The Silver Pendant

I wondered how it must have felt to write with a plume. My feet dangled from the chair as I sat quietly at my Grade 1 desk, contemplating the circular indent at the top right corner of the wooden surface. In the days when children used to write their lessons in ink, this was where the inkwell rested. I always felt sad hearing stories of students punished for accidentally dripping ink across their page.

To my left, the classroom windows half covered with snow made me shiver. The Montreal winter months often confined us to the indoors because of the brutal cold outside. Bundled in our snowsuits, scarves and hats, we would only be allowed to play outside at recess and lunch hour if the temperature was above minus fifteen degrees Celsius.

We each wore a silver pin attached to our navy blue school uniform sweater. Every good student in our class had a different Saint pendant fastened to it. Break any rule, whether talking out of turn or giggling in the line up, and Sister Julie would theatrically walk up to her target and ceremoniously take his or her pin away. She would then put the pin into her pocket and only return it three days later if the student had proved worthy of earning the silver pendant back. One could easily recognize the good kids from the bad. All you had to do was look for the pin. Some never earned their pin back.

I learned perfect cursive writing by copying poems and stories. I learned to decode words by reading storybooks that never had a point, such as stories of children walking their dogs to the pond, with no climax, no problems nor solutions. Every day we practised rote counting and rote reading.

Church on Fridays was my favourite part of the school week. All students attending L’Ecole Saint Joseph sat in the pews, facing the front and listening to the priest read from the Bible. Finally, I thought to myself, these stories have a plot and interesting characters and settings. One day, following the children’s liturgy, I asked Sister Julie if these stories were really true or if they were only make believe. She bent down and whispered that indeed, they were true as long as I had faith. Faith? “What does that mean?” I asked. She replied, “It is just something that you have and that you do not question.”