'Dear Sister Kathleen, It Turns Out You Were Full of Shit After All'
While I was getting punished unmercifully, a dictator wanna-be grew up in Brooklyn.
I was only 5 when I had my first run-in with matches. It was in the small patch of forest behind Kingsley Square in Freehold. Today, there is a car dealership or something there. Then, it was the moment when the future outlaw, ‘L’il B’ was stopped in his tracks.
The whipping wind made it seem colder than it really was. Kindergarten was out for the day, and my friend Paul and I were out in the woods exploring. These were the days when kids went off to play, even at 5. Determined to shelter ourselves from the dropping temperature, we located a large tree that had a cut out at its base. Needless to say, the cut resembled a “fireplace,” I told Paul. He had recently begun experimenting with fire, and voila, my little buddy pulled out some matches. We lit some twigs and leaves and laughed. It wasn’t enough, though. I mean, with all the talk about “Don’t play with fire!” It was proving to be just another adult-world exaggeration. When a flame kicked up too high, we stomped it out. Easy-peasy.
Lightbulb.
Let’s grab that big branch over there with the drying leaves. Fanning the flames, the fire slowly, and then with increasing urgency, worked its way up the branch like a slinky worming down the basement steps. Before we knew it, Paul was on one side of the flame, and I was on the other. A wall of heat separated us, and the flames leaped skyward in search of more impressionable leaves and branches. The fire was on, and we were off, scampering toward our respective homes. When I last looked back, before slipping onto the sidewalk that led to our back gate, the whole tree was engulfed.
What had I done, I thought?
Later, after the Freehold volunteer firemen had saved the surrounding forest from further harm, I remember a policeman — one of my mother’s former classmates (Freehold was smaller then) — reaching under the bed and yanking me out by my ankle. I was sobbing. I told them that a lightning bolt hit the matches, and the fire started.
Amazing, right? I was weaving a tale of pure and unadulterated shit, knowing that no one in their right mind would ever believe me. They listened and then said nothing. I was told to take a nap. Lying in my bed, still shaking, I marveled at how easy it had been to lie my way out of that near tragedy. It was heady, to say the least, because I had been liberated from the consequences of my bad deed. They loved me too much to be angry, I thought.
All hell broke loose when my father returned home from work. My exploration of fire was over. Paul and I grew apart, and then we moved. I started first grade, and it was there that my inability to be contained by rules and regulations began to burst the seams. Multiple times, my parents were summoned to the school to discuss my behavior. It was decided that my friend Patrick Durkin and I should never again be in the same class. We laughed too much; school was nothing but a joke. I can still see him dropping the chalk from his nose, pretending he had sneezed them out. Oh, how I laughed at the spectacle.
The school year ended, and Sister Kathleen gave out small gifts to all of our classmates from a large bag she had. The better one behaved, the better one’s grades, the better the gift. Each time someone came up for a gift, she would trash Patrick and me in her sweet, Irish brogue.
“Look at these two naughty hoodlums. They think they are so smart. Well, smart ones like these two end up with nothing but garbage in life.”
Tough, Irish, Catholic love.
She abused us for hours in front of everyone, even warranting a protest from my teacher, Miss Cook. When it looked like we would cry, she would step on the gas and mock us more. By the end of the public flogging, we had toughened up and were beginning to play the roles she had given us.
“If you will continue to act like uncivilized barbarians, then you will be paying for it your whole lives. You will never amount to anything if you aren’t moral, truthful and hardworking.”
There were two gifts left over at the end. She called us over, tousled our hair, and, with a smile, handed us each the ugliest little monkeys.
“I expect more from you two. You are too Irish and handsome to grow to be losers or something. Now be good, and I will pray for you.”
She was what people back then called a “sparkplug.”
Brooklyn
Right about this time over in Brooklyn, a young real estate developer by the name of Donald Trump was following his father’s lead and denying Black residents the right to rent apartments. His father paid a fine for that, but the young boy of privilege learned only one lesson: Do whatever you want and deny it to the end, even after they have caught you with your pants down.
As we watched, the boy from Queens, whose family owned a lot of properties in Brooklyn, would spend the next four decades lying, cheating, committing fraud, raping, abusing, and being so incompetent as to lead tens of thousands to their early deaths and in a moment that was supposed to have been his denouement, caused his followers to attack the Capitol building in the nation’s capital to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.
Donald Trump has lived a despicable life void of morals. He is genuinely an evil person and, most astonishingly, one of the most self-obsessed sociopaths who has ever been in public office in our country. No one lies as much and as buffoonishly as Donald Trump. Half — now less than half — of the country knows he is lying, but the other half regards his words as the Gospel truth. He always promises that “soon, he will reveal the “truth” about this or that, but he never does. When pressed as to why he hasn’t revealed it yet, he says that he would, but his lawyer tells him he has to wait lest more witchhunts be launched against him.
The same patterns for lying and blustery he used in 2016, he used now in 2024. He has been using the same anti-social approach to the world around him since that day when I lit that tree on fire. But between the pressure of the nuns at St. Rose of Lima and the constant love and support of my parents, grandparents, and everyone around me, by 5th grade, I had extracted myself from the pull of the dark side. I became a pretty good kid and eventually an okay man.
Donald Trump was just elected to a second term, even after the worst presidency in our history, and January 6th. The world figured he couldn’t get lower than he was on January 7th. No one thought he would ever return to politics, let alone the White House, and yet here we sit, awaiting the beginning of the end of our democracy like Germans in 1933 after Hitler acceded to the chancellory.
“Sister Kathleen? Can you hear me? Are you seeing this? Ummm, I think you were a wee bit full of the blarney, Sister.”