ONLY THE NAMES ARE CHANGED

Moving To a New Home and School and Being Bullied

Memoirs 10

My father’s job must have collapsed under him as we left the house on Sunnyside and moved into a dingy little place above a diner, a small restaurant where my mother got a job as a waitress. My father went to work for Diamond Taxi. Life somehow was good despite the rat infested restaurant and apartments above it.

When my parents were both home they would often have my father’s taxi work buddies over for spaghetti feasts. There was a lot of laughter from my father and his friends and plenty of smiles on my mother’s face. When she was at work in the restaurant, we were often in the restaurant as well. I would take care of my baby sister B and my brother D while my mother flirted with the customers, which earned her good tips. She loved the attention and admiration of the men with whom she flirted.

I started grade one in a school which had an asphalt playground surrounded by a chain-link fence. The school was an old, red-bricked structure crammed full of kids who were constantly pushing and shoving. The teachers tried to keep order in the school yard by having us line up in our class groups before the end of recess. They made us stand still before we could then troop back into the school once the bell rang.

This school wasn’t a happy place for me, as I was constantly being shoved and knocked down. As soon as we were let outside for recess I would head away from the kids and tuck myself next to the fence surrounding the school playground.

I didn’t dare go near any of the playground equipment or groups of kids. I tried hard to disappear, not to be seen. Yet, I wasn’t successful as the school-yard bullies would still find me and knock me down. It also didn’t help that I was the smallest kid in the classroom.

The art of disappearing while in plain view had begun for me as a child hiding from my father’s anger. School was teaching me danger lurked everywhere and I was the focus of that danger. The idea of retreating into silence and as close to the edges of the fence as I could, reinforced my belief danger would pass by and leave me alone if I was invisible.

We again moved, this time into a nice home we had to ourselves, a small white house which was part of a long row of townhouses not too far from Saint Patrick’s School. The school was nicer than Hopewell School which I had thought was beautiful in comparison to the school I had just left. St. Pat’s was more modern, and more important for me, it was a Catholic school.

Being Catholic was getting to be something I knew was vital for me. I had often heard from Mémère about going to Heaven, a place reserved only for Catholics. According to her, Protestants were destined to go to Hell, even if they were good people. I could hardly wait to be like my young uncles, R and R, I wanted to be able to go to confession and communion. I wanted to be a good Catholic and ensure my place in Heaven.

It didn’t seem to matter I already knew how to read in comparison with my classmates. I had Catechism lessons and writing lessons that brought me into a better relationship with my classmates. As we learned together and practiced together, we became serious little saints for the most part. The fear of going to Hell was enough to motivate even the worst of us to learn our Catechism lessons.

When it came to writing, I felt a rush of excitement, almost joy. I was learning how to be a writer. One day I would write my own stories, my own books. I was happy in St. Pat’s school and that happiness was enough to convince my brother D that school was going to be a good place to go for him as well.

Before Easter, the students in my class and the other grade one classes were marched down the street to St. Pat’s Cathedral. We were lined up in a double row. All of the grade one students were lined up according to the class they were in. The nuns, who were our teachers, walked along with us making sure we kept a pious silence, not hesitating to pinch an ear or give a tap on the head of any offenders.

It was a Wednesday and we were going to practice the proper rituals in the church, rituals we had been learning in the classroom during our Catechism lessons. That Saturday we would be formally giving our first confessions in preparation for our First Communion the following day.

As I walked along with my head slightly bowed, I was smiling with an excitement I kept buried so I wouldn’t be reprimanded by the teacher. I pretended I was a saint. Somehow these holy sacraments would change the world around me and make it a kinder place, a happier place because I was going to be a saint.

About a month later, one of my classmates died, an Italian girl named Carmela. Again, I walked with my classmates down the sidewalk to see her in her coffin in the funeral home. I was confused. How could this have happened? Why didn’t God keep her alive and make her well? She was such a good girl and she liked me.

Somehow I had thought by receiving the sacraments, she would have been healed and we all would be protected. I learned from our teacher that Carmela was now in Purgatory, safe from suffering and pain. Again I was confused, almost angry, why Purgatory and not Heaven? Carmela was a good girl. She missed a lot of school because of her battle with Cancer, but that shouldn’t have been a good reason to keep her out of Heaven.

I don’t know why we moved again before the school year was over, but we ended up moving in with my French grandparents, who had recently moved into a bigger apartment above a flooring store on Wellington Street. Though there was still a month left of school, my parents decided there wasn’t any need to have me enroll in a different school to finish the school year. I had attended three schools by the time I finished grade one.

My brother D was happy as it meant we could play together a lot more. For me, I felt sadness at having to leave my classmates at St. Pat’s. They were my first friends. At Hopewell School, my friends had been the books which the teacher had let me use while she taught the other students. And in the school between those two, I hid to avoid bullies.

At the school where I had begun grade one, I had no friends, just people who tormented me as they tripped me, hit me, laughed at me, and called me names. St. Pat’s was different. As a group we had come together because of going through the initiation rituals of Catholicism.

However, moving back in with my French grandparents was moving back into familiar territory where there was no quiet spaces. I had discovered quiet corners in our townhouse near St. Pat’s School, corners that would somehow ease my anxieties and fears about life in general.

I would retreat into these quiet corners to escape the growing bitterness that was becoming part of my mother’s response to our poverty and the unpredictable moods of my father. At my grandparent’s place, it was a more chaotic territory so busy and filled with people that one was easily lost in the shuffle.

Despite becoming invisible in the crowd, there were no places to which I could retreat, no quiet places. It was as if, in the larger group, the sense of being an individual was blurred and almost lost.

For a child like myself, an introvert who needed space and quietness, the chaos left me sitting anxiously on the sidelines until others decided otherwise.

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Previously

Thanks to the following for following along with the story this far:

Carrie, Benighted, Patrick OConnell, Adrian CDTPPW, JB The Talker, Maddy Mirza, Block Wife, and katoshi