No Feast For You

Instead of celebrating birthdays, the Sisters celebrated feast days.  Like many children born to a good Catholic family, care was taken to link one's given name with that of a saint.  Carol was derived from Charles so my name sake saint was St. Charles of Borromeo.   For years, almost every day was linked to a saint, until the great "saint shakedown" .  During that time, the saints of possible mythic origin quietly disappeared from the Catholic calendar. 

Saints were a weird lot.  A huge number of them seemed positively, certifiably insane.  In today's world, they'd be spending their time at places with names like Shady Acres and State Hospital.  Their rooms would be padded and they'd spend their days in a drugged haze to quiet the voices and hallucinations.  Unfortunately, the brand of crazy attributed to me did not come close to the Sisters' idea of sainthood.  I would sometimes remind myself that the saints usually had a hell of a time living within their own centuries.  Even though I thought most of them more than a little nuts, I could console myself with the thought that at least I was in good company.

Sometimes the saints were just down right creepy.  I'd found a book on the convent library shelves entitled, The Incorruptibles.  Incorruptibles are saints whose bodies don't decompose in the ordinary manor.  Some of the pictures in this book would have made Wes Craven and Stephen King feel right at home.  Being a saint and winning God's special favor would have been okay.  Creeping people out with my shriveled corpse years after my death, not so much.  A few look pretty good but there are enough others to make horror seem real.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility

Saints reproduction pictures could also be a form of creepy.  A poor reproduction of Ruben's St. Sebastian picture hung above the landing of the central convent stairs.  This massive picture startled me almost every time I looked at it.  I tried to stop looking at it but given it's size and placement on the landing nearest the dining hall, it wasn't easy.

I think the Sister's St. Sebastian had more clothes on.  Unfortunately, the ecstatic expression on his face was more pronounced.  It was hauntingly sexual.  What disturbed me is that it didn't seem obvious to anyone but me.  Near nudity, arrows, too ecstatic a face, it didn't take a Freudian to figure it out.

So celebrating a feast day was not nearly as much fun as a birthday back when birthday's were still fun.  It was usually disappointing and an occasion to feel homesick.  No presents, no cake, made it a dud as far as celebrations go.  So when Sister Consuela came up to me with a smile and asked me to write down what I'd like for my upcoming feast day, my nerves sprang to attention.  This had to be a trap.  It looked like a trap.  It felt like a trap.  It even smelled like a trap.

I agonized over the list I was to slip under her door.  Requesting a sporty convertible was not good but was requesting a bottle of lotion better?  Finally, I wrote down an American Heritage Dictionary.  Slipping the note under her door, I was filled with dread.  This could not have a happy ending.  There were no signs that my feast day had been derailed during the days leading to it.  It wasn't until the fated day itself that I was summoned to Sister Consuela's office.  Summoning was never good.  Trembling with fear, I promptly obeyed.
Walking into her office she said in a firm and frightening tone, "Close the door."
"God, I must be in major trouble now", I thought.
Once the door was closed and innocent lay passersby in the hall were shielded from her venom, she began to tell me,  "You are such a disappointment.  What were you thinking?"
I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about yet here she stood red-faced and sputtering spittle as she spat out her words with the steady staccato of heavy artillery fire.  I'd just completed a phase that I felt was beyond reproach.  Hearing her tell me what a loser I was felt terrible.  
At some point, her words began to wash over me.  I stopped listening until she ended her spew with the words, "You don't deserve a feast day.  All feast day celebrations for you are canceled."
Even though feast days were already a dud in the celebration department, this was a surprisingly cruel twist.  I wasn't prepared to hear it.  Taken by surprise, the tears I usually could hide, spilled down my cheeks.

This surprised my attacker.  She suddenly seemed to soften as if tears were what she'd wanted all along. Yet she was surprised by them.  I was quietly dismissed with, "You can go now, Carol."  Usually, I was left with a litany of my wrongs.  I didn't agree with the vast majority of the charges but I did have some understanding of what I was up against.  Once charged, I would internally plea my cause in a manner most eloquent and shame the socks off my veiled enemies.  How wonderful the human mind in finding ways to cope.  But this was something new.  I didn't know what I'd supposedly done.  It was kept secret even from me.  I didn't know how to fight this.