For example: “I will not talk in class”. “I will not forget the envelope on Sunday Mass”. (it only had a dime in it.) “I will not try to rub against Loida Milan at lunch.” “I will not pee in my pants when the Monsignor comes to hand out report cards.” Stuff like this.
So, me? I always looked for the easy way out because I started developing a knot on the first knuckle on the middle finger of my right hand. It was blue and red and had a deep crevasse that looked nasty.
I made an invention that I thought was better than the wireless radio by Guglielmo Marconi, another famous Italian inventor besides myself.
We all had these pink erasers, and I took four of them and tied them to five number 2 sharpened pencils. Necessity is the mother of invention, so I wrapped a few rubber bands around the erasers so the pencils were capable of writing like one unit. I was now able to get five lines done at once for the 500 lines. I did the mathematical computations in my head (yeah, right!) and discovered that the pencils would fit perfectly on each line of the loose-leaf paper. An amazing stroke of luck or divine provenance. Please pray for that.
Now, the next day, when the boys would have to hand in the 500-line manual torture sentence, everyone’s hands were in various stages of muscle atrophy, except me, of course. I only had to write the “I will not throw snowballs at city buses” only 100 times. Pure genius. It was my way of cheating on being compliant. And I had plenty of time to watch Twilight Zone or Outer Limits.
The nuns would tear up the papers right in front of their sufferers while smiling like Dr. Mengele at his victims. The mental torture lasted longer than the cramped hands. This is what the good sisters learned from the Japanese who ran the prisoner-of-war camps in Osaka, Nagoya, Singapore, and Tokyo.
What kind of deranged individual would do that to kids? I think I can start a class action suit against the New York Archdiocese for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for the 8 years I spent in the clutches of these maniacal nuns. The church is nearly bankrupt from all the sexual assaults on children and vulnerable adults through the years, so there can’t be any real payday here.
