but do now, that she was defining my life as an outsider where I would have to find a home. Her counsel has given me enormous freedom and the luxury of a confident point of view.

She did something else. She defined my essence, telling me how bright and beautiful I was, how capable, what a presence I had, a commanding voice, and that I was going to go somewhere.

This assessment upset my da, as he sees the world destroying me as he has allowed it to destroy him. My mother explains to him that I have a coldness that he lacks, and cannot understand, and that I have moral fiber equal to but differing with his physical courage. “You see them running over Jimmy like they have run over you, Ray, but Jimmy will never give them his power, never. Power is a two-edge sword, true. It can cut Jimmy down as much as it can cut him loose. I have full confidence he will use it well.”

The metaphor of physical courage he can understand because although of small stature and slight build he fears no man physically, but every man in authority.

“Jimmy will never bow down to anyone, Ray. Do you hear me? Anyone! It is not in his character. It is why he has a problem with Father. Priests expect adulation. Jimmy has no such inclination. He will be hated and loved in life, and neither one will change his path.”

He shakes his head, “Dorothy, you’ve fed Jimmy’s head so full of bullshit that his feet have never touched the ground. They’ll beat the shit out of him, Dorothy, as he chases windmills, mark my words.”

She chuckles. “That’s the whole idea.”

From the perspective of sixty years, I find they both were right. She was speaking with the mind of ambition and love; he with the mind of defeat and fear. The best job that he ever had was on the extra board of the Chicago & North Western Railroad where he would work passenger or baggage the 202 miles from Clinton to Boone, or deadhead one way and work the other. Before that, he worked as a laborer at the Clinton Corn Starch Company; before that on the WPA during the Great Depression; and before that as a bellhop in Chicago as a young man.

He was always pushing the Sisyphus rock up the hill, and having it come crushing down on him again and again, and then dying three days after his fiftieth birthday with bone cancer. Little wonder he feared for his smart aleck son who acted as if he was God’s gift to the world.

VII

We have a chicken coop in the backyard, which came with the house. We don’t raise chickens and so I use it as my den. I have removed the nesting shelves and fashioned a desk and use a crate as a chair. I have cleaned the windows, walls and floor of feathers and droppings, and stake it out as my place. I read there, write my little poems, and musings.

During the month of May, I fashion an altar to the Blessed Virgin Mary with a candle I don’t light, and a small statue and picture of the Madonna. I also have a picture of Pope Pius XII pinned to the wall. I fill a little vase with cherry blossoms, borrow a white napkin from the dining room hutch, and fashion an altar. I say long prayers to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, prayers that I’ve since forgotten. I say these prayers every day during my Lady’s month. I also talk to Her about my life, and the problems in it, and always feel better for the attention.

Twelve years later, when I am in the US Navy, I visit her shrine at Fatima in Portugal, and meet Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen there, a Catholic scholar whom I greatly admire, and later have a military audience with Pope Pius XII with some five hundred other US sailors in his private chapel, only a month before he dies.

We have a garage beside the chicken coop, but no automobile. We take the bus or walk to wherever we have to go. Our little backyard is a veritable orchard. We have delicious, green, and crab apple trees, a plum tree, grape vines lining both sides of the walk from the house to the garage, an asparagus patch, current berry bushes, and a cherry tree. I throw apples at the apple trees, and two or three fresh apples fall down, grab a couple of bunches of white and purple grapes, pluck a plum off its tree, and retreat to my chicken coop sanctuary to spend a delightful hour.

I love comic books, especially the rare ones that are called “classic comics,” and dream of the Count of Monte Christi, the swashbuckler who always saves the day, or Tom Sawyer, who always gets other people to do his work.

My mother reads books borrowed from the library, books I am not allowed to read because I always get jam and peanut butter on them. Small wonder that my home today has thousands of books, which may not be soiled by food, but are richly marked with highlighters, turned pages, or scratchy notes.

VIII

One of the crushing realities of the sixth grade is being the last boy in my class chosen to be an altar boy. I know the Latin Mass as well as any classmate, and love the ritual of celebrant and server even more than Bobby, who prefers to attend rather than serve Mass.

My mother wants me to be a Jesuit priest and my da a New York City policeman, both seem remote when I can’t even become an altar boy. Then again, we live more than a thousand miles from metropolitan New York. The barrier, of course, is Father and me. I am working on it. I can now say I love his guttural laugh, but have to add it never reaches his eyes.

Sometimes reality has a strange way of proving parents to be prophets. Admirers label me as a moral philosopher, which is something of a blend of priest and cop. It is also the product of being an interdisciplinary doer. Although first trained in science as a chemist and chemical engineer, later in sales where I encountered the raw attitudes of people, moving on to executive status in the problem solving, then being retrained in the social and behavioral sciences, becoming a consultant and adjunct professor, then returning to the corporation world and working about the globe, I now find myself writing books and essays, such as this.
IX

This natural progression in work has meant traveling across the United States, Europe, Africa and South America. It is in such travels I have witnessed people living daily on less than what American teenagers spend on soft drinks during their school lunch breaks. I also see how American companies exploit the natives in such places as Jamaica, Suriname, Venezuela, and South Africa. Companies and governments act in collusion in extracting the rich oil reserves, or bauxite ore out of the soil, while paying indigenous labor little. It makes an impression.

It is 1968 and I am in South Africa, where my programmed idealism clashes with draconian reality. My mind is trained for the job, but not my heart. I am a young executive sent to facilitate the formation of a new chemical company to virtually eliminate competition in the specialty chemical industry.

The strategy is to consolidate into a new entity an American subsidiary, a British affiliate, and the specialty chemical division of the largest chemical company in all of Africa in the oppressive climate of South Africa apartheid.

Living in a midwestern community of few Negroes, but having friends of that race at university, apartheid shocks my senses. The policy of the Afrikaans South African government in this period is the separate development of the Bantu or blacks into homelands, where little commercial, industrial, or agricultural development exists. African men are forced leave their homelands to seek gainful employment in the white metropolitan areas.

If you can imagine, 2.5 million white Afrikaners and 1.4 million whites of British descent live a privileged existence over 12 million Bantu and 2 million Colored with absolute authority. Africans carry identity cards and can be incarcerated if in metropolitan areas after curfew. They can be imprisoned up to 120 days without being formally charged.

This experience changes this Iowa boy forever. It reconstitutes his life into a not always quiet outrage. He isn’t prepared for corporate exploitation or governmental malfeasance, in South Africa or anywhere else. His work takes him to countries rich in natural resources but poor in the distribution of wealth, which is apparently all right with American corporations and former European colonizers.

X

My mindset and sense of fair play is established by the sixth grade thanks to a retinue of volunteer teachers not much older than I am.

There is a star high school athlete, an alumnus of St. Patrick’s, who comes back to coach us. He singles me out because I am tall, and with the patience of Job, develops me into a basketball player. I win three major letters in high school basketball and am on the varsity for four years.

There are two other high school students who have grown up in the shadow of the courthouse, who teach us how to play baseball on the courthouse diamond. They both become professional baseball players. Were it not for WWII, and military service, they would have been major league players.

One is a joy to be around, athletically superb, but as much fun as if he were no older than we are. The other one is more mature, and seems to have a special understanding of us boys as we struggle to find our way through adolescence.

He is a lovely man, the ideal type of the caring person. How much less a man I would be today had I not experienced his guidance. He accepted my high-strung nature, my idealism, and showed me how to use rather than be abused by it.

Although a boy himself, he seems to understand what I don’t, and to move me from being my own worst enemy to my own best friend. He never compliments me, but corrects my play in such a way that it always feels like a compliment.

These young volunteer coaches not only help us as athletes, but as persons as well.

Two of them are gone, but they are all in my heart and will be there until I join them.

XI

Then there is a young Sister of St. Francis. She is my sixth grade teacher. Only 20, and not much older than her students, this is Sister’s first teaching assignment. An initial challenge is finding a way to deal with my high-strung nature. We are today the best of friends, but this was a traumatic period for us both. I was trying to get a grip on my passions, and she was trying to gain control of her class.

One day, she tells us that no one shall speak until she acknowledges his or her raised hand, a clear attempt to gain control of the chaos. Three times I recite the answer when someone else has a hand up. After the third disruption, she has me come to the front of the room.

Calmly, she tells me my behavior is unacceptable. I am ready to apologize, which has worked before, feeling it will close the matter, when she puts her small hand to her lips, then holds her hand up, palm out, and her innocent gaze silences me.

“For this disrespect to me and your classmates, James, you will stay after school and write on the blackboard 300 times, ‘I will not talk in class until I am called upon by Sister to speak’.”

“When, Sister?”

“After school.”

“Tonight?” She nods. “But I have basketball practice!”

“You’ll have to miss it.”

“But I can’t miss it. I can’t.” I can see by her quiet resolve that something is different; that she means business. My mind races. I am not to play basketball today! Basketball is my life! A rage wells up in me that is so powerful and so overwhelming that I pick up the object nearest me, a folding chair, and raise it high above my head. I seem a foot taller than Sister.

There is fright in her eyes as if I am about to send the chair crashing down on her head. But even in my towering rage, I have no intentions of hitting anyone, much less Sister. I want to demolish something, throw the chair through the window. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Like the calm in the center of a storm, I am out of control but not totally so.

There I stand frozen with the chair over my head, and I look at Sister, and she looks as frightened as a doe in the headlights of an on rushing car. Then she does something that I shall remember until my dying day. She touches her lips with her index finger, and then makes the Sign of the Cross.

That nonverbal action pricks my spell as if she had lanced a boil, and I collapse into the chair folding myself into it like a fetus. The room is bathed in an anxious silence. Now composed, Sister dismisses the class for the day, asks me to stay.

She sits there behind her desk for several minutes and says nothing. I still am in the folding chair my head bowed in fatigue and shame unable to look at her. I want to apologize but can’t. Right then and there I know I am my da’s son. I have been critical of his spontaneous rages, his impulsive explosions over nothing: phone calls from bill collectors, my mother smoking too much, the house being in a mess, my walking with my hands in my pockets down Chicago’s loop district. I was twelve and he expects me to treat life like a combat zone.

My terrible temper has never gotten out of control outside play, but now I see it for what it is, a curse. I am already big and strong, and could hurt someone. I pray that never happens. I am mumbling prayers in Latin, sitting on that folding chair, prayers in that dead language that distances me from myself: “Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Ioanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo…” These is a response of the altar boy at Mass, I have finally become.

My mind slowly becomes conscious of my fix. Will I be expelled? Will I no longer be able to play basketball? I am full of “me, me, me,” while Sister sits quietly behind her desk, looking at me pensively.

Then the school bell rings ending classes for the day.

“I’m going to leave you now, James,” she says, “to complete your punishment and I’m not coming back to check your work. I don’t expect you to leave until it is completed. Is that clear?” I nod. “Then we should both forget it ever happened.”

What beautiful psychology. Here I am writing about it sixty years later.

She knew then that it was an important moment in both our lives and that it would never be forgotten. There was no lecture; no psychological melodrama; no analysis of what a terrible temper I had, and how it would be my albatross in the future; none of that. Perhaps that is why it cauterized my soul with the imprint of its terrible truth. It was a transformational moment.

Sister knew, as hot headed as I was, as angry as I was that she had reached me. She knew also that I was task oriented, and would dutifully complete my punishment. I printed those 300 lines, doing 50 at a time, then erasing the blackboard, and doing 50 more. School let out at 3:20 p.m., and I was still printing my sentences at 5:00 p.m. It was already dark outside.

The janitor sees the light on in the sixth grade room, and is waiting to clean it. He finally comes in and asks me how much longer I’ll be. “I’m doing an assignment,” I say.

With tongue in cheek, he says, “I can see that. I’ve come by here several times and you keep writing the same sentence over and over again. Up to 275 now, huh? How many more left?”

“25. I have to do a total of 300.” My head hurts sharing this with this stranger, but he doesn’t make a joke of my predicament.

Instead he asks, “Can I clean the board when you’re done?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have to save your work?”

“No.”

“How are you going to prove you stayed and did it?”

“Sister will know because I’ll tell her I did it.”

For some reason with those words of trust I lose it in front of this stranger. Something rises from deep inside me, something that comes roaring out without warning. I start to bawl, deep, deep sobs in front of the janitor, crying so hard and so loud that it might have been embarrassing if I were the least bit connected.

I feel so sorry for how terrible I have been to Sister; how king and trusting she has been of me. I am very disappointed with myself. I don’t like me very much. I am mourning that fact. I cannot help myself.

“Are you all right, son?” he asks, clearly mystified by my breakdown.

“No,” I sob. “I’m not all right.”

“Can I do anything? Get you a glass of water?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll leave you then, come back later.” His kindness makes me sob even more.

Several minutes later, I go into the cloakroom, put my jacket on, and walk to my block by the courthouse. I walk around the courthouse block at least a half dozen times. It has started to snow; large soft snowflakes touch my tearing face and melt with them. When I finally walk from the corner of the jail to the three houses west to my home, my mother is waiting in the doorway with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a coffee cup in her hand. “Where have you been, Jimmy?”

I hate her smoking, hate her talking with a cigarette in her mouth, but somehow none of that is important. Dripping with snow, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I start to laugh, and swallow her in a bear hug, all 95 pounds and five feet one inch of her, and say, “I love you, mommy. God, how I love you.”

She takes her cigarette out of her mouth, and holds it away from her body, and says, “Well, I’m not used to that.” That finds me hugging her even harder. “Careful now. I’m not a sack of flour.” Then she chuckles with that glint in her eye, “You going to tell me what brought this on?”

“Maybe someday.”

“Okay,” she says as if to herself, I can live with that. I suspect she thinks it relates to basketball practice lasting longer than usual. Whatever, she doesn’t press me and I love her all the more for it.

I never did tell her, although I write about the incident in my memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003). She dies ten years before it is published on D-Day, June 6, 1993 at the age of 79. I found myself crying when I wrote about that day in the novel, and now I find myself crying as even an older man writing this essay in 2008, still stuck in the sixth grade.

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Dr. Fisher’s books are listed and available on his website: www.fisherofideas.com. His most recent book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (Authorhouse 2007).