Rough Waters

Chapter One:

Much of my life I have come up just short on many of my major goals. I’ll never forget this unfortunate morning. The blacktop street in front of our house at the corner of Downer Street and Huron Boulevard is already steaming. I walk slowly to keep cool for the two blocks south along Huron to Sacred Heart school at 8 o’clock. I’m wearing a short sleeve cotton shirt and short brown pants. I feel like I have on a bear coat. Along the right side of the sidewalk is a block long vacant lot. There is only one house and it is a little white thing opposite us on the corner. In the middle of the vacant lot is a pond made from rain water. It’s a great place for a young boy to explore and get into trouble when the water gets into his shoes or boots. I want to give the cool mud a try today, but I can’t. I’m a few minutes late already. I can feel that the day is going to be a scorcher, as we say. Little do I know how hot it was going to make me?

It is the first week in June. We’ve taken all our final tests the week before. School will be out in a week and the inmates are eager to escape. I’m certain the nuns are happier than we. They must be dying of the heat in their long black robes and white starched head gear. I like to think that when school closes they kick off their shoes lie back, have a cold beer and exchange tales of the past year.

When I get to school my teacher Sister Mary Clare tells me that Sister Mary Francis, the principal of our little citadel of education, wants to see me. This can be only be bad news. Any time one has to see the principal he is in trouble. On the short walk to her office I’m nervously playing back through my mind what I’ve been doing the past week. I can’t think of anything. I’m innocent. I knock on her door and she beckons me into her stiflingly hot office. There are the usual decorations on the wall of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ of the Sacred Heart and a cross with a palm leaf wrapped around it. There is a faint odor of incense. It could be Sister MF. In the corner is a small electric fan. The window is open but it is still hot and would get hotter very soon, inside and outside of that room. Sister is a rotund little thing sitting behind the standard yellow oak desk. She has a smile that can go from angelic to satanic in a split second. While I sit stewing she is looking for some paper. At last she finds it and speaks. She tells me why she wants to see me. “You’ve done very well Michael”, that’s my name, Michael Still. I am greatly relieved. When my grandparents came to America the name was changed at immigration from Stillatsch to Still. It happened to a lot of people in those days

After the opening compliment sister tells me I’ve scored 100% on every subject. “That is perfect. I’ve never seen that in over thirty years of teaching.” “However, Michael”, the saintly lady notes, “Perfection is not possible in this world. Only God is perfect.” With that she lays it on me. “I’m going to have to lower your arithmetic grade to 95.” At age seven I am already experiencing unfairness for the third time. First, it was mother abandoning me in kindergarden, then getting the wrong bike at Christmas and now this. I’ve hated math ever since and I didn’t care much for Sister MF either. I trudge out of her office and have to spend the rest of the day in Sister MC’s class. Fortunately, they aren’t grading my attitude or I’ll have a minus number. I ask myself, why me, how can she do this to me? What is the point of working hard when in the end you get screwed?

Walking back down Huron Street toward home that afternoon I ask myself why is the world so unfair? I want to cry but mother told me boys don’t cry. Instead, I’m so angry that I walk through the vacant lot and deliberately jump up and down with my shoes on in the pond. I didn’t know the right curse words yet, but in retrospect it would have been something like son-of-a-bitch.