A cheerfulness of nuns

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