I spent the morning yesterday with a gaggle of nuns, a tumult of nuns, a cheerfulness of nuns. I bet there were 40 of them although I did not count.
They were all sorts of ages although there were only two or three who were undeniably younger than me, which made me wonder quietly about their future as an order; but on the other hand you never met so many older women with young hearts and supple minds as this particular hullabaloo of nuns.
Over the course of the morning I heard many interesting and sad and funny and piercing stories from this wonderment of nuns, this intensity of nuns, this insistence of nuns, but the story that stays with me this morning is the nun who talked to me about the 50, count them 50, years she spent as a kindergarten teacher, in four schools, two of them quite rural, one quite urban, and one, she said, in the furthest outskirts of the city, the place where immigrants and migrants and really poor people live, the place where the bus route ends, the sort of place where streets have numbers instead of names.
I was only there for a year, filling in for someone, she said, but I remember at the end of the year the children gave me all sorts of food as parting gifts — jams their mums made, and fish their dads had smoked, and goat meat, and pears, and a rooster.
I remember that rooster particularly, because he was a recalcitrant creature, and we parted ways soon after we met, with no love lost on either side. I say this who has taken vows to celebrate the holy in every living thing, but there are some limits to what you can take with equanimity.
It was at that school, she said, that I got into a habit I kept up for the rest of my days as a kindergarten teacher. It started because a little boy came to class with a note pinned to his shirt. The note was from his dad and it said that the boy didn't speak much American but he was a very good boy, a tender boy, a bright boy, and if I would just let him sit in class and absorb the American, he would pretty soon soak it up, he was a sponge of a boy that way, and they would all work at home to learn American better, in fact the rule of the house now was that they would only speak American in the house, and no more Estonian, although you could still go out in the yard and speak Estonian if you really had to.
Indeed that boy was a sponge, continued the nun, and within weeks you would never have known that American was not his native tongue, but something about the note pinned on his shirt gave me an idea.
"The children wore those notes with such pride. They would stand up straight and stick their bony chests out, and they would finger the note reverently like it was Holy Scripture."
All children in kindergarten are thrilled and terrified in those first days and weeks, and these kids in particular were even more so, because many of them were from other countries and languages, so I got into the habit of pinning a note to their shirts when they went home.
For the first two weeks I sent every child home with a note, and then we went to a weekly note, a custom we kept up for the rest of the year. When we went to the weekly note the notes became more businesslike, talking about school events and that sort of thing, but for the first two weeks I concentrated on talking about the child himself or herself.
I would write notes saying things like this boy has the brightest happiest most engaging smile I have ever seen, or this girl is the most avid eager reader I have ever met, or this boy is wonderfully kind to the shyest children in class. That sort of thing.
And the children wore those notes with such pride, she said. They would stand up straight and stick their bony chests out as I knelt to pin the note to their shirts, and then they would finger the note reverently like it was Holy Scripture, which in a real sense it was, you know?
So when you ask me what I miss most about being a teacher, it's pinning those notes on those wonderful holy children. That's what I miss the most. I still have a box of the safety pins I used for those notes and I open the box sometimes and riffle through the pins and remember. A subtle form of meditative prayer, like saying the Rosary, it seems to me. Don't you think so?
And I said, yes, Sister, I do. Yes.
Brian Doyle was the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland and a prolific writer. He died in 2017.