Our Lady of Sorrows

This subject http://againlucky.blogspot.com/2010/03/holy-trinity.html offers a window through which to view a certain stage of life, as adolescence began to bloom and usher in an age of downhill slopes strewn with sinkholes.
After completing 5th grade in public school, my mother decided Catholic school would offer a better alternative than the public institution I would have had to attend, about which she had heard horror stories from a teacher. So, off I went, book bag in hand, blue corduroys, lighter-shade-of-blue polo shirt, desert boots and a Dutch-boy haircut. My neighbors attended that school, as did some of the kids with whom I had played basketball in the parish, so I knew some people.
Sr. Mary of the Rosary embraced me in sixth grade as the model student, despite her censure for my failure to turn in a Science Fair project, while she pulled Donald Wagner around by the sideburns. I hauled the extra crates full of school-size milk cartons from the cafeteria over to the convent each day, though I don't know why. Didn't they have refrigeration in the cafeteria? She generally compensated me with Clark bars.
We recited prayers dutifully, said the Act of Contrition and stumbled through confession ("Forgive me father...I swore and I fought with my brother and I robbed the deli blind and I drank half the Scotch from the cabinet and I might have smoked weed since my last confession, but I can't be sure because it fucks up my memory) and attended the Stations of the Cross. During class, especially religion class, I adorned my book covers with band logos, with The Who and Yes and Kiss occupying particularly prominent spots, although I didn't consider myself above throwing Rush or ELO in there if I needed to fill space.
I played the good-boy role, for I couldn't let down my mother and then the nuns and then the priests. I needed permission to fail, or at least to adjust or to be allowed to express how I felt or to change my mind, though instead I encountered relentless pressure.
Another side existed. I had a thing for knives, and I brought them to school. I once repeatedly plunged a knife through a classmate's binder, in class, the kind of stuff for which a current-day student would face arrest. I destroyed another classmate's book bag more than once, though I don't know how his parents failed to notice or intervene. Another friend stalked this kid down on the playground one day, grabbed him and spat in his face. We had taken up a collection as an incentive for this expectoration escapade.
Our sixth-grade class trip to the Six Flags amusement park provided an opportunity for us to spread our wings a bit more. As we ascended in the cable cars, we smoked marijuana and glided above the pedestrians in the park below. Sixth-graders being who they are, Dennis the priest got wind of our antics--I actually told him that, yes, I had smoked weed when he asked me a few days later. He threatened to tell my mother but, as far as I know, never did. Gave me a few days of angst but didn't interrupt the long-term trend, for my roguish behavior proceeded unabated for the next one, two, three, four, five years. But my good grades and above-average athletic performance must have masked the self-destructive aspects. Never mind that I slept a disproportionate number of hours. What if Dennis had told my mother that I was high on the sixth-grade class trip? Would she have recognized that a constructive change might have been in order? He probably thought he was being cool by not ratting me out, but a better outcome might have resulted had he informed. Not likely, though, that it would have effected long-term change, for my mother wouldn't have surrendered the way of life to which she had become accustomed nor acknowledged that something dark plagued her great white hope.
I tended to beautiful Ria while I was in eighth grade, after her family's car accident left her a paraplegic. A classmate and I met the van that brought her to school at the side door and transported her in her wheelchair to the electric chair that would slide her down the stairs. She pushed with her arms and slid herself along a board to transfer from the wheelchair to the electric chair, and from our vantage point at the top of the stairs we watched her descend toward her fifth-grade classroom as the noise from the chair's motor echoed throughout the stairwell. We carried the wheelchair down the stairs and met her at the bottom so she could slip back in. Her family gave us silver Cross pens at the end of the year. I still have them.
I still know some of these people. Others have died. Little Billy Thorne, who used to run toward me screaming my name for protection from an enemy real or perceived, succumbed to a congenital kidney ailment. Sean died, too, and I still don't know how. I cross paths with others from time to time. With some, long-festering animosities create current tension, while with others the interactions are familiar. Back then some of these people perceived me as having the world by the balls, when in fact a maelstrom swirled in my mind. I wonder how they perceive me now, with the family and the two kids playing little league and the job and the dog. I suspect they think the same as they did. So do I.
A friend and I drove by that school, Our Lady of Sorrows, one day, and he said something about Catholics always dwelling on negativity and defeatism, with names like that. The name, though, suited the place and times.