Rosary Beads and Lemonheads

[I originally wrote this and posted this on another version of my online journal in 2007. I am revisiting it since it’s now the 50th anniversary of my third grade year.]

March 1974. Richard Nixon was president of the United States, but not for much longer. "Seasons in the Sun," a maudlin little pop tune about young people having joy and fun and then dying, sung by some guy named Terry Jacks, was spilling out of a.m. radio stations from coast to coast. However, in a third-grade classroom in a nondescript southeastern Pennsylvania elementary school, the only music to be heard was that of an anonymous cowboy, singing the multiplication tables over and over and over again.Two times two is four. Two times three is six. Two times four is eight.If you listened closely, another sound, nearly imperceptible, could be detected in that classroom. It was the sound of little plastic beads being taken out of little plastic bags and being strung together in rows of ten, separated by a plastic bar, another bead and then one more plastic bar.Sister Mary Adrian's class was making rosaries again.Three times two is six. Three times three is nine. Three times four is 12.Sister Mary Adrian was my third-grade teacher. The bolder, more juvenile delinquent, surely hell-bound, kids in our class shockingly referred to her as just "Adrian." The rest of us called her "Stir," that peculiar Catholic school kid pronunciation of the word "sister." For the purposes of this story, I¹ll call her "SMA."These days, stories about mentally deranged nuns ruining childhoods abound, but that’s not the case with me. My life was not unduly affected by the nuns I encountered during eight years of Catholic school. It is obvious to me now though that the first few years I attended St. Joseph Elementary School were warm-up grades. Our first-grade teacher was a nice, sweet-natured nun, though I barely remember her now. In second grade we had a lay (i.e., non-nun) teacher, whose name I probably couldn¹t pronounce or spell even today, let alone as a seven-year-old.Four time two is eight. Four times three is 12. Four times fouris 16.All bets were off in third grade because, while SMA was not necessarily violent or mean, she was rather bad-tempered though, and clearly eccentric. This eccentricity most clearly manifested itself in the dozens (hundreds?) of rosaries our class produced that year.

My mother once told me that when I came home from school and told her how many rosaries we "made" that day, she thought I meant how many times we prayed the rosary. Eventually, Mom realized what I was talking about, probably when I brought home a sample of my work.Rosary making had been the central routine of our third-grade existence ever since school started back in September. At various times during the day, whatever was passing for regular classwork stopped, and rosary-making commenced. It was perfectly reasonable to make rosaries during religion class, of course, but with the singing cowboy crooning the multiplication tables, math class became a time for beads and bars as well (besides, you had to know how to count the correct number of beads, right? That's math.).Even social studies class could work for rosary-making since the rosaries were allegedly being shipped off to poor children in mission countries around the world. And, why would we have any reason to believe otherwise? It's not like there was some kind of black market for plastic rosaries made by third graders, even in the 1970s.Five times two is 10. Five times three is 15. Five times four is 20.SMA seemed very tall, but that could have just been my third-grader perception of her. She looked both austere and severe in the way that most people imagine fearsome nuns to appear. Though it was the mod mid-1970s, SMA, and all the nuns at St. Joe’s, wore a standard issue habit, as befit the relatively conservative order to which they belonged.SMA wore glasses and her most prominent facial feature was a sharp nose. I remember one day, after SMA ate chicken noodle soup for lunch, a tiny crumb of a noodle spent the afternoon attached for dear life in the corner of her lips. There are for more significant events in my life about which my memory is becoming faulty, but the brain cells responsible for holding on to that crumb have proven to be damn stubborn.Six times two is 12. Six times three is 18. Six times four is 24.In addition to her rosary-making talents, SMA was the czarina of our school's thriving candy concession. Though it seems inconceivable by more 21stcentury weight-conscious, dentally correct standards, back in 1974 at St. Joseph, candy was sold on the schoolyard at recess and lunchtime. SMA provided these boxes of candy, which usually included the Ferrara Pan line of quality candies (for example, my personal favorite, Lemonheads), to the various classrooms. SMA collecting the proceeds from candy sales as well.At some point, SMA deputized me to help her with the candy enterprise and so I’d often spend my lunchtime sorting change and filling up coin wrappers with nickels, dimes and quarters. It was still easy to still find buffalo nickels and Indian head pennies in loose changes in the 1970s and SMA would let me trade in my more recent coins so I could add the older ones to my coin collection at home.As SMA’s trust in my abilities grew, my responsibilities encompassed walking to the local credit union with a friend to deposit the candy money into...well, into the candy money account, I guess. I mean, I suppose that my friend and I could have been unwitting patsies in some grand money laundering scheme, in which the candy money got diverted to mysterious Swiss bank accounts that allowed SMA and her nun friends to drive around in increasingly elaborate and expensive station wagons as the 1970s wound through its inevitable disco phase. However, from this vantage point, that scenario seems unlikely. At least somewhat unlikely, anyway.Seven times two is 14. Seven times three is 21. Seven times four is 28.So what did I learn in third grade? I learned the finer points of rosary making.I learned about wheeling and dealing in the high stakes schoolyard nickel candy financial jungles.Thanks to Terry Jacks, I learned that young people have joy and fun and then die.I learned, through Sister Mary Adrian, that there are some real characters in this world and that I was bound to meet a few of them in my time.And, of course, I learned my times tables.Eight times two is 16. Eight times three is 24. Eight times three is 32.